The room
A studio designed around the fact that different formats put loudspeakers in different places.
Studio Sound and Broadcast Engineering described Touchdown Studio 2 in December 1992 as a deliberate departure from conventional audio. The article documented a 15-enclosure monitoring environment: an octagon of Quested monitors in the conventional plane with an additional overhead channel, alongside a Sony HDTV projection system.
Signal placement was handled by an AGM Digital Arts-developed digital surround encoder/decoder and a 16-channel vector-positioning unit using multiple AGM TMS320C30-based four-channel I/O, 32-bit DSP cards. The purpose was practical flexibility rather than novelty for its own sake: the room could address stereo, Dolby Stereo and Ambisonic work and accommodate picture-oriented production.
Software-configurable monitoring
Later 1993 trade coverage reinforces the same picture. Billboard described a nine-speaker Quested monitoring system operating with an AGM digital processor and the Neve monitoring section, allowing rapid switching between stereo, several Dolby formats, Ambisonics and mono. Mix described the room as a software-configurable processing and monitoring environment for stereo, surround, HDTV and Ambisonic playback.
Why two loudspeaker counts? The surviving 1992 and 1993 sources describe the system differently — fifteen enclosures in the earlier feature and nine Quested monitors in the later Billboard account. The archive does not invent a reconciliation; the configuration may have changed or the publications may have been counting different parts of the system.
Anthony Morris at Touchdown
A June 1993 Studio Sound international studio directory names Terry Drivas as owner and lists Anthony Morris as Studio/Bookings Manager. A later directory names someone else in that role, so this page deliberately limits the documented management credit to June 1993 rather than implying an indefinite tenure.