A designer, a production crew and a new name.

Crane Song is the company of the American designer Dave Hill, and its story starts with an earlier one. According to the company’s own history, archived in 2002, Hill was building synthesizers as a boy, repaired instruments and recorded at a local music store, and, after enrolling in an electronics course at a community college, was asked to teach it after his first semester; he taught for about eight years. In a 2004 interview with Tape Op he described himself as self-taught and said he ended up owning a recording studio that friends had started around an Ampex eight-track machine.

His first well-known design was for someone else. Early in the 1980s, the company history says, a used-equipment dealer asked him for a valve compressor with the sound of older models but clean enough to compete with modern ones; the result was the Summit Audio TLA-100. Sound On Sound told the same story in 2014. Hill went on to design and set up manufacturing for the whole Summit Audio range, and the company says Summit grew from one product and one employee in the basement of his home in 1984 to a full line and more than a dozen staff by 1994.

That ended in September 1994, when, the company history says, Summit moved its manufacturing to California. Hill wanted to keep the production crew together, and beginning in August 1995 several of them went back to work for him in a new company, Crane Song, based in Superior, Wisconsin, on Lake Superior. Sound On Sound dates the founding to 1995; Hill told Tape Op that his first product came out in “1995-1996.” Asked about the name, he said: “It originates from when I was working on industrial film, a documentary.”

Compressors, converters and a signed front panel.

Crane Song’s first design, the company says, was the HDV-2, a valve playback preamplifier for the Ampex ATR-102 tape machine, built for the ATR Service Company. Next came the STC-8, a two-channel discrete class-A compressor-limiter. By 2002 the range also included the Flamingo stereo microphone preamplifier, the Trakker single-channel compressor, the Spider eight-channel preamp, mixer and converter, and the HEDD, short for Harmonically Enhanced Digital Device, a converter that could add valve- and tape-like character in the digital domain. A 192kHz version, the HEDD 192, followed in late 2001.

Converters became Hill’s second speciality. Sound On Sound’s Hugh Robjohns reviewed the Avocet stereo monitor controller in 2005, calling Hill “Crane Song’s mastermind.” Later versions, the Avocet II and IIA, and the Solaris converter used what Tape Op in 2016 called a fifth-generation “Quantum” DAC; the HEDD Quantum, reviewed in 2019, added the same clocking. In the 2010s the company also made valve 500-series modules, including the Syren preamplifier, the Insignia equaliser and the Falcon compressor.

Software carried the name further. Crane Song’s Phoenix plug-ins emulated tape machines for Pro Tools, and Avid hired Hill to design HEAT, short for Harmonically Enhanced Algorithm Technology, for Pro Tools, Tape Op reported in 2011. The company still lists Phoenix, HEAT and the Peacock vinyl-emulation plug-in.

The products have a recognisable look. Reviewing the Solaris in 2017, Sound On Sound said it was “instantly recognisable as a Crane Song product, due to the mint-green plastic knobs and Dave’s signature printed at the right-hand end of the front panel.” The names are recognisable too: most are birds — Avocet, Flamingo, Ibis, Falcon — and in 2012 Tape Op joked about the company’s “avian nomenclature” when Hill launched a sideline label, Dave Hill Designs, whose Titan compressor took its name from mythology instead.

Design and documentation.

Big consoles get the attention, but much of a modern studio’s signal path runs through equipment from smaller specialist makers. The seven companies in this guide each built a name in one link of that chain: summing, conversion between analogue and digital, microphone preamplifiers, or moving audio between systems.

Summing is where Dangerous Music began. The company says it was officially founded in 2001 with the release of its 2-BUS analogue summing amplifier. Its website gave an address in Edmeston, in upstate New York, in 2008 and 2014.

Conversion is central to several others. Lavry Engineering, whose range includes the Quintessence digital-to-analogue converter, gives its shipping address as Kingston, Washington. Crane Song, whose products have included HEDD converters, gave its address as Superior, Wisconsin, on its website in 2005. Burl Audio, which says it was founded in 2006, makes converters and microphone preamplifiers and describes itself as “based in Santa Cruz, California.”

Grace Design, a family firm that says it was founded by the brothers Michael and Eben Grace in the early 1990s, makes microphone preamplifiers and says its shop is in Lyons, Colorado. SPL electronics, which names Hermann Gier and Wolfgang Neumann as its founders, is based in Niederkrüchten, Germany, and uses the line “Sound Performance – Made in Germany.” DirectOut, from Mittweida in Saxony, works on the networking side, with MADI and audio-over-IP converters and routers that link consoles, stage racks and computers.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Handmade in Superior, by its own account and others’.

Crane Song has stayed small and in one place. The company’s 2002 website gave its address as Crane Song Ltd in Superior, Wisconsin, and said some of its staff had worked with Hill since 1988. In 2014 Tape Op’s Geoff Stanfield wrote that “Crane Song gear is handmade in Superior, Wisconsin,” which is the clearest independent statement we found of where the hardware is made. An early Tape Op review, in 2001, noted that Hill built his gear “first and foremost to use in his own studio,” and Hill told the magazine in 2004 that every design was refined in his own control room before release.

Its users are named in the trade press and on its own site. The website quotes the mixer Tony Maserati on the Avocet, Andrew Scheps on the Phoenix plug-in, and mastering engineers including Brad Blackwood and Warren Sokol of Universal Mastering Studios; we give those as quotations the company chose to publish. Hill also wrote and lectured on audio design, and the website keeps his papers, from a talk on compressor circuits at Audio Days in Paris in 2012 to a product-design session at the AES convention in Los Angeles in 2014.

The recent picture is less clear. A notice on the company’s website, signed “Crane Song Ltd” and first archived in April 2024, says the business had been through “a challenging period,” had spent “nearly a year” restructuring, and was “focused on resuming production” and developing new products. We could not establish who owns Crane Song Ltd today, and the website, last updated in 2024, still lists international distributors from Germany to Japan.

For a design guide, Crane Song shows how a few consistent details — a knob colour, a signature, a family of bird names — can make a small maker’s equipment recognisable across the studio. Compare Universal Audio, another name built on studio compressors and plug-ins, and API, whose 500-series format Crane Song’s valve modules were built for. For this guide we use mint green, deep teal and panel black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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