MCI JH636

A big automated MCI console that changed hands for the price of a used sedan.

Overview

This name trips people up. The JH636 is an MCI console, not a Neve. It shows up in this archive under Neve because that's where collectors keep filing it, but the badge on the frame reads MCI, the same company whose JH-series tape machines every studio in America seemed to own at some point. The JH636 is the automated mixing desk from that family. What makes it worth a page isn't a spec sheet. It's the paper trail. The classified sections of the trade magazines are full of these things changing hands, and the prices tell you almost everything.

Throughout the early-to-mid 1990s, used-gear brokers in Boston ran the JH636 at a steady $25,000 with automation included. The same listing appeared month after month in the pages of Mix (January 1992, p.231). That's a serious console at a working-studio price. The same broker kept advertising it, which suggests these desks were moving, or at least that the market could bear that number. A Nashville dealer, Blevins Audio Exchange, listed a JH636-30 with VU metering and automation at $22,000, a few thousand under the Boston price. Region and configuration moved the needle. Later in the decade Mix (September 1994, p.213) shows a 36-input/26-frame JH636 in a vintage console roundup alongside SSL and Neve iron, and by 2003 the same desk turns up in an ATR Service vintage inventory listing next to Studer and Neve VR72 consoles. Nearly every listing calls out the automation specifically, which tells you the automated version is the one people wanted.

The record leaves out the boring stuff. No channel count is fixed across all units (listings range from 32-input frames to 36-input frames). There is no documented EQ topology, no published noise figures, no production years. The market wrote the JH636's history in classified ads rather than spec sheets. Collectors note that the frame size and automation package vary unit to unit, so a buyer is really evaluating a specific desk rather than a model. The $22,000 - $25,000 range from the 1990s classifieds is the best anchor available for what these traded at. Treat it as a period figure, not a current valuation.

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