Neve Kelso 10/2
A ten-channel transportable console from Rupert Neve & Co. It was the small-format Neve that actually left the factory, and it now turns up in the back pages of 1980s studio magazines.
Overview
Rupert Neve & Co. Ltd of Cambridge House, Melbourn, Royston, listed the Kelso 10/2 among its stock consoles in 1975. It was a ten-input, two-output transportable desk, and it sat alongside the Melbourn 12/2 and the larger Specification 80xx frames in the company's standard catalogue. It was a small-format Neve, not a custom build. The company's own advertising copy of the period promised that despatch of stock consoles was "rarely longer than 12 weeks". Custom work ran six to eight months depending on size and complexity. So the Kelso was the Neve you could buy off the shelf.
The design brief, as described in contemporary trade coverage, was multi-purpose: location and studio recording, film dubbing and editing. The channel facilities were comprehensive for a compact desk. Every channel had microphone and line amplifiers, equalisation and a pan pot. There was also solo, talkback, a line-up oscillator and tape playback facilities, with stereo monitoring and metering via two PPM or VU meters. That is a full recording console's front end in a transportable frame. It turns up in institutional settings as readily as in music studios. One was sold to the Greek National Theatre for installation, and another appears in the equipment lists of a public television station's edit suite, running alongside a Grass Valley switcher and a CMX edit system.
The Kelso was evidently not a mass-market product. Collectors chasing a small Neve today will find it referenced far more often in for-sale columns than in any technical literature. These desks were treated as working tools: bought, used, and moved on when the room was upgraded.
The used market is where the Kelso is best documented. Through 1985 and 1986, British dealers advertised Kelso 10/2 desks at figures ranging from £3,500 to £5,000. One 1986 listing in Studio-Sound (July 1986, p.162) priced a Kelso 10/2 at £3,500, and a September 1985 entry (p.98) described a "mint" example at £4,000. The same columns carried a Neve 8068 at £50,000, so the Kelso was the entry point into Neve ownership by a wide margin. These are period asking prices in pounds sterling, not a guide to today's market. The spread is still telling: condition and completeness moved these desks by a third or more even then.
Practical ownership is the usual Neve story. These are modular, serviceable consoles, and the transportable format means the Kelso has survived in greater numbers than a fixed installation of similar vintage might have. The caveats are the obvious ones. A forty-plus-year-old desk will have tired capacitors, noisy pots and switches, and connectors that have been cycled far too many times. Restoration will be a patient, piece-by-piece affair, not a matter of ordering a kit.
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