Mixing, Mastering, Restoration

Q: Analog or digital and why?

A: We have and do both here. We love analog, but we mostly do transfers. With new artists and groups, we prefer digital. Computer processing and recall allows us to give our clients wonderful, no sacrifice, mixing and mastering, and instant recall for precise revisions.

Q: What's your typical work process?

A: When it comes to doing transfers and restorations, we first try to gather all the information we can about the media before even trying to open it up or play it. We will also take notes from the client or do research if necessary. We then do a physical examination, possible baking, occasionally a physical and delicate cleaning of the tape in serious cases, slow library re-reeling (sometimes manually by hand), calibration of our machines to the medium, and finally a play through while recording, sometimes two. During the recording process, we never leave the medium unattended, always listening and watching, taking notes along the way. The client will receive a zipped file of each individual track (or stereo files for 2 track), separated by song, section, or increments of time, as well as pictures of the medium, showing it's condition, notes taken by the transferring engineer, and any other information we discover. Once transferred, at the clients request, we will add the additional service of restoration where we will digitally restore the transferred audio to the best of our ability to remove hiss, hum, distortion, clipping, clicks, pops, varied speed, wow and flutter, background noise or light cross talk, and anything else we can do to make the audio as clean as possible. The client receives the original files and restored files in a zip file. Our Mixing and Mastering services are described in detail on our website.

Q: Tell us about your studio setup.

A: We have two main rigs here. One is a full transfer setup with our tape machines (2"-24 track. 2"-16 track, 1/2" 4 track, 1/4" 2 track, 4 ADAT decks (32 tracks), 3 DTRS / Hi-8 decks (24 tracks), BetaMax with F1 converter, DAT deck, Cassette deck, CD deck, and turntable hooked up directly to converters for either the highest quality analog to digital conversion, or a 1:1 digital transfer. Our other set up is a mix of analog and digital gear for mixing and mastering. Most of the mastering gear was built by our head engineer and technician Mark Rucci.

Q: Describe the most common type of work you do for your clients.

A: We do an even amount of Mixing / Masting projects as well as Transfers and Restorations. Many times we do an "all-in-one" package where we transfer audio from vintage media (such as analog or digital tape), restore the audio as best we can, then mix and finally master the music. We love what we do. Saving music and sharing it with the world.