Miles Showell

After being brought up on a varied musical diet by a family who owned a record shop, Miles decided he really wanted a career in music. He began working at Utopia Studios in 1984 where he was trained in the finer arts of disc cutting by Steve Angel.

Miles’s recent clients include: Faithless, Dido, Mike Oldfield, White Stripes, Everything But the Girl, Groove Armada, Underworld, The Brand New Heavies.
International artists include: Zazie, Johnny Hallyday, Nazen Oncel, Pascal Obispo and Sertab Erener…

Following two further years at Utopia, Miles moved onto Copymasters (now Masterpiece) where he was responsible for helping to turn the company from a copy house into a professional Mastering facility.

Having achieved every possible goal at Masterpiece, Miles felt he needed a new challenge. Miles was invited to join the team at Metropolis in late 1997. Given the extensive facilities, equipment and unrivalled technical team that Metropolis has at its disposal, Miles creative streak went into overdrive.

Since his days at Utopia, Miles (inspired by the work of Stan Ricker at Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs in California) had wanted to offer the possibility of half speed mastering to his vinyl clients (which is an intricate system where the disc cutting lathe and the master tape are both run at half their real time speed, the resulting cut when played offers outstanding high frequency and transient response and excellent stereo separation). However, Miles’ quest was always thwarted.

Thankfully the Metropolis attitude of “Good enough is not good enough” meant that the technicians and management were far more open-minded about the idea. This led to the in-house development of unique half speed cutting equipment which became know as ‘The Paradigm Process’. In a nutshell, the technicians and Miles were able to bring 25 years of development to the original concept. The cuts using this process have met universal acclaim. There are only two engineers in the world who can offer half speed mastering and Miles is the only one in Europe!

Whatever music and format you bring to Miles at Metropolis Mastering you can rest assured of working with an engineer who has been described as a perfectionist (his affectionate nickname is “Precious”).