About

It’s the late 70s. Boys are driving Ford Capris, Charlie’s Angels is on the telly and Ziggy had taken it all too far (but boy could he play guitar).

The hi-fi market saw JVC invent Quadrophonic and Teac launch the 3340 4-track quarter-inch tape machine. Quadrophonic flopped. I guess we weren’t quite ready for a fifth loudspeaker and a sub(woofer) and a cool name like 5.1 Surround Sound back then?

However, the 3340 had Simul-Sync functionality which allowed a musician to playback one track whilst recording another giving the ability to ‘overdub’ in real-time. This essentially was the beginning of the home-recording studio.

Fresh out of school, he learned to service and repair both Teac and Revox A77 reel-to-reel tape recorders. The Logic switches on the Teac decks burnt out and the Revox machines required high-speed, vari-speed and simul-sync conversions to work in this new environment. Then Music Lab was born.

He met and married Louise, who at the time was product manager for a local Borehamwood firm and responsible for the release of the Revox B77 along with product sales for Neumann microphones and Studer multi-track tape recorders.

Fast forward to 1997 and he founded GearBox. In the 12 years before the company was sold, it became the de-facto supply company for equipment hire, sales and support to audio and video professionals alike.

Pro Tools was replacing tape and demand for high-end systems came from the likes of Abbey Road, AIR, Angel, Metropolis, Olympic, Sarm and many more. GearBox became the number one Pro Tools rental company in the UK.

As well as having supplied most of the Soho facilities and freelance sound editors he equipped over 250 feature film productions with a combination of Digidesign Pro Tools and Avid Media Composer systems to major film dubbing theatres including De Lane Lea, Goldcrest Post-Production, Pinewood-Shepperton Group, Twickenham Film Studios and other facilities including Hackenbacker, Videosonics, Soundelux any many more.

In 2009 he launched Eastwood (Sound and Vision) Ltd. And in doing so, he and the ESV team continue to supply all of the OB and television facilities with Sony HDCAM, HDCAM-SR, XDCAM HD and other broadcast ancilliary equipment. Clients include BBC Studios and Post-Production, The London Studios, Pinewood Television, CTV OB, Visions, SIS Live and Input Media.

To this day, ESV remain the unrivaled choice for Pro Tools sales and rental systems to the film, TV and music-recording industries.

He is proud to have built up a trusting and professional working relationship with post-production supervisors, sound designers and sound supervisors and regards these well-versed professionals as personal friends as well as industry colleagues.

35 years on he's still listening to Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and Dolby have announced their 64-speaker Atmos technology.

He is...

Richard Eastwood
Managing Director
Eastwood (Sound and Vision) Ltd
          ... a name you know and trust