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The lathe in the picture, located at Abbey Road Studios, is the one Miles Showell used to cut at 1/2 speed, the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band remix. It began life as a Neumann VMS82 DMM that according to Showell had been "...routinely stripped for spares".

Here's what else he told me:

"When I discovered it, it was looking very dirty and was in a sorry state. However, fortunately for me all the broken parts that had been swapped out had been retained. There are probably six people in the world that can be totally trusted with Neumann lathes.

I am in the fortunate position to personally know two of them (Crispin Murray and John Goldstraw who, like me, are both ex-Metropolis employees). Even better is that all of us work well together. Crispin and John were confident that given enough time they could repair all the broken boards so the three of us set about planning a resurrection. The owner of the lathe shell and broken parts was not interested so I made them an offer which amazingly was accepted.

Pictured (L-R): Touraj Moghaddam (Vertere Acoustics), Crispin Murray (Guilde Productions), Showell and John Goldstraw (Hathor Audio). This was taken around an hour before Showell started cutting the first acetate of Sgt. Pepper.....

"The lathe was collected and work progressed. The three of us decided to really go all out to make it the quietest and cleanest sounding lathe in the world. Progress was slow and the work took almost eighteen months. But it was done by February 2017 and Sgt. Pepper.... was the first cut done on it. The install took two days, at 7pm on the second day I started work on ...Pepper... Crispin sat with me until we had played the first acetate and we were confident that all was good. He left at 2:30am and I sat there cutting the masters for the main LP until 6am. It was a very long but extremely rewarding day.

The restoration work includes:

- Convert lathe from DMM to lacquer operation (a considerable job as a lot of things need to be changed).

- Complete rebuild of the power supplies (in both the lathe and cutting amplifiers)

- Replace all capacitors in the lathe control (groove spacing) systems

- Upgrade all capacitors in the audio signal path power amplifiers with long life hi-fi grade types (there are dozens. Change one and you will hear no difference, change them all and it really improves the sound).

- Upgrade many of the transistors in the power amplifiers for newer and better sounding equivalents.

- Remove the patch-bay and tracing simulator from the amplifier rack as these are not necessary and only serve to degrade the audio.

- Upgrade the opamps and rebuild the acceleration limiter (an upgrade largely learned from Chris Muth* with whom Crispin and John share knowledge) thus making the cleanest sounding and fastest reacting de-esser I have ever heard.

- Rewire the entire system with the finest audio cables (many of these cables came from Vertere).

We also made some cosmetic changes so it looks a lot prettier. Gone is the awful green Formica console. The leather drop down tool cover had been lost so we had a new one made.

Fortunately, underneath all the dust and diesel soot (the lathe had been dumped in a warehouse for a few years in the 1990s) the mechanical parts and the lathe body were in a good physical condition.

The result of all of this is the best sounding (and best looking) cutting system I have ever worked with, and I have used some fabulous systems in my time. This is not hyperbole. The cleanliness of the high end sounds far more Ortofon than Neumann (which is perfect as I pretty much have the Ortofon sound but with Neumann reliability).

When John and Crispin were finished, they both said they had wanted to upgrade and customise a cutting system as much as mine has been, but that no-one had given them such a free reign. My attitude was simple, yes it is a lot of money, more than I really have to spend, but seeing as they had a jigsaw puzzle anyway, better to hot-rod everything as they went than to save money now only to take the system off air for a month or more to do it in the future.

The three of us could not be more delighted with the finished results. Next time you are in the U.K. do come to Abbey Road and see it."

You can be sure I will!

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