New York, NY (November 6, 2023)—The Cutting Room has had to respond to New York City’s changing real estate landscape in recent years, and now boasts two locations.
Studio owner David Crafa has long had a West 4th Street location in SoHo, having first opened there in 2006. However, the shift from commercial to residential zoning in this iconic building, which once housed Tower Records’ East Coast flagship store, compelled those studios to change their focus from music to productions for film and television, as well as for podcasts and voice-overs. Meanwhile, Crafa’s search for a new location where music could reign unfettered led to the opening, in 2020, of The Cutting Room Control Room 1, on West 24th Street in the booming Chelsea neighborhood.
The original West 4th Street studios are outfitted with classic Genelec 1031A monitors in each of its three rooms. When needed, the 1031As are rounded up and reconfigured for 5.1 surround mixing in one of the studios, and they are mainstays in Tony Gillis’ mastering suite there. In Control Room 1, The Cutting Room’s premier mixing facility, the soffited Genelec 1234A Smart Active Monitors loom above the 32-channel Solid State Logic Origin console, buttressed by a 7382A Smart Active Subwoofer and a pair of Genelec 8030B monitors.
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“Everything actually worked out very well,” says David MacLeod, The Cutting Room’s general manager. “The zoning and noise issues that arose at the SoHo location compelled us to pivot to other types of productions, such as film and television and podcasts, with a more nine-to-five-type schedule, just as COVID was putting a huge new emphasis on those markets. In a way, the timing couldn’t have been better, and the 1031As are an extremely versatile and flexible speaker that lets us cover a lot of production ground easily.
“It’s interesting: at West 4th Street, the Roc-A-Fella and Interscope gold records came off the wall and were replaced with Netflix and Hulu posters,” he says. “The 1031As made the transition easily.”
