Tony Faulkner, the Grammy-winning recording engineer, has been recording orchestral music for over four decades. The credits span every major label, every significant concert hall in Europe, and a catalogue of recordings that fills entire shelves in specialist record shops. When Faulkner records the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for SME Music, the pure analogue record label of the British turntable maker SME, the expertise behind the microphones is not in question. What is unusual is the signal path.
The Digital Standard
A typical orchestral recording session in 2026 follows a digital workflow. High-resolution digital recorders capture the performance at sample rates of 96 kHz or 192 kHz and bit depths of 24 or 32 bits. The recordings are edited, mixed, and mastered in digital audio workstations. The final product may be released as a digital download, a streaming file, a CD, or a vinyl pressing, but regardless of the physical format, the recording originated in the digital domain.
The Analogue Alternative
Every SME Music session, from Indian classical and folk music to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and jazz, follows a different path entirely. The microphones feed analogue preamplifiers and an analogue console, which feed a Studer A80 tape recorder running half-inch RTM SM900 tape. The performance is captured as a continuous analogue waveform on tape: no sampling, no conversion, no quantisation. The tape is the master.
The mixing stage remains analogue. Tony Faulkner sets the two-channel stereo balance on the analogue console during the session itself, using physical faders and analogue signal processing. Faulkner’s approach to orchestral recording typically involves careful microphone placement that captures the natural balance of the ensemble in the recording space, eliminating the need for post-session adjustment. The fewer interventions between the microphone and the master tape, the more transparent the final result.
From Tape to Groove
The mastering and cutting stage completes the chain. The analogue master tape feeds the cutting lathe, a precision machine that translates the electrical waveform into the physical groove of a lacquer disc. The lacquer yields the father, the father the mother, the mother the stamper, and the stamper presses the vinyl. At no point in this chain does the signal leave the analogue domain.
At Emil Berliner Studios in Berlin, Rainer Maillard, four-time Grammy winner and the foremost authority on analogue production, edits and masters every SME Music recording. Sidney Claire Meyer, head of the studio’s vinyl department and one of the rising stars of lacquer cutting, cuts each lacquer. Emil Berliner Studios takes its name from Emile Berliner, the inventor of the disc gramophone, the very technology that the vinyl record descends from. Maillard’s involvement connects SME Music recordings to the oldest and most direct lineage in the history of recorded sound.
Continuous vs Discrete
The practical difference between an all-analogue recording and a digital-intermediate recording is measurable and, on appropriate playback equipment, easily audible. The analogue waveform is continuous in both time and amplitude. A digital recording, however high the sample rate, is a series of discrete measurements that approximate the continuous waveform. The approximation is extremely good at modern sample rates, but the reconstruction filter required to convert those discrete measurements back into a continuous waveform introduces its own artefacts. An all-analogue recording avoids this entirely. What the microphone captured is what the groove contains.
What the Listener Hears
For the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the SME Music recording programme represents something increasingly rare: sessions where the performance is captured by technology that imposes no inherent ceiling on the information that reaches the listener. The musicians play. The microphones listen. The tape records. The groove preserves. The listener, seated in front of an SME turntable with the stylus in the groove, hears what Faulkner heard in the control room.
Pure Analogue Defined
This is what SME Music means by pure analogue. Not a marketing position, but a verifiable, auditable signal path from air movement in the concert hall to air movement in the listening room, with no digital conversion anywhere along the way.
