Nimbus Records is a British record company based at Wyastone Leys, Ganarew, Herefordshire, England. They specialise in classical music recordings and were the first company in the UK to produce compact discs. Nimbus was founded in 1972 by the late bass singer Numa Labinsky, and the brothers Michael and Gerald Reynolds, and has traditionally been based at the Wyastone Leys mansion site, near Monmouth and the English/Welsh border. A core technical aspect of the company's recording philosophy was the early adoption of the Ambisonic surround-sound system invented by a group of British researchers including the late mathematician and recording engineer Michael Gerzon. The recordings have been made with a single-point array of microphones developed by Dr Jonathan Halliday, which is equivalent to a form of soundfield microphone, encoded into stereo-compatible 2-channel Ambisonic UHJ Format and released on conventional stereo media. A large sub-label of Nimbus Records is the vocal series Prima Voce. This label specialises in the transfer of vocal records on 78 rpm disc dating from 1900. The method of transfer involves the use of thorn needles and a giant acoustic horn on a carefully restored gramophone. No electronic processing is used: instead, the gramophone is placed in a living room environment and recorded ambisonically, in surround-sound, from a typical listening position. Although controversial, the technique is capable of producing remarkably lifelike results - particularly for recordings made "acoustically" prior to the arrival of studio microphones in 1925. Nimbus Records was the first company to master and press Compact Discs in the UK, and developed and sold equipment for these purposes. The label was one of the first major Western classical labels to also record Indian classical music digitally and market alongside its Western counterpart. In 2001 a new holding company was established, Wyastone Estate which was the umbrella over Nimbus Records, Nimbus Disc and Print, Nimbus Music Publishing, Wyastone CD Distribution and Wyastone Business Park. In 2004 Wyastone Estate opened a short run CD manufacturing plant. This enabled Nimbus Records to continue adding new titles to the catalogue without being forced to delete the back catalogue. In 2014 Nimbus Records held a catalogue of over 1500 in stock CD titles, their biggest catalogue to date. (Rondo DB)

Labels
Wikipedia	Nimbus_Records
Country	United Kingdom
Started	1972
Official website	https://www.wyastone.co.uk/