Hyde Street Studios

TURNABOUT

The staff at Filmways/Heider's rallied together to oust Blum and presented an extensive petition to Filmways with the signatures of virtually every employee and several clients as well, including engineer Pat Ieraci and producers David Rubinson and Skip Drinkwater, outlining their dissatisfaction with the choice of administrator. Filmways did nothing. Only when many staff members, including Harry Sitam, Michael MacKenzie and Gray Odell, threatened to quit en masse was Blum fired.

Yet Filmways continued to resist funding the declining studio. Rubinson, a mainstay at Heider's, eventually reluctantly left and started his own studio, The Automatt. Rubinson and Catero had been asking for two simple modifications to Studio A; a 4-channel headphone cue system instead of stereo, and mute switches on the monitor section of the board. Sitam muses, “Rubinson had Studio A block-booked most of the time with major acts. The studio would have made a lot of money if it had just done these (modifications). “
In 1980, a partnership composed of Dan Alexander, Tom Sharples and Michael Ward acquired the San Francisco studios. The rooms were reopened as Hyde Street Studios, named for the street on which the building is located.

Walking into a multimillion-dollar studio, the new owners began with ambitions that exceeded reality. They first attempted to operate all four studios, which, Ward says, was “complete madness. “The new studio ran into financial problems, and Hyde Street's equipment was not as good as it should have been.

But Ward and his partners were willing to spend money and learn from their mistakes. They began remodeling the studios, with “flexibility as one of the mantras,” Ward says, because of the need to compete in a wider musical market consisting of everything from rock to jazz to rap.

They also added to their equipment inventory. As one of the nation's largest dealers of second-hand audio, Alexander played a major part in the selection of new equipment, much of it reflecting his taste for “troublesome English consoles,” as Ward describes it.

Alexander owned the first Helios console ever built, previously located in Olympic Studio Two. It was the console that recorded the Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet, Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin II and Queen's A Night at the Opera. It was moved to Studio C, and although it was a famous console for its time, Alexander admits that its sound left something to be desired by today's standards. It also required large amounts of money to make it operational.

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