Biography:

Graham Langley’s pro-audio career started in 1972, at Audio Developments near Birmingham, where he built mixing consoles and tape recorders. The following year he joined a Collective on a hill farm in Wales and built “four-channel mono mixers in purple boxes” as well as electronic crossovers, phasers, power amplifiers, and speaker cabinets, the last again being covered in purple paint-impregnated hessian. His customers included Alexis Korner and Fairport Convention.
Sadly, a car accident that killed several members of the Collective forced Langley to move back to Manchester. Here, a school reunion brought Nick Franks and Graham Langley together. They’d first met as 14-year olds at a Grammar School in Manchester. In the intervening years, Franks had studied at the London School of Economics, and so brought business skills to support Langley’s analogue design expertise. Langley had conceived the Amek name while on holiday in Cornwall in the mid-1960s, and the pair set up Amek’s first factory premises in Altrincham, on the southern edge of Manchester, in 1974.
One of Amek’s first major clients was a French psychedelic band called Gong, who commissioned the company to build a large, bespoke three-section winged console for a tour, along with amps, monitor console, and a lighting controller! Business progressed rapidly after that, and Amek consoles gathered a reputation for sounding very ‘musical’.
The second half of the 1970s saw the company launch the M-series modular split recording consoles, and S-series sound-reinforcement desks, and two years later the Total Audio Concepts (TAC) brand was introduced, with a low-cost 16:2 console. At the end of that decade Amek introduced the flagship M3000, a 24-bus recording console, and the M1000 top-of-the-range sound-reinforcement desk.
In 1983 Graham achieved the prestige status of Chartered Engineer.
The ’80s were just as busy, producing the M2500 and Angela consoles, the BC01 broadcast console, the TAC Matchless and Scorpion desks, and the assignable APC console with GML automation. During this time, the Amek factory moved to New Islington Mill in Salford, to the West of Manchester, TAC established a new factory in Devon, and Amek won the Queen’s Award for Exports three years in a row (1985-87). At the end of the ’80s the M2500 was replaced by the G2520, and TAC Bullet multipurpose mixer were launched. But the really big news was that Rupert Neve joined the company and the Medici Equaliser being the first directly attributable product.
During this period, Graham developed many mixing consoles such as the Amek Mozart, Rembrandt, Galileo… He made important innovations that were very ahead of his time such as Virtual Dynamics. He also developed in conjunction with Rupert Neve the Amek 9098 which is recognized today as one of the best mixing consoles ever produced.