An artist’s catalogue is its most valuable asset and the transfer, preservation and restoration of material need to be undertaken by skilled engineers, who have access to the correct technical equipment. Abbey Road Studios has always pioneered the use of new technologies and have developed our own proprietary systems that enable us to create, manage and deliver your digital assets.

The Studios can digitise a wide range of analogue media, including the various types of reel-to-reel and cartridge-based magnetic tape, vinyl LPs & 45s, shellac 78s, metal masters and wax cylinders. Each project requires different and specific processes, which are managed in-house by Abbey Road Studios’ specialist engineers and support staff.

We also have dedicated audio and video service teams who duplicate, convert, encode and supply from and to virtually any physical or digital format.

Case study: Digital archiving of complete recording sessions
The multi-track session masters of a well-known, international rock band’s first seven albums were stored on 2” 24 track tapes only.
Initially they only wanted to digitise a number of titles from their back-catalogue for use in console games. However when they saw the benefits they decided to digitally archive the recording sessions from all seven albums in full.
There were three key reasons for archiving:

  1. To save their work – they wanted to preserve their work digitally, because repeatedly baking the master tapes could cause them to deteriorate and lose quality
  2. To save money - they needed to be able to access their assets without going through the same costly baking and transfer process
  3. To save time - they wanted to have their assets with them so they could access them quickly and at their convenience

Case study: Mass digitisation
A major record label needed to digitise a large number of tapes, in order to reconstruct severely damaged content from original masters. Abbey Road Studios embarked on a mass digitalisation project, transferring thousand of tapes in a highly organised and controlled manner.
The key benefits of using Abbey Road Studios for this project were:

  1. High quality – digitised analogue material into hi-def audio files; also provided scans of all accompanying packaging and paperwork, and customised meta-data
  2. Cost effective – implemented efficient and controlled processes to ensure the project was delivered within budget; integrated seamlessly with their existing archiving and billing systems
  3. Quick turnaround – worked to tight deadlines, using efficient and controlled processes to complete the project to a high standard in a short period of time.

Contact