Shadow Hills Industries is discrete, non-compromise solid-state gear with that classy 1940s look.
Shadwo Hills Industry – classy sounding and looking
Shadow Hills is a neighbourhood in Los Angeles, California. Peter Reardon, who engineered Coolio's „Gangsta's Paradise“, Clawfinger and others and worked for NASA, founded his company – and named it Shadow Hills Industries.
The company moved to Texas but kept its name. Peter Reardon startet building what he needed for his work and noticed he always got superb feedback for it and people wanted to buy it.
Shadow Hills Industrie's gear is rated by many people in the business the best-looking audio products of all time. There is a stylish 1940's / Art-Déco-design to all of their products. The consistent old-school forties design is a magnet in every recording studio and puts a smile on everybody's face. Shadow Hills look great, but everybody agrees it's not primarily style that counts. But also in terms of sound and built quality, Shadow Hills is also absolutely top-notch! Oh, and the bulky bakelite knobs (You know the saying: Everything biggerr in Texas!), the massive switches are pure tactile bliss.
Shadow Hills Industries is a no-compromise-brand. All units are built without integrated circuits (ICs) and with highest quality components available. This means: You will always be able to service these units. If you buy a Shadow Hills product, you can clearly see it as an investment and probably inherit it to your grandchildren.
Shadow Hills have incredible channel/ stereo matching, low noise, distortion only where and when wanted. The gear may sound like it is from the golden tube area, but in fact is solid state. The only tubes used are „magic eyes“ used in a couple of units.
Transformers can influence the sound. Most products feature switchable output transformers. So nickel, iron, in some cases steel or discrete out can give you the sound character your signal needs.
The gigantic Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor is a dynamic masterpiece you might have probably seen somewhere on pictures. It is one of the most re-known (and certainly: recognisable) outboard processors on the market. You do find this compressors in a lot of mastering studios around the world, if not in most of them.
It is a dual mono or stereo operating compressor with both optical and VCA sections. They can be set and activated independently. Despite its name, the Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor is also pure gold for tracking and makes a wonderful bus compressor as well. This massive compressor can do anything from technical and inaudible compression to wringing out, saturating and smashing. It is not cheap, which is true, but there has been not a single compromise in creating and building it.
There is a less expensive way to have a stereo signal compressed by Shadow Hills Industries: The Dual Vandergraf. This is a two-unit 500 series stereo compressor derived from the Mastering Compressor's discrete dynamics section. The output transformer has an iron core.
The mic preamps Shadow Hills build use Jensen input transformers and let you choose between trannys and transformerless (for maximum clarity on the output. There are 19“ four channel versions available (Quad GAMA) and also the single-channel Series 500 Mono GAMA.
The Shadow Hills Equinox features two GAMA preamps, but is also a monitoring controller with talkback and a 30-channel-summing-amp!
Lots of features for monitoring is what the 19“/2U Shadow Hills Oculus offers. It has a wireless control unit called Pendant, fitting every workstation – and of course looking absolutely gorgeous.