Mark if you check in here, about the board routing which you touch on in the video--I keep reading Bob Olhsson mentioning that Cal Harris told him that Chuck Britz actually preferred to bypass the board at Western a lot of the time, favoring an Ampex MX-10 for dynamics and ribbons, and going right into a limiter for tube mics.
Was that...possible? Did the Putnam boards bypassing board-pre inserts from outboard pres?
I don't know for certain, but doubt that he would have used the AMPEX MX-10 which was vastly inferior to the console in Western Studio 3. And that console didn't have inserts on each chl. It was a high impedance mixer which was fine because it had 3 or later 4 busses (Outputs) to feed the 3 track or 4 track deck. With only 3 or 4 tracks that was all you needed. The console in Studio 2 had a transformer on the output so an insert patch was possible as was a direct out so that console was easily used for 8 track recording.