When Cool Brick Studios Owner and Senior Producer Dave Taylor sat down to hear the PhantomFocus Monitor System in his new PhantomFocus MixRoom for the first time after it was tuned, he recalls, ‘I swung around and said, “Holy shit!”. In response, Carl Tatz smiled and said, “Yeah, everybody says that”.’ The exchange follows Carl Tatz Design having installed one of the company’s PhantomFocus MixRooms at Cool Brick Studios in the shadow of Mount Sopris in Carbondale, Colorado.
Taylor’s Cool Brick Studios is housed in a famous historic 124-year-old home built in 1900. Opened in 2011, a recent whole-house renovation includes a Carl Tatz Design 5.1 PhantomFocus MixRoom featuring five PFM HD-1000 Master Reference Monitors; a Carl Tatz Edition GV-30 Universal Console by Argosy; a pair of PFM ICE Cube-12 subwoofers; and a Raven Chrome eChair. Proprietary CTD acoustic modules by Auralex are used throughout.
The implementation of Cool Brick Studios’ MixRoom is one of CTD’s more unique challenges, requiring the use of custom acoustic curtains to treat the side NanaWall moving glass partitions and designing a high-performance absorptive/diffusive treatment for the home’s concave rear bay window wall.
‘Another unique aspect of our recent immersive rooms that use an LCR monitor array is that we now employ a motorised centre channel and TV lift in conjunction with separate tunings for stereo and time-aligned immersive systems with basically a two-button switch between the two modes,’ Tatz explains.
‘CTD was a pleasure to work with from concept to completion in a very challenging space in a 1900s historic house,’ Taylor comments ‘I truly understand now how it feels to be an artist in one’s work. For the first time I feel like I can paint sound with a very fine articulate brush and capture and create the colours and textures of music that are in my mind. At last I can really trust what I am hearing.’
Taylor began playing music aged nine years old on a Harmony Silvertone guitar and was producing an artist spotlight series at age 15. He has since enjoyed a 20-plus-year career in broadcast radio, where he was exposed to thousands of hit songs in all genres and started working with Pro Tools when it was called Sound Designer.
He continued in professional audio production in the Southeast, Southwest and New York, until opening Cool Brick Studios in 2011, with thousands of tracks produced to date. He has five award-winning films to his credit as well as soundscapes in films screened at Cannes and being shown on major streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime.
Cool Brick Studios specialises in music production, mixing and mastering in all genres as well as postproduction sound design for film.
More: www.phantomfocus.com
