Malcolm Toft [Tape Op #26] has a career spanning over 50 years in the professional audio industry. He started at CBS Studios in London and went on to work at the iconic Trident Studios. There he began as an audio engineer, then moved to studio manager, working on records by The Beatles, David Bowie, T. Rex, James Taylor, Joe Cocker, and many others. As a designer, he founded Trident Audio and was responsible for the design of many of their iconic consoles, including the A Range, B Range, Series 80, and TSM. He eventually became the co-founder of Trident Audio Developments. Toft went on to form another console company, Malcolm Toft Associates, which eventually led to Toft Audio Designs and the founding of Ocean Audio. Currently he manufactures a range of professional audio products under his own name. In 2009, he was awarded a visiting professorship by Leeds College of Music, and The University of West London awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Science. I have always been an avid Trident console user, so it was pleasure to sit down with Malcolm and discuss his career in the audio industry.
What were your audio influences growing up in England, and how did you come to choose music audio design as a career?
The light that came into my life was rock 'n' roll – when I first heard Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry. My dad would buy these 78 records, and we listened to them on our mum and dad's gramophones. The radio would have a little 7-inch by 4-inch elliptical speaker and that's how we'd listen to all these records. No bass end and no top end! All just in the middle frequencies. That's all we ever heard at home; we didn't hear the full spectrum of music, which we take for granted so much these days. When I went into the studio with my band and we did demo recordings, we had to plug into the wall; we couldn't use our amplifiers. The engineer gave us back our sound through headphones. I heard broad spectrum audio for the first time because they had 12-inch speakers with tweeters. This changed my life to hear music properly; the bass and treble. And I knew that day that this was going to be my career. I knew I wanted to be involved in the recording of sound, because it was fantastic to be in control and capture it. That's where I set my sights. I was living at home, and I built a studio in my front room out of preamplifiers – I've always been interested in how things went together. Every week, with my week's wage, I'd I buy an Italian hi-fi preamplifier. I built a cabinet, put six preamplifiers into the cabinet, and connected them all together. I couldn't understand why there was no output. When I turned the volume up on one preamp it affected the volume on the other. So, I put my best resistors in there to separate them. My dad had a tape recorder, so I did some recording at home. I ended up recording some bands in my front room. I learned how to splice tape a little bit. When I left school, I managed to get myself a job in the studio when I was 17 years old and was paid £5 a week. I went to Tony Pike’s studio to work, which was in his house. He had a 6-channel mixer; it had little pots on it. There was no talkback or foldback [monitors]. There was just EQ, treble and bass, six master level controls, and mic preamps and that fed into a mono tape recorder. The only reverb we had was a Hammond spring unit hanging from the ceiling to isolate it. We had no compressors. The thing was, I learned a tremendous amount. Tony was a drummer, and he had high standards. He taught me about microphone placement and about different microphones. We only had one condenser microphone, because, back in those days, condenser microphones were very expensive. Most of our other mics were AKG D19s. They were the precursor to the Shure SM57s, which we couldn't get in the UK. He taught me how to train my ears, because we didn't have solo buttons back then. I trained my ears to pick out the bass during the recording, or during the mix. I’d pick out the guitar, and isolate it in my head. We take this for granted so much these days, but without the technology, that's how we worked. We recorded the band to mono, so we'd record the guitar, bass, and drums in mono onto one tape machine. Then we played that back and added the vocals onto another tape machine.
After your experience with Tony Pike, where did you go to further your engineering career?
A couple of years later I was about 19, and I got a job at CBS Studios in London. I ended up running their Studio 2. However, the break came in 1960. I was working at CBS and one of the guys said to me, "There's a new studio opening in London, and they’ve got the first 8-track recorder in Europe." CBS Studios only had a 4-track recorder. We thought that was amazing – eight tracks on one tape! Wow, that's impossible! Around March 1968, I got a ticket to the opening party for Trident Studios. At that time, there were very few independent studios in London. They were all owned either by CBS, Pye, or Decca – all the major record labels had studios. I went to the opening of Trident Studios, and they happened to be looking for an engineer. There were hundreds of people there – it was on four floors. I ended up in the control room, with this desk that looked like the Starship Enterprise. It had eight group faders on it and eight meters. I had never seen a desk with eight meters on it. This was amazing! I ended up talking to one of the guys there and met Barry Sheffield, the owner of the studio. Barry came up and said, "Where are you guys from?" I said, "I'm from CBS Studios." He asked, "What do you do?" I said, "I'm an engineer there." And he asked, "Is anyone looking for a job?" I put my hand up jokingly, thought nothing more of it, and went home after about an hour. Three days later, I got a phone call at CBS – it was Barry Sheffield, and he said, "We're serious about that job." I thought, "You're kidding me." I went to Trident Studios after work one evening; they sat me in front of the desk and gave me a tape to mix. I did the mix, went home, and a few days later I got a letter offering me a job at Trident Studios. I still have that letter to this day! The job as engineer paid £1000 a year. In those days £20 a week was a lot of money. I was earning just under £20 at CBS, so this was a step forward. It also included very good overtime rate – double time.
How did that change your career, and who did you work with at the studio?
I joined Trident Studios the very first day it opened, as an engineer. The staff was me, Barry Sheffield, and a maintenance guy named Ron Goodwin: We were the only three there. I was the first engineer they ever employed. My first session was with one of the guys from The Animals; Alan Price. Two months later, this guy named Tony Visconti [Tape Op #29] was assigned to the studio. I was given Tony to work with, and Tony had just come over from America. He was cutting his teeth. I'd only been there for three months, but we hit it off well and I became Tony’s engineer for the next three years. We did T.Rex and David Bowie. Tony and I are still very good friends, and Tony credits me with teaching him everything he knows about engineering. He said, in a video interview, that without me his career wouldn't have taken off. How about that? [laughter] It is amazing. By July of 1968, we were recording “Hey Jude” by The Beatles. The Beatles were pretty fed up with Abbey Road [EMI Studios] because Abbey Road had bought an 8-track, but they wouldn't put it into service. Their engineers took a year to check it out. The Beatles had done Sgt. Pepper's [Lonely Hearts Club Band], and they were pissed off because they had to run two 4-track machines together. It was difficult. So, when they heard we had an 8-track machine, they thought they'd come and try us out. The thing about Trident was the atmosphere was completely different from Abbey Road. Abbey Road was very structured. The engineers wore white coats. You had to get a docket to get a microphone. The cafeteria closed at 5 p.m. It was very bureaucratic at Abbey Road. It was only when The Beatles came along that they swept that all away, because they had to keep The Beatles happy. At Trident, we were a completely different kettle of fish. You could get a toasted sandwich at 3 a.m., because we had a guy, Jerry, who would live upstairs in the kitchen and made tea and toast. There was no ceremony. You could get a microphone whenever you wanted. It was more like an American studio. That was the vision of Norman Sheffield [Barry's brother] when they opened the studio: To run it like an American studio. None of this bureaucratic English stuff, because we were very stiff upper lip in those days. It was all about class. If you spoke with an upper-class accent, you got on. It was very much like that in the '50s and '60s, right up into the '80s, really. It was very class-structured in England. But Trident was not like that because we were just a bunch of people interested in music. The Beatles loved it. I absolutely loved it. They did “Dear Prudence,” “Honey Pie,” and a lot at Trident. Elton John came in with Gus Dudgeon and we did the Elton John album. Then Gus brought in David Bowie, and we did "Space Oddity." We did "Walk on the Wild Side” with Lou Reed. I recorded James Taylor's first album [James Taylor], with Peter Asher [#137] producing. We made so much iconic music at Trident Studios. The first desk we had was a Sound Techniques eight-channel console. I never particularly liked the EQ in it. I was always fighting the EQ a little bit, but it was a good desk and ahead of its time. This is how I got into desk making, because we then went to 16-track. They supplied us with a new desk, and the 8-track went up to a room that we made into a remix room. The Sheffields realized that we were tying up valuable studio space just mixing. That second Sound Techniques desk was really a bit of a turkey. Mechanically, the modules were not very good. There wasn't a proper bus – they were all hardwired and the connectors were held up with some curtain rail underneath. The 16-track replay was on solenoids that were pushed by micro switches. Ultimately, it failed, and we would lose tracks when trying to replay. It wasn't a good desk.
When did you start building your own consoles?
We put up with the Sound Techniques for a couple of years, and then we went to 24-track. Sound Techniques took on a big contract with CTS in London to build a lot of desks and lost interest with us. Trident needed to go to 24-channels, and we had a very small control room. By that time, I'd become the studio manager. I'd always been tinkering with mixers. I didn't want to be a producer, but I wanted my own studio. At Trident Studios, we had a maintenance engineer named Barry Porter. I would talk to Barry in the evenings during sessions, asking him about circuitry, and he would give me bits of circuits. Remember, in those days there were no integrated circuits, just transistors. Barry gave me some circuits and helped me with my mixer that I was building at home. When we went to 24-track, I was tasked with sourcing a 24-channel console to go with our new 24-track 3M [M79] machine. The only manufacturers around at that time in the early '70s were Neve, Cadac, Helios, and Sound Techniques. SSL hadn't come on the scene; that wasn't until another eight or nine years later. There was little choice, and none of them could give us the facilities we wanted, or make the mixer fit the space that we had, which was only like 5 or 6 feet with the remote patch bay. The turning point was when Barry Sheffield and I went up to see Neve; they wined and dined us, because we were a pretty prestigious studio by then. We had a meeting with all their engineers, but Rupert Neve [Tape Op #26, #87] wasn't there. We could tell that none of the people in that room had actually worked on a mixer. They were electronics engineers and systems engineers, but not recording engineers. By this point we had Roy Thomas Baker working for Trident. Roy took over from me as engineer, and, of course, he produced Queen, so we brought him along to the meetings. We were saying we wanted EQ on the monitor section. The reason for EQ in the monitor section is because we used to get tapes from America which were NAB [EQ'd] tapes but, in the UK, and Europe, we used CCIR [EQ] characteristics. When we got a tape in from America, we had to realign the 16-track, which took up a lot of time. So, we said, "When we have the new desk, could we just have treble and bass on the monitor section so that we can compensate for the NAB by EQ'ing rather than having to realign the whole machine?" Of course, none of them could do it. I was 26 years of age at that time, and I said, "I think we could build our own desk." I knew a bit about the systems and building mixers, and Barry had the technical ability to design the electronics. I had a meeting with the Sheffield brothers. For five years they had trusted me – I was a valued member of staff. I had a year to build a mixer, and they let me have a room on the top floor of the Trident Studios building. That is how we built the Trident A Range. It was built for our own studios to give us the requirements that we needed. It was never built to go into mass production. What happened was, as we were designing it, customers heard that we were building a desk. A guy named John Kongos – who'd wrote a song called "He's Gonna Step on You Again" – needed a mixer. Also, the Vernon brothers were building a studio out in Oxfordshire, called Chipping Norton Studios, and they wanted a mixer. I met up with these guys and had a chat, and they said, "We only want 8 channels. We don't want 20. We can't afford the money of an A Range." So, that was the console that became the Trident B Range. That's why the B Range looks so different from the A Range, because the B Range was the mixer I was building for myself at home.
Is this what led to Trident Audio Developments?
Yes. I went to the Sheffield brothers and said, “How about we go into business building mixers?” That's how Trident Audio Developments started. It was born out of these things that grew out of an idea. Everything was serendipitous at Trident and just fell into place. I was given a shareholding in the company of 25%, Barry Porter was given 25%, and we were basically told to go and do it. The Sheffields had some space in a facility they had in North London to manufacture the mixers. By this time, Trident had branched out and had different businesses; a video company, a production company, and a company making cartridges and cassettes. In fact, in the early '70s they became the largest cartridge and cassette duplicating company in Europe with Trident Tape Services, TTS. It was Barry Porter, me, and then we took on staff. Unfortunately, Barry didn't like the corporate life. He couldn't cope with it; it was too stressful. He left the company after about a year. Norman Sheffield was the chairman of the company, and he was quite aloof. He was off in his own ivory tower, and he was quite intimidating. He could come in and bark out orders, but he never gave me any problems. His brother, Barry Sheffield, would be the pacifier. He would say, "Forget Norman. Come down to the pub and have a drink." He was hands on, because Barry was an engineer, a people person, and we all got on with Barry. Engineer Ken Scott [#52] joined from EMI Studios, and Robin Cable joined as well. Robin was a very good engineer who worked for Gus Dudgeon on Elton John's album. The Sheffields wanted to get into production, so they formed Trident Audio Productions, and they were looking for bands. That’s how they discovered Queen. Barry Sheffield saw them and signed them to the production company. Queen used to record during down time in the studio, and they recorded "Seven Seas of Rhye” at this time. Barry paid them £20 to £30 a week, each of them, for a year. We used to have Christmas parties with Queen performing, and Queen used to rehearse in my factory. When I would go home at night from the factory, Queen used to drudge upstairs with their amps to rehearse. The stories are amazing. When Queen started to make money, they became really annoyed, especially Freddie Mercury. He was very pissed off at Barry for unpaid royalties. The Queen song, “Death on Two Legs,” on the album A Night at the Opera, is about Barry Sheffield. It finally ended up that John Reid, Elton John’s manager, bought them out of their contract with Trident. They saw Norman riding around in a Rolls Royce, and Freddie thought that that was their money. But, in actuality, Norman ran several successful businesses; the video company, duplication company, and the studio. What upsets me a bit is that in the movie, Bohemian Rhapsody, Trident Studios is completely erased out of it. Ironically, obviously not known to the makers and maybe not even known to the band either, but there's a scene where they're recording on a mixer, and it's one of my Trident 70 Series with the logo on it. I had to laugh at that!
What was the evolution of Trident consoles through the years?
We did the A Range for a few years, and then integrated circuits [ICs] came out. We were looking at those because they made manufacturing a heck of lot easier. The Fleximix was actually designed for Queen. Would you believe it? I remember I had a meeting with Queen. They weren't happy with live sound on their mixers, because they wanted to be able to group the mix. For example, group the drums together, the guitar mics together, and the vocal mics together. They couldn't conveniently do that on any of the mixers they had, with a master controller for those particular faders. They wanted to be able to configure the desk so that they could have four busses controlled by one fader and three controlled by another fader. I thought, "Well, the only way we're going to be able to do that is to make the mixer configurable." I thought if I put the connectors on the channel strips, I could move the modules around and have a common bus, leaving the other functions standard. It had the connectors on the top of each channel strip, and you could take an empty frame and configure the modules any way you like. You could have 3 inputs, a submaster module; 4 inputs, a submaster module; 6 inputs, a submaster module; and so on across the frames. Also, at that same time, there were big musicals in London, like A Chorus Line, Evita, and Annie. The Fleximix came into its own because the live theatre sound people wanted that flexibility, where they could group together the mics on stage. Up until that time, people had to use the sound system in the theatres, which were not very good. Andrew Lloyd Webber, and people like that, realized that if you give people a good audio experience they will want to come to the theatre. Companies designing sound for theatres didn’t want to use the old fashioned, valve amplifiers and speakers that were in there. There was a company called Autograph, which was a big London hire business, and they stocked loads of the Fleximix frames, loads of separate modules, and configured them with the shows that they wanted to do. So, it became very successful. That was our first solid-state, integrated circuit mixer. After that, I designed the Trident Series 80, because it was coming up to the late-'70s and we needed a mixer that was at a lower cost. After that, I designed the TSM, which was the IC version of the A Range. That's why it's got sliders on the EQ and stuff like that. After that, we came up with the Series 70, which was using the Series 80-type input module and circuitry. Then there was the Series 65; a bit of a rethinker with a different mic preamp and a slightly different way the modules were constructed. The Series 65 had plastic knobs – we were trying to cut costs. There were iterations of the Series 80, like the Series 80B – the same modules but the mechanics were different. The Series 80 originally had the same mechanics of the A Range, which was all very expensive extruded aluminum. To keep the price down, we had to make it out of sheet steel as that was much cheaper. So, the only difference between the 80 and 80B is that the frame is made of steel rather than the aluminum. There is a lot of conjecture from people saying that the 80 and 80B are different. There is no difference electronically; they are exactly the same! The Series 80C is the same input modules as the 80B, but it had a different monitor section so you could cope with 24 or even 48 tracks. Because by the time the 80C was built, disco music was coming in and people were synchronizing two 24-track machines. The 80C had a monitor module that had EQ on it and had the ability to accept two line inputs so it could monitor 48 tracks. It had a different monitor module, and we gave it a different cosmetic look as well. Slightly more modern looking than the 80B. The Trimix was the forerunner of the Series 70. It came along after the Fleximix and was a small version of the Series 70, or like an 8-bus version of the Series 80. It was made to replace the B Range, in a way, because it was at a lower cost. For the smaller studios that wanted 8 channels, we came out with the Trimix. The Series 70 was effectively a 16-track version of the of the Trimix. In the mid-'80s, the Trident London 24 was derived from the Series 65 console, and that started out as an 8-bus, small format desktop console. After customer requests, we started adding patchbays, then increased it to 16 groups, and finally a free-standing model was developed with 24 groups and a patchbay, which became the Series 24 that you have. I believe it continued in production until Trident Audio finally closed its doors around 1995. By that time, it was getting into the '80s and Soundcraft mixers and people like that were doing a good job at the lower price range. We finally came up with the Trident Di-An, a groundbreaking digitally-controlled analog console, but it financially broke the back of the company because it cost so much to develop. I had to give up control of the company, otherwise it would have gone bust. We were offered an exit route, via another company taking over the shares and control. However, the company went in another direction from where I wanted it to go, so I left Trident in 1988.
What a legacy though!
The fact that Trident Audio is the only brand and the only name of the company that's still running is amazing to me. It was the only company not handled by the Sheffield brothers. It was my idea. It's ironic that people may know Trident Studios, considering they ceased to exist in 1996. All the other companies closed and are gone, but Trident Audio is still around. It’s incredible that Trident Audio is still the legacy and the name that people know. 
