After years of careful design and ambitious construction, Manifold Recording is ready to make good on its bold claim to offer ‘Recording… reinvented’.
The minds behind Manifold Recording, which is situated on 16 acres of trees, meadows, ponds and gardens, belong to co-owners Michael Tiemann and wife Amy Tiemann. In line with these new studios offering unique recording experiences, key to the thinking behind Manifold is The Miraverse.
‘This new recording process (which we refer to as co-production) can begin at the beginning, with a tracking session in the Music Room (or other acoustic environment at the Manifold Recording studios),’ the studio says. ‘It can be built up over time through a series of creative overdub sessions. It can be informed by the witness of one or more mixing sessions in the Control Room or the Studio Annex. It can be remixed, with all the creativity and controversy that that entails. Whatever the starting point, and whatever your ultimate goal or vision, The Miraverse can help you realiee a more perfect sound – yours.’
Construction of Manifold Recording began in early 2008, but studio designer and acoustician Wes Lachot had begun working on its layout as early as October 2006. Both the main studio and the studio annex use Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired architecture, and were designed from the ground up. Appropriately, Lachot designed the studio space around the mixing desk’s equilateral listening triangle formed by the loudspeaker locations and the 'sweet spot'.
And the desk chosen to sit with the room’s soffit-mounted Dynaudio Acoustics M4S main monitors and free-standing Adam Audio s2.5a surrounds was a 64-channel API Vision console. ‘I designed Manifold’s Studio A to be quite a large tracking room,’ Lachot explains. ‘These kinds of rooms are rarely built anymore, but they allow for such a beautiful acoustic sound. We felt that the room really deserved to have a top-rate analogue console. Nothing else would do it justice.’
‘API makes gear that makes people passionate about recording and producing music,’ says Michael Tiemann. ‘There is an energy one feels when seeing their trademarked knobs and knowing their potential to deliver. API has never sacrificed quality in the pursuit of the latest fad or fashion, but rather they have built new products, like the Vision console, on the rock-solid foundation of proven designs.
‘With the API Vision now installed in the control room, the true genius of Wes’s design is evident,’ he staddsated. ‘The console is perfectly proportioned, perfectly situated, and perfectly comfortable in its new surroundings. Many control rooms have more console than they can comfortably fit in the available space. Some rooms have too little console space. We have a perfect balance that inspires confidence and creativity.’
Manifold Recording is slated to open June 2011.
More: www.apiaudio.com
