Harrison Audio Consoles

Harrison Audio Consoles is an international company based in Nashville, Tennessee that manufactures mixing consoles and other audio technologies for the post-production, video production, broadcast, sound reinforcement and music recording industries. The company is renowned as an industry innovation for its "inline" mixing console design that has subsequently become the standard for nearly every large format music console. Over 1,500 Harrison consoles have been installed worldwide, presenting a significant percentage of the overall world market share for high-end audio consoles. The company founder, Dave Harrison, was inducted as a Fellow in the Audio Engineering Society for this technical contribution of the recording industry and in particular the first 32-bus "in-line" console.

Harrison came to the recording industry after working for 5 years in recording equipment retail. In the early 1970s he acquired a dealership for Music Center Incorporated, then a manufacturer of tape recorder and record electronics equipment. In 1972 he approached company CEO Jeep Harned with a concept for an inline mixing console that simplified the incorporation of multitrack recorders into a console signal path. The Harrison-designed MCI JH400 series console was the world's first commercially available inline console. Realising the importance of his innovation to multitrack production in both the recording and film industries, Harrison established the manufacturing company, Harrison Consoles.

During the first decade of its existence, Harrison Consoles produced a series of popular consoles for the film, music, broadcast TV markets. In 1975 the company introduced its first product, the Harrison 3232, and the first 32 series product. This was followed by the PP-1 film console, the MR-2, MR-3, and MR-4 music recording consoles, the TV-3, TV-4 broadcast consoles, the HM-5 live console, the Raven music recording console, and the Air-7/Pro-7 broadcast and production consoles. These fully analog console designs continued into the 1990s, while the digital revolution was taking place. During this period of rapid digital development, Harrison still continued to produce analog consoles (often with some digital elements) such as the AIR 790/PRO 790 broadcast and production consoles, AP-100 on-air production console, the MR-20 music console, the industry workhorse TV-950 and Pro-950 production consoles, and finally the TV5.1 surround-capable broadcast console.