32Classic Console
Beautiful analog tone is at the heart of the 32Classic mixing consoles
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Four-time Grammy Award-winning producer, musician, DJ and professional photographer and videographer Ryan Lewis has renovated his private studio in Washington state as he prepares to make it commercially available in the spring of 2027. The facility, completed in 2017, has been revitalized in partnership with pro audio equipment retailer and integrator Vintage King Audio, and now features a Harrison 32Classic 32-channel analogue inline mixing console together with seven Harrison Audio D510R 500 Series racks.
Lewis first came to prominence with hip-hop duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, who swept the rap categories of the 2014 Grammy Awards with their debut independent album The Heist and “Thrift Shop” single, also winning for Best New Artist. He went on to collaborate with Kesha on Grammy-nominated song “Praying,” as well as co-writing and co-producing the opening song from The Greatest Showman motion picture soundtrack. Now living in Los Angeles, Lewis has also taken delivery of a second Harrison 32Classic for a commercial facility currently under construction in the Highland Park neighbourhood of the city, scheduled to open in the first half of 2027.
“I chose the Harrison for the legendary EQs, the crazy filters, the mic pre’s, 32 channels, eight buses, the history of the brand and Dave Harrison, who invented the inline console,” Lewis explains. “But none of that was why I bought it. Unlike most consoles, there are integrated converters everywhere — the console is a Dante interface. That fundamentally changes what a console can do in a studio.”
The 32Classic includes premium A-to-D and D-to-A converters with routing of channel, cue/matrix master, group bus and main stereo mix bus inputs and outputs, as well as 12 immersive playback inputs to the monitor section, via the onboard Dante interface. The console’s channel directs, group buses, three stereo cue/matrix mixes and main stereo mix are all additionally available as analogue outputs. “You’ve got great converters inside the board,” Lewis says, “and then all of that analogue signal is still routable after the DAW has already received it.”
To take advantage of the flexibility of the Dante networking and simultaneous analogue outputs, the technical design of his revamped Washington studio, a collaboration between Lewis and Vintage King’s James Good and Frank Verschuuren, creates an effects matrix using the 32Classic’s channel direct and cue matrix outputs that enables access to the facility’s extensive outboard processing without patching. “Almost nothing in this room needs to be patched. It’s all wired and waiting,” Lewis says. “That was the whole goal — how do I do a lot with the least amount of effort and get to the fun part the fastest?”
The studio’s outboard is housed in seven Harrison D510R 500 Series racks, two of them fitted with the optionalD510dante interface — the D510R is the only 500 Series rack to offer one. “I’m using seven of the D510R racks and they all do different jobs,” Lewis says. “Four of them give every insert on the console its own 500 Series compressor. One holds outboard effects, one holds the preamps and EQs for the room mics, and then there’s a mobile rack that rolls around for cassette recording.”
The four insert racks are wired directly to the 32Classic’s 32 channels and loaded with 12 Harrison feed-forward VCA Comp modules alongside 20 SSL 611 Dyn E modules — a compressor on every channel of the console. “The Harrison500 Series compressors are easy to use and they sound great,” says Lewis. “I wanted a compressor on every insert, and the D510R racks were the perfect way to house that many 500 Series modules. Not to mention there’s a card that turns any of these racks into a Dante interface as well.”
A fifth rack holds character and saturation processors wired permanently into the effects matrix. A sixth is dedicated to the live-room mics: four Harrison 32Cpre+ Jensen transformer-coupled mic preamps feed four Harrison MR3eq 3-band parametric EQ modules with HP filters — two stereo pairs, permanently tuned for the room — summed by a D510mx module into a single stereo channel that stays available on the console at all times. The 32Cpre+ takes its design from the original Harrison 3232 console of the late 1970s; the MR3eq derives from the MR3 console of the 1980s.
The seventh rack rolls. Mounted on a mobile rig for the tracking space, it sums through its own D510mx into a cassette deck and an SD recorder, so a take can be captured with no computer involved at all. “This one’s the coolest experiment,” Lewis says. “It’s built to just scoot around — you roll it up to the grand piano or an amp, put the headphones on, and you’re recording. No computer, and it’s full of analogue texture.”
Overall, he explains, “On most consoles the analogue outputs either get patched out to outboard gear or run straight to an interface to get converted. The Harrison converts those outputs inside the console — it’s its own Dante interface, with clean converters — so the analogue output stays completely available for something else. In my studio design that allowed for a huge effects matrix: direct access to reverbs, delays, saturation, at the push of a button, from any channel, any bus, or the master. The architecture of this console is the foundation my entire studio is built on.”
Lewis frames the payoff as friction removed rather than features added. “The hard part of an analogue room has never been the gear. It’s the distance between having an idea and hearing it — if getting there takes twenty minutes, the moment is usually gone. Here it’s a button. You try the bad idea, because trying it costs you nothing. There’s gear in this room from every era of the industry, things built in the seventies sitting next to things built last year, and none of it does studio design, where complicated ideas can be tried quickly.”
In conclusion, Lewis offers an example. “Say it’s a vocal. You want the raw take protected — not overprocessed, with room left to work in the DAW later. But you also want to try things: parallel compression, running it through distortion, a crazy tape delay, an eighties reverb. Normally those two things fight each other. Here they don’t. The console’s own conversion already has the raw capture handled, which frees the analogue outputs to feed the effects matrix, and every bus has its own insert routing on top of that. So the clean take is safe permanently, and I can print fully committed versions right beside it, character all over them, several at once. Committing costs me nothing, because none of it can touch the original. That’s what actually changes — you stop protecting the take and start chasing the idea.”