Studio Focus: Burwood Music Centre
17 November 2014
At the last White Night festival in Melbourne — when the whole city stays up to watch projected visuals, eat out of restaurant food vans and explore the city’s arts precincts for odd performances — you could go and catch a bona fide Rachmaninoff performance all night at Hamer Hall. Of course, the famously stretch-fingered pianist died during World War II, so how was this possible? Well, he recorded about 35 piano rolls for the American Piano Company, on the company’s souped up pianola. The performance was played back on a restored 1920s Mason & Hamlin grand reproducing piano, which was the most expensive piano in the world when it was built. It was a beautiful performance that was spooky for its life-likeness.
By comparison, the Live Performance LX replay mechanism installed on the Hamburg Steinway Model D concert grand piano at Burwood Music Centre is a Mac Pro to the Mason & Hamlin’s Commodore 64. It’s capable of reproducing 1020 dynamic levels, 256 pedal positions, and 800 samples per second — it would have blown Rachmaninoff away.
It’s not just for show and tell either, studio owner and long-time engineer Allan Neuendorf is pressing it into service for any engineers out there who don’t happen to have a Model D in their live room. While you won’t get all the intermediate positions of the LX system, you can send Allan a MIDI file, and for a small fee, he’ll mic up the piano using his collection of Schoeps and Neumann microphones, plug them into his Millennia mic preamps, and record an incredible rendition of your playing on a nine-foot Steinway in a real live room. Samplers eat your heart out.
This isn’t just any off-the-showroom-floor Model D either. It took Neuendorf years to track down a pristine condition, vintage Model D, because you just can’t beat the quality of an aged soundboard. The control room is equipped with a ProTools HD rig, and Manger studio monitors employing a bending metal plate HF transducer that are well worth a listen.
The overall theme of the Music Centre is high fidelity. The Audiophile Reference Recordings record bar is run by vinyl specialist Charles Lee, and stocks formats including vinyl, CD, SACD, DVD and Blu-ray. It’s the place to go for your hi-fi fix, because after you’ve picked out your favourite Miles Davis joint, you can head into the Head-Fi consultation room and get fitted for a pair of top-flight, wood veneer cans, and match them to your preferred stereo DAC. Burwood Music Centre was recently appounted the exclusive Victorian retailer of the Benchmark converter range, so the quality is up there. If headphones aren’t your thing, you can get a taste of the latest development in hi-fi speakers, playback devices and amps in the intimate performance space/showroom called the Maven Room. The theatrette can seat 32 in luxury, and is available for performances, launches, or anything that could benefit from a controlled acoustic and a Yamaha C7 grand piano — that’s right, two grand pianos under one roof.
Bringing a bit more pop sensibility to the centre is Bradshaw Music Productions. Run by producer Lee Bradshaw and marketing strategist/singer-songwriter Kate Finkelstein, the pair provide full-service artist development. Bradshaw has his own production studio running Logic, with a UA Apollo and Genelec monitors. And if tracks need to get stepped up a notch, he’s always got the main studio and the Steinway to play with.
Burwood Music Centre:
(03) 8683 9910 or www.burwoodmusiccentre.com.au
www.audiophilereferencerecordings.com.au
www.bradshawmusicproductions.com
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