Puget Sound Studios owner Bruce Brown
After two years in the building, Puget Sound Studios (Issaquah, Wash.;
www.pugetsoundstudios.com) opened for business this past October, offering diverse services to the Seattle audio industry. The facility comprises a post-production/control room, mastering studio, iso booth and machine room. Owner Bruce Brown points out that the space was meant to be flexible to accommodate any of his clients’ needs. “For anyone wanting to record,” he says, “the mastering room can also be used as a tracking room.”
Brown’s studio is built in the basement of his home. It was designed by recording engineer Chris Huston and tuned by Bob Hodas. “We bought the house four years ago when it was just framing,” Brown says. “We had the builder increase the height of the basement ceiling to 12 feet.” The house is on Cougar Mountain, just outside of Seattle, and Brown says his is the only studio in Washington state that can record, edit and master multichannel DSD/DXD material. The post room features a Pro Tools HD4 Accel system and the first Neve Masterpiece II from Legendary Audio.
Cobaltt Mastering owner/chief engineer Bruce Maddocks
Photo: David Goggin
The mastering room centers around a Pyramix DSD workstation with EMM Labs converters; monitoring is via Wilson Audio WATT/Puppy speakers. “This has been a dream of mine — bringing the Pacific Northwest a mastering room it can be proud of.”
In September, five-year-old recording/archiving facility Cups ‘N Strings (Santa Monica, Calif.;
www.cupsnstrings.com) welcomed the addition of Bruce Maddocks’ Cobaltt Mastering suite. “We opened our Cobaltt Mastering suite to distinguish it from the restoration and tape archival work we are known for here,” Maddocks explains. “In a sense, Cobaltt is a case-study room to utilize some of my loudspeaker designs and the acoustic paneling systems I have developed for the personal-use studios of artists and film composers like Harry Gregson-Williams. The concept involves a combination of diffusers, broadband Helmholtz absorbers and membrane bass absorbers. Cobaltt has the flexibility to satisfy the needs of popular music mastering, as well as motion picture and game soundtracks.”
Maddocks, with 30 years of engineering experience, works on a Mac G5 Dual Core running Pro Tools 7.3. His mastering room is still fairly new, but he has already completed projects for rapper Nash the Kid, MC Nate Nerd and chanteuse Pauline Drossart. A number of soundtrack projects are also in the works.
