You know what you're getting when you walk into a top-line recording studio. Smoked glass, mirrors, deep-pile beige carpets, cork, black aircraft seats and lots and lots of pine.

Right? Wrong. Terminal could come as a terrible shock to your brown leather-flying jacket-and-tinted-shades brigade who are used to hopping from LA to NY to WC1 and finding the same decor everywhere — identical from the firmness of the cushions in the producers' chair to the brand of toilet paper.

Admittedly it's not in the league of your all-digital Solid State Money studios like the Townhouse, Utopia or Abbey Road, but it's sitting firmly on the rung below that, the good-quality unpretentious 24-track which is easily decent enough to record an album in. Therefore the bands that have been in so far have been the middle-of-the-league bands with good independent deals or bands who have just been signed by a major record company. Bands like Specimen, Flesh For Lulu, Second Image, and Alone Again Or.

But it's very well equipped and, maybe more importantly, the attitude of both engineers and owners is positive and knowledgeable. There's nothing like good people to make a studio a joy to work in — and nothing worse than spending a week trapped in a small room with an obnoxious incompetent, however good the gear maybe.

To a large extent, that springs from the fact that Terminal Studios is the offspring of the Terminal rehearsal complex just down the road, a high-class operation which many famous and hip bands use to get their acts together and which has been going for some three years now — sufficient time for owners Tony McGrail and Charlie Barratt to have learnt how to cope with the demands of hysterical bands, seedy managers, dodgy record companies and so on. And somewhere in the middle of that lot they've got the hang of offering a service which satisfies their clients and still keeps their heads above water.

Now they've got the recording studio — which has been in operation since last Autumn — it's proved quite easy to apply the same principles, and it seems the bands have been as well pleased.

As far as gear goes, there's nothing amazingly unusual — an Amek Angela 28:24 console feeding a Lyrec multitrack recorder and mastering onto a Studer A80; monitoring is carried out via a bi-amped JBL system (not particularly weird, but very very loud, should you need it), Visonik' Davids or Auratones.

Processing equipment, however, is in great abundance, and the quality ain't so bad either. There are two AMS units, their digital reverb and the digital delay plus the interface unit that lets you use it as a Harmoniser or sampling system playable from a synth or sequencer. Posh and dead useful. And in the great rackfulls of gear there are a few other gems, ranging from the right up-to-the-minute like Psionics parametrics and Valley People compressors to classics of the past like an Eventide phaser. Well psychedelic, that one.

And there's a couple of unusual gadgets built in, like a Trace Elliott bass pre-amp which is ideal for those times when you want to play bass, guitar or keyboards in the control room itself. It acts like a super DI box, and can be linked to a cab in the studio if you want a miked sound as well.

But the equipment isn't the main feature of the studio at all; it's the place itself that makes it worthwhile. It all looks very clean and high-tech, with the spacious control room and the main area both having been acoustically designed from scratch, therefore giving an absolutely flat response for monitoring, and in the studio itself, a wide variation in sound from very live at one end to quite dead at the other. And there's a very dead booth available for overdubs as well.

Hence the studio sounds very bright indeed, particularly for horns and percussion which seem to come pinging out of the mix with almost surreal quality. A very distinctive sound, but one most people so far seem to have got along with well.

Like Martin Rex, their chief engineer, gets along with his gear, in fact — he knows exactly what all his bits of electronics can do and how to get the best out of them because he was the man that designed and wired together the hardware. He used to be Dennis Bovell's house engineer and the Reggae master's studio tricks have rubbed off in his use of sampling and triggering technology. The studio's Drumulator can often be found linked to the AMS and its library of sampled sounds, and allied to the 'extremely musical' Eq on the Amek desk you may well be surprised by the sounds that appear magically from the monitors.

At £40 per hour, £350 per day, it's a very good deal for the pro band who are looking for somewhere between the scuzzy 16-track basement and the computer-controlled cost of the big boys. The studio may be Terminal, but the shock when the bill comes won't be.

TERMINAL STUDIOS (Contact Details)