When Cool Brick Studios Owner and Senior Producer Dave Taylor sat down to hear his PhantomFocus™ Monitor System in his new PhantomFocus MixRoom™ for the first time after it was tuned, he recalls, “I swung around and said ‘Holy (expletive)!’ Carl smiled and said, ‘Yeah, everybody says that.’”
Carl Tatz Design has recently installed one of the company’s TEC Award-winning PhantomFocus MixRooms at Cool Brick Studios. Nestled in the shadow of majestic Mount Sopris in Carbondale, Colorado, in the bucolic Aspen Valley, Dave Taylor’s Cool Brick Studios is housed in a famous historic 124-year-old home built in 1900.
Opened in 2011, a recent extensive 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™.
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. Studio designer Carl Tatz explains, “Another unique aspect of our recent immersive rooms that utilize an LCR monitor array is that we now employ a motorized center 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” (viewable here). Proprietary CTD acoustic modules by Auralex® are utilized throughout.
Taylor comments, about his Cool Brick PhantomFocus MixRoom experience, “CTD was a pleasure to work with from concept to completion in a very challenging space in a 1900s historic house.” He continues, “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 colors and textures of music that are in my mind. At last I can really trust what I am hearing!”
Dave Taylor started playing music at nine years old on a Harmony Silvertone guitar. He began producing an artist spotlight series at age 15 and 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 to do professional audio production in the Southeast, Southwest and New York, until opening Cool Brick Studios in 2011, with thousands of tracks produced. 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 specializes in music production, mixing and mastering in all genres as well as post-production sound design for film.
