Power Station Studios

Rob Roy is the recording engineer and audio producer who built the current Power Station Recording Studios in Pompano Beach, FL using the acoustic design expertise of his friend and business partner Tony Bongiovi, who’s known for the legendary Power Station in New York (now called Avatar).

Rob joined forces with Bongiovi Entertainment in the nineties and has a background in developing strategic funding and production opportunities for various projects. He currently operates and manages Power Station’s studio in Pompano Beach, FL. Rob is also involved in business development opportunities for Power Station’s parent companies, Bongiovi Acoustics and Bongiovi Medical.

As Director of Studio Operations at Power Station Recording Studios, Rob Roy maintains the studio’s tradition of recording excellence using a wide range of carefully chosen equipment including the legendary 72-channel Neve 9098i. And his latest addition is LEWITT’s next-gen LCT 640 TS multi-pattern microphone, which allows any kind of polar pattern to be realized dynamically – even after the fact.

[LEWITT] You recently started using the LCT 640 TS in your studio; please tell us about your experiences with the microphone so far...

When it came in, I wasn’t really sure what to make of it – because you see all these products out there where software and hardware kind of meet. I’ve heard many of them, but what ends up happening with such products is that one side of the thing – whether it’s the hardware-side or the software-side – carries all the weight. What I feel is completely different about the LCT 640 TS is that you get high-quality hardware and really cool software. Before I’d even touched the software, I looked at the microphone itself, especially the dual-output design that provides the signals from the capsule’s front and back diaphragms separately. And the first thing I noticed about the microphone that actually got my attention was that it sounds amazing. If you look at modern production today, you need to have that really slick, clean, tight, punchy microphone vocal sound – because if you’ve got that, you can do anything with it.

I first ran it through a Millennia preamp and noticed how transparent and detailed the mic sounds, and that the connectivity between the frequencies was very smooth yet very detailed. Usually, with microphones like this, I hear these artificial peaks at 3kHz or 5kHz, and the thing that really impressed me about the LCT 640 TS was that it was very linear and smooth, which allowed me to get everything out of it that I wanted.

Next, I took it and put it into a Neve 1084 preamp, since I wanted to see what would happen with an analogue EQ that’s not nearly as clean as the Millenia. One thing I like about Neve equipment, whether I’m using the modules or consoles, is that it adds an element of harmonic content that may or may not have been audible before. Some people call that color, but what I hear is the harmonic content. Now, with the LCT 640 TS and the 1084, I started hearing not just the harmonic content, but also how it was possible to go in and EQ right into certain areas without having any harmonic phase issues on the top side or on the low side – everything stayed really workable.

Then I took the LCT 640 TS and ran it through a really inexpensive mic preamp that retails at $150 … I just wanted to see how the LCT 640 TS would perform. So I took that really crappy mic preamp, which sounded really grainy and noisy – not even signal noise, just ugly – and because this mic is so clean and linear in its frequency response, it made this inexpensive mic preamp sound like a $2,500 unit … it was ridiculous! So that was the thing that really won me over to this particular microphone and got my attention from the get-go.