Nineteen kilometres outside Mmabatho, in what is now the North West Province of South Africa, there is a group of concrete buildings laid out in the shape of a rhinoceros. In 1991 somebody installed a Neve VRP96 in one of them, an SSL 4000G+ in another, and a Focusrite Studio Console, one of only ten that firm ever built, in the third. Three of the finest large-format desks in the history of the trade, in three rooms, in one complex, in the middle of nowhere.

The complex is BOP Studios. It was built by the government of Bophuthatswana, a nominally independent homeland that no country other than South Africa ever recognised, and it was finished at the precise moment when sanctions and the cultural boycott meant almost no international artist was going to fly in and use it. The money came substantially out of a pension fund. The signal path was the best that could be bought anywhere on earth. The bookings did not arrive.

This is not an article about how remarkable it all was, though it was. It is an article about what happens when you buy the best gear in the world, put it where nobody can reach it, and then leave it in a hot room for ten years until the smoke comes out of the Neve.

What a Bophuthatswana recording studio was actually for

Bophuthatswana was one of the four homelands that apartheid South Africa declared independent, in its case in 1977. Nobody else recognised it. What it did have was the legal freedom to run businesses that were awkward or illegal across the border, which is why the complex ended up with a golf course, a hotel and a casino next door.

The studio was financed by the Sefalana Employee Benefits Organisation, the Bophuthatswana government, and the employees pension fund. That is the fact the rest of the article hangs on. This was not a rich producer's folly or a label's flagship. It was retirement money, spent on Kinoshita soffit monitors.

What it cost is genuinely disputed, and we are not going to pick a figure. Sound On Sound, who visited and wrote the only serious account of the place, put it like this:

Definitive figures are elusive, but different sources put the cost anywhere between 22 and 91 million US dollars.

A South African account, on the music site musicist.co.za, gives "over 900 million rand" instead. Depending on which year's exchange rate you apply, that is either roughly consistent with the top of the Sound On Sound range or wildly outside it, and neither source says which year it means. Nobody agrees. Anyone who tells you a single confident number for BOP Studios is repeating something they did not check.

Tom Hidley non-environment, on 3Hz springs, shaped like a rhinoceros

The architecture was by Thomas Rast. The acoustics were by Tom Hidley, the man who invented the non-environment control room: hard front wall, everything behind and beside the engineer absorptive, so the room contributes almost nothing and you hear the monitors rather than the building. If you were hiring the best acoustician alive in 1990, you hired Hidley. They hired Hidley.

Three concrete shells were laid out so that from above the complex reads as a rhinoceros. Studio 3 is the head, Studio 2 the forelegs, Studio 1 the hind legs, the office block is the backbone and the hotel is the horn. You cannot hear this from the control room. It was not meant to be heard.

The detail underneath is where it gets difficult to read calmly:

• Floating hardwood floors sitting on isolation springs tuned to 3Hz.
• A labyrinth bass trap pit dug in underneath the console position.
• Eleven kilometres of Van den Hul silver cable in Studio 1 alone. Most people agonise over a three metre interconnect.
• Air conditioning plant specified to leave a 10dBA noise floor in the rooms. Remember that number, it comes back.
• Mains outlets in UK, US and South African patterns, at both 110V and 230V, so that a visiting engineer could plug in whatever he had brought with him. Almost none of them came.
• A Studio 1 live room 22 metres by 19 metres, sized for 120 musicians.
• Fazioli nine-foot concert grands in Studios 1 and 2. Not Steinways. Faziolis.
• Eighteen thatched cottages, a boma and a pool for the artists who were going to be staying.

Three control rooms, three of the best desks ever made

Most studios that can afford a great console buy one great console and build the business around it. BOP bought three, from three different manufacturers, so that whoever turned up could work on the desk they already knew.

Room	Console	Configuration	Automation
Studio 1	Focusrite Studio Console #5	One of only ten ever built	GML
Studio 2	Neve VRP96	72 mono, 8 stereo	Flying Faders
Studio 3	SSL 4000G+	72 mono, 8 stereo	Ultimation

Take those one at a time, because the shorthand hides how absurd the list is. The SSL 4000G+ with Ultimation is the desk that most commercial records of the late eighties and early nineties went through, and there were plenty of them. The Neve VRP96 is much rarer and was Neve's big assembly-line flagship of the period. The Focusrite is not in the same category as either. Focusrite was founded by Rupert Neve after he had left the company that carries his name, and the Studio Console was its large-format desk: ten were built, in total, ever. Number 5 went to a homeland.

Behind the desks, the tape. Studer A820 24-track and A820 2-track machines, plus Sony, Mitsubishi and Studer digital formats, because in 1991 nobody knew which digital format was going to win. Studio 3 also had a New England Digital Synclavier running direct-to-disk, which at the time was roughly the price of a house and, per minute of recorded audio, a good deal more temperamental than a PR-99.

If you want the wider picture of how unusual any of this was on the continent, the multitrack timeline is its own piece: how Africa got multitrack covers who had what and when, and BOP sits at the far end of it by about two decades.

Monitoring, and why it weighs 250 kilograms

All three control rooms ran soffit-mounted Kinoshita RM-7V main monitors. Each cabinet weighs 250kg. They were originally driven by 1kW Van den Hul solid-state amplifiers and later by Manley 600W KT90 valve amplifiers, which is a sentence that should probably be read twice.

The rooms were also fitted with paired Kinoshita RS-1 subwoofers, quoted at 105dB SPL at 9Hz. Not 90Hz. Nine. This was the first Kinoshita Infra-Sonic installation anywhere, and it is the reason the floors are on 3Hz springs and the air conditioning had to hit 10dBA: build a system that reproduces 9Hz and everything else in the building has to be quieter than that or you have built a very expensive seismometer.

For context on what everyone else was doing, the reference monitor in the average commercial room in 1991 was a pair of NS-10s on the meter bridge, bought because they were unforgiving, cheap and everywhere. The difference between an NS-10 and a Kinoshita RM-7V is not really a difference of degree. It is a difference of funding model.

The outboard

The rack list reads like someone was handed a catalogue and told to tick the good ones.

Function	Units
Dynamics	Manley Variable Mu, SSL FXG384, UREI 1176LN, UREI LA-4, dbx 165A
EQ	Pultec, Pultec mid-frequency, TC 1128, BSS DPR901
Reverb and delay	AMS RMX16, AMS S-DMX, Klark Teknik DN780, Lexicon 300, Lexicon PCM70, Lexicon PCM42, Eventide H3000SE
Enhancement	Aphex Aural Exciter, BBE Sonic Maximizer

Every one of those is still a name people chase. The 1176LN is the fastest FET compressor ever built and remains the default answer for a vocal that needs to sit forward. The LA-4 is the later solid-state relative of the LA-2A, rack-friendly and much less fussy. The dbx 165A is the bigger brother of the 160, which is the compressor that put VCA gain reduction on drums and never really left.

The Manley Variable Mu is the valve bus compressor everybody still wants, and the Thermionic Culture Phoenix belongs to the same lineage of British valve glue. On the time-based side, the PCM42 was Lexicon's workhorse delay, a direct descendant of the Prime Time; the PCM70 is the reverb that gave the period its plates and halls, and its small sibling the LXP-15 is how most rooms got a fraction of that sound without a PCM budget.

Nothing in that rack was a compromise. Not one unit was there because it was what they could afford. That is the part that makes the rest of the story worse.

Who actually recorded at BOP Studios Mmabatho

Between 1991 and 1994, while Bophuthatswana was still notionally independent, the answer is: very few people. Sanctions and the cultural boycott meant that booking a session in a bantustan was a career decision, not a logistical one. The American singer Laura Branigan cut tracks there for Over My Heart, released in 1993, which is the clearest documented international session of the independent period.

Then Bophuthatswana ceased to exist, South Africa held its first democratic election, and the studio was leased to the SABC. Sound On Sound dates that lease to 1994, Wikipedia to 1995, and nothing we found reconciles the two. Either way the rooms finally got used, by the artists who had been on the wrong side of the boycott the whole time: Brenda Fassie, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Stimela, Lucky Dube, Sipho Mabuse, Prophets of da City and the Soweto String Quartet.

There is a bleak symmetry there. The building was designed for international clients who could not come, and it was eventually filled by South African artists who could not have been booked into it, on those terms, a year earlier.

Where was The Lion King recorded?

Accounts of BOP Studios consistently list The Lion King soundtrack among the work done there during the SABC lease. That is worth stating carefully. The 1994 film's music was assembled across several countries and several facilities, and no session documentation has been published that says which parts were cut at BOP. What the sources support is that the complex was used for the project. What they do not support is "The Lion King was recorded at BOP Studios" as a flat sentence, and we are not going to write one.

Why nobody came

Sun City opened on 7 December 1979, about 140km north west of Johannesburg, near Rustenburg, under the Pilanesberg. Sol Kerzner built it, not Sun International: Kerzner left South African Breweries and formed that company only in 1983. It stood inside Bophuthatswana for a legal reason Wikipedia states plainly, that the homeland "could provide entertainment such as gambling and topless revue shows, which were banned in South Africa". Bophuthatswana had been declared independent on 6 December 1977, no state but South Africa recognised it, and the UN General Assembly called on all governments to deny it recognition. A jurisdiction invented as a loophole, with a casino in the loophole.

Sun City and BOP Studios were both inside Bophuthatswana, and that is where the easy assumption goes wrong. They sit roughly 155km apart in a straight line, about 227km by road, close to three hours' drive. Bophuthatswana was a non-contiguous patchwork of enclaves, nicknamed Jigsawland. The two were in the same country only in the fictional sense.

What BOP had next door was closer. Sound On Sound describes the complex nestling "between a golf course on one side and a hotel resort and casino on the other". The golf course is Leopard Park Golf Club. The resort at Mmabatho opened in 1977 as the Mmabatho Sun, became the Tusk Mmabatho Casino in 2001 and Mmabatho Palms in 2009, is run by Peermont, and burned badly on 8 September 2021. One account calls it Kerzner's first casino resort, which is a single source. No source says in so many words that the hotel beside the studios is that hotel. The names and the dates are on the table.

The boycott was older than any of it. UN General Assembly resolution 2396, of 2 December 1968, asked states to suspend cultural exchanges with South Africa, and the UN Centre Against Apartheid published a register of the entertainers who went anyway. A UPI report of 26 October 1983 put it at around 200 names, 85 of them American, among them Sinatra, Ray Charles, Cher, the Beach Boys, Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt. The Centre alleged Pretoria had set Sun City up in Bophuthatswana "to deflect criticism".

They went because the money was good. Kerzner, according to Wikipedia, "offered substantial financial incentives to performing artists to use Sun City as a venue". Sinatra and Shirley Bassey in 1981; Olivia Newton-John, Dolly Parton and Neil Sedaka in 1982; Rod Stewart in July 1983 and Elton John that October; Boney M in 1984; Queen in October 1984.

Queen are the best documented consequence: twelve shows at the Sun City Super Bowl as originally booked. Britain's Musicians' Union had banned members from performing there, the union fined the band, and the UN added them to the register. No reliable figure for the fine has been published. Roger Taylor, in 2021: "We went with the best intentions, but I still think it was kind of a mistake."

The following year the other side got a record. Artists United Against Apartheid was founded by Steven Van Zandt and the producer Arthur Baker, from a concept by Danny Schechter; the single appeared on 16 October 1985, the album on 25 October, on EMI Manhattan. It demanded a pledge, not a donation, and the arrangement is the pledge: each soloist sings "I", the ensemble answers "ain't gonna play Sun City". Bono, Bob Dylan, Run-DMC, Keith Richards, Lou Reed, Peter Gabriel, Gil Scott-Heron, Afrika Bambaataa and around 150 more took part. It reached 38 in the US and 21 in the UK, about half of American radio stations played it, and South Africa banned it.

Now put BOP Studios on that timeline. It opened in 1991. Detlef Siegfried, in a peer reviewed article published in 2016: "In 1991, the cultural boycott was considerably relaxed, though formally maintained." The UN did not call for the resumption of cultural links until 13 December 1991, resolution A/RES/46/79, by which time the studio was open. The Musicians' Union did not lift its Sun City ban until March 1992, and then with conditions. Paul Simon played Johannesburg in January 1992, described as the first major performer to visit since the UN recommendation. Two liberation movements picketed him anyway.

Sound On Sound's account of the plan, and what happened to it:

The aim was to raise South Africa's profile across the world through music, by attracting international recording artists. However, few were willing to work there during the Apartheid years.

We are not going to tell you that Sun City's reputation kept artists out of BOP. No source draws that line. What is documented is the arrangement: a studio funded by a bantustan, in the bantustan whose most famous export was a resort much of the music industry had publicly sworn off, opening in the last year of a formally intact cultural boycott, with a Sun branded casino a few hundred metres from the control room. The arithmetic is the reader's.

Then they turned the air conditioning off

Period	What happened
1991 to 1994	Independent operation, hobbled by sanctions and the cultural boycott
1994 or 1995 to 2003	Leased to the SABC, start year disputed, busiest years of its working life
2003 to 2008	Mothballed. Power off, doors locked, nobody inside
After 2008	Reopened briefly as a resort; studios not in commercial use
Around 2012	Sold at auction, reported at roughly USD 1m, to Saj Chaudry

Five years without power, in the North West Province, is five years of thermal cycling and humidity in a building whose entire environmental design assumed the plant was running. When somebody eventually decided to power the Neve up for a test, the air conditioning was dead. Sound On Sound records what happened next:

The magic smoke escaped from the Neve console after extended overnight use without functioning air-con, and no one has dared turn it on since.

"Magic smoke" is the trade's joke about the fact that electronics apparently run on smoke, because once the smoke comes out they stop working. It is the kind of line you use about a fifty rand power supply. Used about a VRP96 with 72 mono inputs that somebody's pension bought, it stops being funny about halfway through the sentence.

The rest of the damage was the ordinary, stupid kind. Water in the ceilings. Parquet lifting off the floor. The UPS gone. Lighting circuits failed. The SSL and the Focusrite both partially non-functional. Sound On Sound's visitor noted that the fabric of the building itself was in remarkably good condition for a structure that had been mothballed for a decade, which is somehow worse: the concrete shells that Hidley specified did their job perfectly, and everything they were built to protect died anyway.

None of this required a disaster. It required somebody to stop paying the electricity bill. That is the whole failure mode. Gear does not mostly die of use, it dies of storage, and the question of what it costs to bring a neglected machine back is the one we answer properly in our piece on recapping and servicing.

What we could not verify

• Why the bookings did not arrive. No source draws a causal line between Sun City's notoriety and BOP's empty diary, and no artist is on record as having refused BOP by name. We have set the boycott and the studio side by side because they overlap in time and place, not because anybody has demonstrated cause.
• The hotel next door. Sound On Sound places a hotel resort and casino beside the complex. The Mmabatho Sun opened in the same town in 1977. No source we found states that these are the same building, and we are not asserting it. The claim that it was Kerzner's first casino resort rests on a single source.
• The Queen fine. The Musicians' Union fined the band over the October 1984 Sun City shows. Figures circulate for the amount. None of them is sourced well enough to print.
• The construction cost. Sound On Sound gives a 22 to 91 million US dollar range and calls definitive figures elusive. A South African account gives over 900 million rand. Neither states a base year, so the two cannot be reconciled from the outside. We are not picking one.
• The year the SABC lease began. Sound On Sound gives 1994, Wikipedia gives 1995, and a third account only places the SABC involvement after 1993. Nothing we found reconciles them, so we have not picked one.
• The Lion King. Listed in accounts of the studio, with no published session detail establishing which material was recorded there.
• The amplifier history. The 1kW Van den Hul solid-state amps and the later Manley 600W KT90 valve amps are as reported by Sound On Sound. We have no second source and no serial numbers.
• The 2012 auction. The roughly USD 1m price and the buyer's name rest on a small number of reports. Treat the figure as approximate.
• Present condition. The description of water damage, failed power and dead consoles reflects reporting from a 2013 visit. What is standing in those rooms in 2026 we do not know, and we are not going to guess.
• The Neve. Nobody has published what actually failed inside it. "The magic smoke escaped" is a description of a symptom, not a diagnosis.

The one that got out: Focusrite Studio Console number 5

In September 2019 an American studio owner named John Aquilino bought Focusrite Studio Console #5 out of the dead building and shipped it to Arizona. That is the last working part of this story, and it is the only part with a decent ending.

The restoration was not a clean-and-polish. Joel Gette of Thermal Relief Design did the preliminary work. Ken Hirsch and Orphan Audio carried out the full refurbishment, with guidance from Phil Dudderidge, Focusrite's chairman. The job was a complete recap, new switches throughout, and the replacement of 4,600 LEDs. The original GML automation, by then genuinely ancient, was replaced with a Tangerine automation interface from THD Labs.

Read that list as a bench job rather than a headline. A complete recap on a desk of that size is thousands of individual components. New switches means every one of them, because on a console the switch contacts are what fail first and there is no point doing half. Four thousand six hundred LEDs is not a cosmetic decision either: on a desk like that the lamps are the status display, and a dark button is a channel you cannot trust.

The console now lives in The Focusrite Room, a control room inside the Platinum Underground complex in Mesa, Arizona, on the eastern edge of Phoenix, built thirty feet below ground level. Custom air handling holds it between 72 and 74 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly 22 to 23 Celsius, constantly. After what happened to the Neve, that is not a luxury specification. It is a reaction.

Ten Focusrite Studio Consoles were built. Four are known to survive. One of them spent a decade in the dark in a building shaped like a rhinoceros, in a country that stopped existing in 1994, and somebody drove it out.

What we can actually sell you

We do not have a Focusrite Studio Console, and if we did we would not be able to keep it at 23 degrees. What we do have is the rack that sat beside those desks, serviced and working: the Neve 33609/C for the bus, a Chilton M10/2 Mk6 if you want discrete British console iron without a soffit, and the Focusrite Liquid Channel, which is what the company got up to once it had stopped building large-format desks one at a time. If you are buying any of it into Africa, the duty, VAT and voltage situation is covered in our importing guide, and it is more navigable than the 1991 version of the problem was.

The other thing worth saying, having written all this, is that the gear was never the bottleneck. It was not the bottleneck at BOP, where the gear was perfect and the room stayed empty. It was not the bottleneck in Lagos either, where the rooms Afrobeat actually came out of were small, hot and badly equipped, and produced records nobody has stopped playing.

Sources

• Sound On Sound: The BOP Studios Story
• Wikipedia: BOP Studios
• Musicist: BOP Studios
• Wikipedia: Sun City (South Africa)
• Wikipedia: Artists United Against Apartheid
• Wikipedia: Sun City (song)
• UPI, 26 October 1983: UN blacklists entertainers who perform in South Africa
• Detlef Siegfried: Zeithistorische Forschungen on the cultural boycott
• UN Digital Library: resolution A/RES/46/79
• Casino.org: Mmabatho Palms devastated by fire
• Christian Science Monitor, 16 January 1992: Paul Simon in South Africa
• Mix: Focusrite Studio Console, Rare Desk Returns
• Focusrite: Studio Console 5 Crosses the Atlantic to Its New Home