After the doors closed at AES 2018 in New York City, Vintage King headed to Sear Sound to celebrate another successful pro audio convention. For this exclusive event, we were honored to be a part of the first-ever live quadraphonic direct-to-disk recording session in history.

For the session, musician Emily Wells provided the sounds. She is an incredible multi-instrumentalist who is capable of creating extremely lush, beautiful and deep music all by herself. At the Afterglow event, she created a layered performance that featured vocals/vocoder, synths, violin and percussion.

While Wells played in front of a hushed audience, engineers from Sear Sound worked together with lathe engineer Wesley Wolf of Tangible Formats and quadraphonic sound expert KamranV of CyKiK to bring the recording straight to vinyl. Afterward, the record was taken straight from the lathe over to a record player where everyone excitedly listened back to the live session they had just heard in full quadraphonic glory.

Special thanks to Emily Wells, Headroom For Days, Sears Sound, Tangible Formats, CyKik, Barefoot Sound, Shinola, Eventide, The NAMM Show, ATC Loudspeakers, G-Technology, United Recording, AVN|SYS, Recording Connection, KMD Productions, Involve Audio, SoundGirls, Gearslutz, Sonic Scoop and HoneySuckle for making this a night we'll never forget. Continue on below to see images from the AES Afterglow 2018 and live tracking sessions with Emily Wells.