As you're crossing the road in front of Abbey Road Studios, stop and look down the tree-lined boulevard from about halfway across. Whoops! Deja vu, anyone? Because this is a scene you'll have seen umpteen times before. It sums up for millions of people the whole image of the biggest band Pop has ever known, the Beatles, and there you are — slap in the middle of it, just where Paul was standing without his socks on.

It's a pretty awesome beginning to a visit to the world-famous Abbey Road Studios, and once you've been hit by that blast of cultural nostalgia you're just softened up for the fact that the studios have been the scene of more classic track-laying than the whole of British Rail's Eastern Region. Virtually every big name in the world of Pop, Rock and all stations between have ventured in through those doors and soaked a little of their genius into those walls.

But it hasn't rested on its mightily impressive laurels; Abbey Road is still the sharp end of recording operations for its parent corporation, the giant EMI empire, and is still well booked — whether that's thanks to its reputation is doubtful, as today's pernickety producers won't use any studio that isn't right up to the mark as far as high tech gadgetry goes.

So they're still updating — the days of linking four-track machines are far behind them now. Linking 48-track digital formats, its much more likely to be the subject of engineers' chat these days, along with other esoteric topics such as Direct Metal Mastering, compact disc cutting, triggering from SMPTE and the best computer controlled mixing system. Not, however, that I'm suggesting that the studios are inhabited by bespectacled boffins and synth bands reeking of hairspray; a massive proportion of their bookings, particularly in the huge (55 feet by nearly 100) Studio One, are with the more traditional forms of music, such as orchestral (classical works and a lot of film themes) and operatic. John Williams spends a lot of time creating his washes of quasi-classical film music here, and you'll find many an Abbey Road job backing the dodgy dialogue in your local fleapit's weekly offerings. This is an area where the traditional and the technical neatly overlap — it's all very well getting your penguin-suited orchestral bods together in one place and presenting them with their sheets of carefully written music, but it's got to synchronise exactly with certain events in the film, and it's no easy task getting twenty-fourth-of-a-second precision on tape and getting it to link up properly with the visuals later.

Therefore, in comes the advantage (or one of them) of recording in a massive studio complex. They have combined resources with Anvil Films to provide full projection facilities in Studios One and Two, plus video Q-lock, time codes, pulses, and any facility you might need to avoid embarrassing scenes where the smoochy string section pops up in the car chase or the big crescendo happens just as the end of the credits rolls up.

But in order to make their great big studio more attractive still the people at Abbey Road are building a new control room to replace the present, slightly cramped one. It's huge, with a machine room behind it to contain all the techno gubbins and keep them from under your feet, and it's been built behind a cunning construction of breeze blocks so it doesn't interfere with the normal workings of the recording area. Then when it's nearly finished the breeze blocks come down, the gap's filled, and you've got an instant new control room; just add producer and mix.

Studio Two is the next biggest area in the complex and as you'd expect; a flash new computerised mixdown fills its own control room, which overlooks the 60 foot by 40 foot main studio area. Big enough, as Meat Loaf was finding out during my visit, to play table tennis in quite comfortably.

The two other studios, three and the penthouse, are smaller but no less well-equipped. The penthouse has recently been revamped in the cause of restricting it to twenty-four track operation, but it's very much — like all the facilities — state of the art.

But although you may think of Abbey Road as just a place where your creative crotchets are converted to oxide, there's much more than recording here. There are the ancillary facilities — remix, transferring tapes to other formats (cassette, half-inch to quarter-inch, tape to film or video, or vice versa, you name it...), editing, and a world-renowned mobile recording facility, but the present pride and joy of the place resides in two new and spectacularly high tech facilities.

The first is the all-digital mastering facility. This is a massively specialised operation that only a very few experts in the world know anything about — and Abbey Road's got one. The machinery is vastly expensive, but tied in with the digital recording equipment that is available in the studios, it can produce an amazingly crisp quality of sounds that is as near to reality as you can get without getting Sting and the lads round to your place to do a few numbers.

The other piece of fantabulous gear that everybody down at Abbey Road is enthusing over is the DMM — or Direct Metal Mastering — machine. Now this doesn't mean that it makes the LSO sound like UFO, rather it's more or less the last word in record cutting. Instead of the soft and easily warpable acetate masters which conventional machines use, from which stamping moulds are grown, the DMM system cuts directly onto metal (hence the name, dimbo) which cuts out a lot of the stages between cutting and pressing. It has disadvantages; for instance the fact that the final masters are much less durable and therefore have to be changed much more often, and the fact that the machinery is much more complex and finicky than normal. But this is outweighed, in most people's eyes (or rather ears), by the obvious and massive gains in quality. It basically sounds better.

So from the very moment you strike the first E major to the time the master trundles off the pressing plant, Abbey Road can now take care of everything. It ain't cheap — as the saying goes, if you need to ask the price you probably can't afford it — but it is, quite simply, the best. Unbeat(le)able.

ABBEY ROAD STUDIOS (Contact Details)