Harrison 65K (late 1970s)
The paper trail for the Harrison 65K points a little differently than the brand on the folder. What the period studio press documents is the Allison Research 65K Console Automation Programmer, an outboard automation system. Allison marketed it for use “with API, Harrison, Helios, Sphere, Trident and other fine mixing consoles.” So the 65K's place in the Harrison story is as the recommended automation brain for Harrison desks. It was not a Harrison-built circuit.
Allison's own trade advertising, an “Industry Standard” campaign in Studio Sound (June 1978, p.25), called the 65K a second-generation programmer. It accepted 0 to +5.6 VDC control voltages from VCA-type faders. It started at a basic 16-fader capacity with a UK list price of £2,362 and could be expanded to 64 faders. By mid-1978 the same ads claimed nearly 100 units in daily use worldwide. An earlier Allison spread in Recording Engineer (October 1977, p.17) said roughly 60 systems had been delivered that year, each running essentially flawlessly. That is ad copy, granted, but it helped make the 65K a default console-automation choice in the late 1970s. Allison even ran congratulatory messages when Sphere adopted the 65K for its new programmable consoles. A follow-up Recording Engineer ad (June 1978, p.67) was unusually blunt about the price - $54,246 - and promised future expansion to as many as 8,192 analog functions or 65,536 digital bit functions.
The 65K kept surfacing long after its heyday. A 1989 classified in Mix Magazine (February 1989, p.177), offering a Harrison MR-3 recording console, specified “Allison automation with VCA subgrouping” as a selling point. That about sums up the legacy: the Allison brain that brought real automation to Harrison and other fine desks in the late 1970s, even though the hardware itself wore Allison’s name.
Exact production years, total numbers and any Harrison-specific service literature are not documented. The surviving record is essentially Allison's advertising and the used-gear listings that followed.
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