Sound International

Sound International was a British monthly music and recording magazine established in 1978 and published until the mid-1980s. The magazine included interviews with musicians, recording engineers and producers, news and reviews of musical instruments and recording equipment, and feature articles on a wide range of aspects of the professional and semi-professional music and recording industry of the period.
Sound International was established as a sister publication to the leading international professional recording journal of the time, Studio Sound magazine (formerly Tape Recorder). Both were published from the Croydon, Surrey offices of Link House Publications, headquartered in Poole, Dorset in the United Kingdom. The purpose of the title was to appeal to professional and amateur musicians as well as recording engineers and producers and the growing crossover area of musicians building their own studios and utilising lower-cost, smaller-scale "semi-pro" or "prosumer" audio equipment, pioneered by companies like Tascam with their 4-track reel-to-reel recorders and the cassette-based 4-track Portastudio. The magazine correctly identified that there would be a significant growth in the importance of home studios at both the professional and semi-professional levels and was aimed at this burgeoning market.
The first issue of Sound International was published in May 1978. In the early 1980s, Link House Publications purchased competing title Beat Instrumental and added it to the masthead of Sound International. The title also underwent a significant redesign at the time. The title was ultimately incorporated into Studio Sound magazine in around 1985 as the musical instrument (MI) and professional audio industries started to become more integrated.
Founding Editor of Sound International was Richard Elen, formerly a studio manager for EMI Music Publishing Ltd and trained at Island Records' Basing Street Studios in the early 1970s, and the Deputy Editor was Tony Bacon, who joined the title from Richard Desmond's competing magazine International Musician and Recording World. After Elen left the magazine in 1981 to become Editor of Studio Sound magazine, Tony Bacon was promoted to the post of Editor. He remained Editor until the title was "folded into" Studio Sound in the mid-1980s. Bacon went on to edit other magazines and authored the guitar books Six Decades of The Fender Telecaster, 50 years of the Gibson Les Paul and Paul McCartney - Bassmaster.

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