Toulouse, France, June 8, 2025 — Several years ago, Olivier Cussac received some devastating news: Studio Condorcet, a legendary recording facility founded near the centre of Toulouse in the 1970s, which he had owned since 2007, had been scheduled for demolition as part of an urban renewal project. Fast forward to January 2025, and Studio Condorcet has been reborn with the launch of a multi-purpose room housing a new Harrison 32Classic 32-channel analogue console, the first of several planned spaces at the new location just outside Toulouse.
Cussac, a multi-instrumentalist, engineer, producer, and film and TV composer, comments, “As a film score composer, I have to work in various musical styles, from orchestral to jazz to electro to every kind of pop, rock and funk styles. As a record producer, I really focus on the intensity in music, no matter the genre. The 32Classic can handle anything; a heavy rock band like Slift, all the way to a fully acoustic project.”
Indeed, Cussac, who worked on the last Slift album at the studio’s previous location, has been working with the band on pre-production for their next project on the new Harrison console. “All the drums went through the 32Classic mic preamps and I can tell you — they rock! I was used to miking drums with vintage mic pre’s and the 32Classic has the same punch and density.”
He continues, “I’m not an EQ guy so I mostly rely on my favourite inductor-based outboard gear, and the proportional Q on the Harrison gives me some of the same feeling. I dig it! The summing adds depth and width, with lots of headroom. The master bus transformer option on the bus master is subtle but can add some mojo to some mixes.”
Studio Condorcet’s large mix room, where Cussac is surrounded by guitars, keyboards and other noise-making devices and offers views of the countryside through a large window next to the console, was acoustically designed by Camille Hamel and Jean Marc Vernaudon to double as a recording space. The high-ceilinged room beyond the front wall is currently being converted into a 430-square-foot tracking space for bands or ensembles of up to 15 musicians.
“I absolutely wanted a brand-new desk,” says Cussac, but he was unfamiliar with the brand’s history or products, other than the Mixbus software. “My interest started to grow when I saw the pedigree of the studios and engineers who used the 32C.” Harrison’s 32C, introduced in 1975, played an integral part in the production of hit records by the likes of Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, Supertramp, Michael Jackson, and many others. Cussac also had a checklist: “Build quality was one of my first criteria, along with power consumption and, of course, audio quality.”
He had been considering several console brands, but a visit to Harrison’s international manufacturing facility in the U.K. with his technician, Julien Couralet, to personally experience the 32Classic sealed the deal for Cussac. “Firstly, I was blown away by the filters, especially the LPF (low-pass filter). I found the layout very well designed, with plenty of space, like an old-school desk. And Julian told me he was extremely confident with the choice of components and build quality.”
The pair had brought along a multitrack project so they could compare the quality of the 32Classic’s summing to Couralet’s vintage console. “It was quite easy to recall levels with the 0 dB lock button on each channel, which bypasses the fader and sets the level to exactly 0 dB,” Cussac says. “Both versions sounded great, but the 32Classic was a bit beefier. Mids for me are the key.”
Elaborating on the 32Classic’s qualities, he continues, “I really consider the LPF as a creative tool; you could even call it a ‘poetic’ tool. A regular LPF coldly removes part of the sound, whereas Harrison’s filters add something musical while cutting in a kind of magical way. It reminds me of the filter behaviour of some of my favourite vintage analogue synths. If I need a surgical filter, I’ll just go to the ‘HI’ section of the EQ in shelving mode.”
Cussac also appreciates being able to switch sections of the channel strip, such as all the auxes, inserts, 0 dB feature and pan, out of the signal path. “That has really changed my life,” he says. Speaking of pan pots: “Pans are often a weak point on consoles, but these have a very steady and precise behaviour across the stereo image.”
Externally, he continues, “The deep arm rest is a great idea and the custom sidecar on the right-hand end of the console also has this extension. It’s a favourite place for my OTO machines or an orchestral score. The D-sub patching at the rear is also a nice feature as they are angled down so they are not stressed by the weight of the cables, and there’s a lot with an analogue patchbay! I wanted a 100% analogue console with a full analogue patchbay, so I chose not to have the Dante AD/DA audio interface included.”
One other small feature stands out, he adds: “The instrument input in the centre section. I initially considered it a gadget but have unexpectedly been very happy with it. Being able to patch a mic or a keyboard on the fly is always helpful.”
Cussac’s first project in the new space was mixing an album, OK, for French trumpet player Daoud. “Fifteen tracks mixed in five days with no recall and no mods,” he reports. He has since completed two more albums — Julii Sharp’s Burning Line and Words of Sara’s Echoes from the Living — at the new Studio Condorcet. “The Harrison console, ATC 110 monitors and fine acoustic design plus top backline make this studio an exceptional environment to create and record music,” he says.