Located in the United Kingdom, Astoria Studio is widely recognized as one of the most respected recording studios in the world. Owned by David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, Astoria has served as recording venue to some of the most renowned recording artists in the music industry. Anyone familiar with the state-of-the-art production values on Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall, Momentary Lapse of Reason, The Division Bell, and David Gilmour in Concert 2002 DVD, can appreciate the meticulous nature with which the Pink Floyd albums are put together. Astoria Studio’s principles are renowned for reviewing every aspect of their recording chain continually. It was this perfectionist approach that led Astoria to seek out and implement Shunyata Research’s Hydra power distribution systems, PowerSnakes power cables and Aeros Series signal cables to their state-of-the-art recording equipment. Astoria’s principle engineers actively endorse Shunyata Research products to other studios and mastering engineers and have paved the way for may subsequent Shunyata studio applications.
We conducted a series of listening test to both the Shunyata cables and the HYDRA power conditioner. Our comparison point included both standard mains cables and other esoteric cables. We found that both the Shunyata cables and the HYDRA gave the best results by some margin.
We were particularly impressed with the sense of phase coherence that Shunyata products delivered, giving noticeably better imaging, depth and clarity. We tried many different areas of our signal path, all benefited. With digital sources it was almost as if we had switched from 44.1k/16 bit to 96k/ 24 bit. We now run all our analogue machines, workstations and the mixing console from the Shunyata equipment.