Emeryville, CA (September 30, 2026)—Steve Schatz is a veteran of post-production, having spent roughly a quarter-century working on film dubbing stages at Universal, Warner Bros., Sony, Disney and Skywalker Sound. When he decided to create his own immersive audio facility in his converted residential garage, Black Lava Studios was born.
Located in Sacramento, Black Lava Studios supports Dolby Atmos music mixing and mastering, film and documentary work, sound design, recording and quality control. To create a workspace based around his workflow, Schatz brought in Advanced Systems Group (ASG), which designed and supplied the studio’s 9.1.6 monitoring environment and advised on speaker placement, room correction, conversion and signal routing.
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For much of the process, Schatz coordinated with Collyer Spreen, Professional Technical Sales Engineer at ASG. “Collyer guided me through many of the intangibles of building a studio; the things you may not think about until you have lived with a room,” said Schatz. “They were incredibly patient. They loaned me equipment and gave me time to listen, work, and develop a real sense of what I wanted.”
To Spreen, however, it was a straightforward way to ensure Schatz was set up with the most appropriate environment to meet his production needs. Spreen explained, “Steve has spent his career in some of the best audio environments in the industry, so he knew exactly what a professional room should feel like. Our job was to help him translate that experience into a studio, work through the options with him, and make sure every part of the monitoring system supported the way he wanted to work.”
As a result, Black Lava Studios now sports 15 Neumann KH 150 loudspeakers, a KH 870 subwoofer and a Trinnov D-MON processor for monitoring control and room optimization. A Digital Audio Denmark AX64 interface accommodates analog, AES, Dante and MADI connections, allowing Schatz to move between sources and workflows without repeatedly reconfiguring the room. A Lynx Studio Hilo converter supports stereo and headphone monitoring.
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The result is a consistent listening environment where Schatz can confidently assess creative choices across different types of projects. An early test came when he mixed a 13-minute documentary directed and edited by Thom Zimny for Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska box set release last year.
“It was a chance to battle-test the room, and it came out beautifully,” said Schatz. “That was an important moment because it showed that the decisions we had made were working, not only technically, but creatively.”
