Until now.
Recently, Holley and Well Made Music Senior Mastering Engineer Dave Polster drove up to SUMA to move the lathe out of the studio for the first time in over 45 years.
“The lathe definitely needs a lot of work, but we are up for the challenge and confident about a successful outcome,” says Holley, who intends to restore the rare piece of machinery, in a press release.
Holley, Polster and a crew of Neumann lathe experts aim to make the instrument into one of the finest disc cutting lathes in the whole wide world. They’ll even post public social media updates online of restoration efforts as work progresses.
No stranger to Northeast Ohio, Holley III opened Well Made Music in Cleveland back in 2010 as a mastering studio dedicated to the craft of lacquer disc cutting for the vinyl record manufacturing industry. In 2021, Holley and his team relocated to Bristol, where he and his crew cut lacquers for GRAMMY-Award winning releases and independent artists alike. The studio currently operates two restored Neumann VMS-70 Disc Mastering lathes, machines that have been in service since the early 1970s.
“Luckily for us, the stars seem to have aligned, with the added bonus of preserving a huge piece of musical and mechanical history,” Holley says.
The newly acquired lathe’s history can be traced back to Cleveland Recording Company. That facility was the Cleveland area’s first professional recording studio and was incorporated by Frederick C. Wolf in 1946, a Czechoslovakian radio announcer who additionally ran several radio stations out of the same downtown location. In 1950, Wolf hired Ken Hamann as the head technician for both the recording studio and his various radio stations. A Navy veteran who had learned electronics skills as an aircraft electronics technician, Hamann was also in charge of procuring and maintaining equipment around the studio. After a visit to Germany, he began to seek out German-designed audio equipment.
“Cleveland Recording would go on to purchase several classic Neumann microphones, widely regarded as some of the finest microphones of all time,” says Holley.
During this time, Hamann also oversaw the purchase of a Neumann AM32b Disc Cutting Lathe for the studio. Hamann went on to engineer sessions at the studio with Grand Funk Railroad, the James Gang, Wild Cherry and many other nationally known artists of the day. In 1970, Hamann and engineer John Hansen purchased Cleveland Recording Company from Wolf. Michael Bishop, a GRAMMY-Award winning engineer who later went on to work with famed classical label Telarc, joined CRC as a disc mastering engineer in 1972, logging many hours behind the machine. In 1977, Cleveland State University purchased the downtown studio property, and the studio was forced to move.
Hansen and Hamann parted ways, with Hansen retaining the CRC name until his death in 1990. Hamann, on the other hand, branched off to form his own recording studio, SUMA Recording, in Painesville. During the move to SUMA, Hamann retained a large portion of Cleveland Recording’s equipment, including their Neumann AM32b lathe. Around this time, Hamann, Michael Bishop and Ken Hamann’s son Paul Hamann worked together to hand build a state-of-the-art recording console Ken had designed for SUMA. The console would be used for most recording sessions from 1977 up until Paul Hamann’s death in 2017. Acts such as Pere Ubu, Alex Bevan and the Michael Stanley Band recorded at SUMA. The Black Keys cut Attack & Release, arguably one of their best albums, at the studio.
“That studio’s quite magical. One of the most incredible studios in the world,” says Black Keys singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach. Uber-producer Danger Mouse worked on Attack & Release with Paul Hamann.
Ken Hamann passed away in 2003, leaving behind a treasure trove of classic recording equipment with his son, who engineered most sessions at SUMA and continued to cut lacquers himself until his own death in 2017.
Five years ago, producer Michael Seifert purchased the SUMA property and renovated the space, updating much of the technology and installing a Solid State Logic (SSL) Recording Console to replace the aging Ken Hamann hand-built console from 1977.
This article appears in Best of Cleveland 2023.