Marking its tenth anniversary in its current location in Miami’s Downtown – where it has provided audio and/or postproduction services for clients including Paramount Pictures, EA Games, 2K Games, Sony Music, Universal and Disney, as well as recordings for artists including Prince Royce, Nicky Jam, Carlos Vives and Pedro Capo – Heiga Studios has recently completed a revising its signal path, workflow and monitoring configurations.

Using a Dante backbone, the facility now makes extensive use of Red 16Line and RedNet R1 units from Focusrite. The paradigm-shifting implementation of the infrastructure revision units was overseen by Adrian Morales-Demori, who was introduced to the Red series when designing the Dante integration at another facility in 2020.

Heiga Studios’ beginnings go back to the 1990s, when owners Morales-Demori and Malury Imbernon met as pro audio students in their native Venezuela, later starting Heiga Studios in a garage there (and becoming husband and wife). They began their move to Florida in 2000 (first Imbernon and then Morales-Demori), with a subsequent relocation in 2012 to the current facility in Miami.

‘We had decided that we wanted to have Dolby Atmos mixing capability at Heiga Studios, but the infrastructure needed for that seemed to mean that we’d have to buy a lot more equipment to manage it,’ Morales-Demori recalls. ‘I realised that with the R1, we would be able to, for instance, easily switch between stereo and Atmos mix monitoring at the press of a single button. And the Red 16Line does a lot of things from a single unit, including letting us move between multiple DAWs and also act as a hub for Dante, which we are regularly investing in more of in the studio.

‘With both DigiLink and Thunderbolt connections on the Red 16Line, it’s easy to switch from Pro Tools HD to a second DAW without the need to reconfigure option cards in the interface – we just change the host mode either in the RedNet Control software or on the device front panel and change DAWs. We’ve literally rebuilt the studio around Red systems, and it’s made a huge difference.’

Morales-Demori says the R1’s ability to switch seamlessly between stereo and immersive mixing is a further plus, allowing clients to shift mix formats between sessions and also to just as seamlessly toggle monitoring modes during sessions to check image and EQ compatibility between immersive and stereo. ‘All of this is accomplished at the push of a button, instead of having to re-patch every time,’ he says.

But just as important are the benefits for business. ‘Being in charge of Heiga Studios as a CEO, my priority is to provide not only the tools our team needs but also a cost- and time-efficient workflow,’ Imbernon adds. ‘Coming from an audio engineer background, I would also never sacrifice quality – I understand the trust artists give us when they are here to capture their art. These Focusrite system components meet all my standards out of the box. Their ability to create and switch between complex studio signal workflows, to switch to something like mixing Dolby Atmos, and to easily connect our analogue equipment in our racks with anything in the digital domain like Dante or optical, allow our staff and outside producers/engineers to work easily when recording and mixing music making them the perfect gear to future-proof the continuous evolution of the studio. All of this, and the trust I have in Focusrite, was the key to rewiring the entire studio.’

More: www.focusrite.com