Audio legends Wayne Jones & Steve Scanlon sell Baby Reds to the public
You can buy a speaker range used by The Rolling Stones in studio.
Australians can buy a speaker range used by The Rolling Stones for studio sessions.
Two Australian audio legends are marketing their Baby Red speakers to the public to enjoy in living rooms and home theatres.
Music producer and sound engineer Steve Scanlon and bass guitarist Wayne Jones say the Baby Red studio monitors reproduce sound the way artists intend with great accuracy. They say they can excel in homes as well as in studios.
If accolades from the music industry matter, the duo are on to a winner. Reds have been used by The Rolling Stones in studio sessions and the Jones-Scanlon speakers have been endorsed by engineers, producers and artists who have worked with Lady Gaga, Prince, Justin Timberlake, Stevie Wonder, Beyoncé, Jennifer Hudson and Alicia Keys.
Scanlon is no stranger to the stars himself, working as a sound engineer with Mariah Carey and in the studio with legendary 70s rock band Deep Purple.
He has been awarded best Australian live sound engineer and has worked with Tina Arena, Kate Ceberano, The Yellow Jackets and mixed the first Australian Idol album.
Jones recalls when the pair were demonstrating the Reds and the Stones were rehearsing next door. They invited one of the house engineers to take a look.
“Next thing you know, they’d had them (Reds) in the rehearsal as monitors before they went into the recording studio to record their album. And then we get a call saying, ‘Oh, I really like the speakers. They want to take them into the studio. Is that okay?’.”
Jones and Scanlon met in the late 80s. Scanlon, a guitarist and bass player, was in bands in Melbourne and Adelaide, producing recordings for fans on a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder. Jones played bass in bands including Get Off the Cat and designed bass speaker cabinets.
Scanlon began mastering audio for Jones, a partnership that has led to three albums so far. Jones’s tracks were in the top 15 in the smooth jazz market.
“Our relationship still is producing albums as well as everything else,” Jones said.
He said the idea of the Baby Red range came after he heard the bass drivers that Scanlon used when mixing the first album.
The pair collaborated with Lorantz Audio general manager Michail Barabasz on drivers for the red speaker range. Jones outsources production of the cabinet woodwork and painting. The cabinets are handmade and customers can order colours other than red.
Jones said it took two years to develop the Reds. He said where regular speakers produced “niceness and sweetness”, the Baby Reds offered “accuracy reproduction and a stunning sound”.
He said the speakers were a great example of Australian technology making a splash across the world.
Scanlon said when the pair showed the speakers to industry types around the world “they would listen to tracks that they know well and, and pretty much every single one of them remarked that they‘ve heard things in the mixes that they hadn’t heard before”.
They also plan to sell the Red range to movie theatres.
The speakers can be tuned to the room. Customers are given software and a microphone so they can build a room profile which is fed directly to a speaker’s digital signal processor (DSP). Customers need a Windows computer and USB cable for the operation. A Mac version of the software is under development.
The room profile is calculated from 37 room measurements but is only needed once per room.
Scanlon said the upload capability of the room profile was developed during the pandemic.
A pair of 6.5-inch 650 watt Baby Red speakers cost $7999 while a 10-inch 650 watt pair is $9999. A pair of 2000 watt speakers is $26,999. The online shop (waynejonesaudio.com) also sells powered and passive bass cabinets, and bass guitar preamps and amplifiers.
The website brims with endorsements for the Red range and they start with Stones engineer Krish Sharma. “The Jones-Scanlon Studio Monitors are hands down my new favourite monitors,” he said in 2019. “They have punch and headroom to communicate raw takes with power. While being amazingly accurate, they do not sacrifice musicality.”
Four times Emmy award winner and ADR engineer Tim Hands who worked on Game of Thrones describes the Reds “as if a veil has been lifted from my listening experience. Brilliant I tell you, just brilliant!”
Scanlon currently is mixing for Dim Mak records, one of the biggest electronic dance music producers globally, and will manage Vanessa Amorosi who is starting an Australian tour with a new album. He is also working with tenor Mark Vincent.
Jones says his recording is on the backburner while he concentrates on the speaker business. The pair plan to build a network capability for listeners wanting to use Baby Reds throughout their home.
