Over the Christmas holiday season, many of the team are sharing which piece of equipment they regret selling and which item they would never sell. In this article, it is Mike’s turn to share his choices.

It was an interesting process trying to select my two choices, as for me gear is a tool for doing the job and rarely ends up being an emotional process. Although with hindsight being a perfect science, choosing what I regretted selling was the easier of the two choices.

I Regret Selling my Neve 254 Dual Compressor Limiter

I only came to regret selling this many years after selling it. I acquired this unit from a skip, or should that be I prevented it from ending up in the skip! I was working in commercial radio at Piccadilly Radio in the late 1980s and it was about the time UK commercial radio caught the Optimod bug.

Being a commercial radio station, our continuing existence was dependent on our audience size, more listeners meant better advertising revenue. What was starting to happen, was commercial local radio stations began to realise that the transmission processing meant that we could be louder than other stations on the FM dial and so attract more listeners. Hence, we retired our Neve 2254, which had been our transmission safety limiter, since day 1 of the station going on the air, protecting our RF link to the main transmitter and replaced it with a two-band Optimod unit. As we had no other use for the 2254, and I was building my own studio at home, I got the Neve for free!

I used it more as a compressor for VOs and Vocals rather than a limiter but as I moved into-the-box and started using plugins, the Neve got used less and less. It got to the late 90s when I realised that the Neve was worth real money and so part-exchanged it for some new gear that would be much more useful to me. I effectively got around £1,500 for it, which at the time was a fair price. But more recently I have wondered whether it would have been better to have kept it and so been able to use it for its iconic sound.

What I Would Never Sell

This choice was much more difficult as I buy gear to do a job and when it is no longer fit for purpose it is ‘retired’ and then sold. Looking around my studio, my monitors are PMC LB1s and TB1s, which replaced by BBC LS3/5As, that I had for over 30 years and sold for way more than they cost me back in the 1970s.

But even so, the PMCs do a job and do it very well especially with my miniDPS Dirac Live speaker calibration unit, but if something else came along that was worth spending the money on then the PMCs would be sold to make way for their replacements. I don’t have a mixing console, and haven’t since the mid-90s went I went completely in-the-box. Consequently, I have relatively little outboard gear, except for machines to play media in from, although they hardly ever get used now.

So looking around my studio, it was really difficult to find something that I would not sell, until I opened my combined computer cupboard and gear store and my eyes rested on a silver case labelled MKH40/30 MS Pair and my search was over.

This was the one thing that I didn’t sell when we wound up the Omnibuss Mobile, a sound OB truck that I ran with two others in the 90s and early noughties. So it had actually already passed the would-not-sell test some 20 years ago!

I am a fan of MS mics and this matched pair has been at the centre of many location recordings and the sound is spectacular and so my Sennheiser MKH40/30 MS pair is my choice for the item I would not and did not sell.