Belock Recording Studio
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The parent company was an electronics facility employing several hundred scientists and engineers close by at College Point. It was founded by an electronics inventor who was an early developer of computing in military applications concerning ballistics (Project Cyclone - see Time Life Magazine article 1951) and entrepreneur Harry D. Belock in 1954 and subcontracted to the rapidly expanding field of missile guidance, fire power control and other defense work. The company was also involved with NASA and various programs leading to Apollo and the Moon landings. It boasted a Beryllium machining facility in the late 1950s which provided ultra rigid mountings for inertial guidance systems, one of only three in the world. Much of the work was classified.
Although Harry Belock made his fortune within the military sector, his beginnings in electronics were firmly in the entertainment business, firstly in the rapid expansion of radio broadcasting from the 1920s and in the 1930s the development of sound in the movies. It was at that time that Belock worked in Hollywood specifically as a sound engineer for MGM. These experiences, the contacts he made and his understanding of sound recording were major influences in due course when he came to establish Everest Records in 1958 with renowned sound engineer Bert Whyte. Being a New Yorker born and bred it was natural that Everest should be based there.
The Belock Recording Studio was a facility constructed along the lines of the best sound stages then available in Hollywood for film production. The electronics side, given the parent company, was naturally cutting edge with most of it designed and built in-house. Where outside equipment was brought in as with Ampex tape machines and Westrex 35mm magnetic film recorders/followers (as used for some early multi-channel sound on film productions at the time) it was tweaked and modified to meet the requirements of audiophile stereo reproduction in the home on commercial tapes and stereo LPs. In effect this involved improving the frequency range from 20 to 20KHz. Church modified Neumann microphones, extremely sensitive in the crucial mid-range where the human ear is most susceptible, were employed wherever possible being directly sourced from MGM from a limited supply of just a couple of hundred.
These refinements were only partially responsible for the vibrancy, warmth and non-pareil clarity of the best Everest Records from its short-lived golden age (1958–1960) while under the control of Belock as a true audiophile label to rank alongside Mercury, Decca and Westminster.
The unique selling point of Everest at this time was the application of 35mm sound recording in the LP stereo market and Bayside was built to achieve this within the studio with an interesting line of Easy Listening and popular releases and a few remarkable classical such as the Stravinsky "Ebony Concerto" performed by its dedicatee Woody Herman and his "Herd", the big band of Charlie Barnet's "Cherokee", most notably perhaps, the complete cycle of Beethoven quartets from the renowned Fine Arts Quartet. Elsewhere Belock manufactured a mobile version of the 35mm equipment for recordings on location in London and Europe. Some of these classical recordings which have been preserved and archived in Hamburg at Countdown Media's vault of masters are now regarded as audiophile references, such as Katchaturian Gayne from the London Symphony and Fistolauri (Walthamstow Assembly Hall) or within the USA, Bartok, Wagner, Prokofiev. Chopin and other interesting composers such as Antheil, Ginastrea and Canning from Leopold Stokowski. A feature also of the smallish Everest catalogue (some 125 LPs) all with immaculate album artwork in their first editions, we're a series of Copland recordings from Susskind and the composer himself plus a productive partnership of Eugene Goossens and the London Symphony in works by Stravinsky, Rimsky Korsakov, Rachmaninov and others. Of this latter collaboration, the 35mm recording of Villa Lobos's "Little Train" is considered one of the finest ever made and indispensable in its highest quality format in any audiophile collection.
All of these recordings were of course edited and mastered to LP at Bayside by Everest technicians.
Bert Whyte's philosophy was to employ just three microphones to capture the wide sound stage that stereo demands. However, as a review in Stereo Review of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf by Stokowski with "Captain Kangaroo" there is evidence in some recordings of early spot miking however, and even use of radiophonic effects!
The Bayside Studio lasted as long as Belock owned Everest. The decision taken in late 1960 by the Board of Belock Instruments to divest itself of the catalogue, the label, and the equipment ensured that projects scheduled for the first half of 1961 (including a noted Beethoven Symphony cycle from the London Symphony Orchestra and Krips) were to be the end of the recording road for Everest.
The studio was acquired by Robert Fine along with the highly valuable (the Everest mixing consoles alone cost $25,000 each!) 35mm technology which it used in its own releases on the prestigious Mercury Living Presence Records. Other labels which later utilised the 35mm process were Command and Reprise.
As in the film industry, the use of 35mm magnetic coated film in sound recording was a brief experiment that yielded superb results but became prohibitively expensive, cumbersome and outdated by further developments and techniques and in the music business with improvements in traditional half inch tape recorders.
Eventually, after a period where it operated as a freelance studios for hire and then offices, the building was demolished. A dry cleaning business now occupies the spot in Bayside.
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