Mix Book Review Week: Buzz Me In

08/12/2025 6

New York, NY (December 08, 2025)—The colder months of the year are a perfect time to settle in with some hot coffee (or something stronger) and read something that’s not on a screen. There’s any number of bestsellers out there to devour, but audio pros occasionally want to read something that hits a little closer to home. With that in mind, this week, we’re looking at a stack of new books to dig through. Whether you want to check them out for yourself or give them as gifts to your fellow sound mavens, here’s some heartily recommended tomes.

BUZZ ME IN: INSIDE THE RECORD PLANT STUDIOS

By Martin Porter and David Goggin (Thames & Hudson). Mix reviewed this one when it came out during the summer, but Buzz Me In is definitely the most buzzed-about pro-audio book of the year. Detailing the spectacular rise and fall of the Record Plant studio empire, it’s filled with incredible stories, against-the- odds successes, larger-than-life personalities and more cocaine than Antarctica has snow.

The book kicks off in 1967 with Frank Zappa eviscerating a lost ad executive who’s accidentally wandered into his session—and that executive is Chris Stone who soon starts Record Plant with audio engineer Gary Kellgren. Together, Stone and Kellgren create a string of cutting-edge studios that attract the greatest musical minds of the era, all while the two partners forever teeter on the edge of financial and personal destruction.

• Sanctuary of Sound: The Church Studio Story — A Mix Book Review

Capturing the creative highs and decadent lows of the 1970s music industry with unflinching honesty (and sometimes a smirk), Buzz Me In doesn’t just spill the tea; it knocks over the whole teapot. Dropping names like Steph Curry drops three-pointers, all the musical heroes of the era—on both sides of the control-room window—pass through its pages at some point or another, making for a whirlwind document of a time that has passed but the influence of which is still being felt today.