The Kitchen Mastering

The Kitchen Mastering is thriving on one of the country's most eclectic music centers. Located near Chapel Hill, NC, which gave the music world some of its earliest alternative artists, writers and producers, including Mitch Easter, Don Dixon and, more recently, Squirrel Nut Zippers and Ben Folds Five. The Kitchen Maintains the family values implied in its name.

The facility is owned by couple Brent and Kirsten Lambert, who divide engineering and management duties. Brent attended the University of Miami's pioneering music production and engineering program in the early 1980's and moved to Chapel Hill shortly thereafter. During stints as a session musician and assistant engineer, Lambert was exposed to mastering as an art, a science and a business when he followed some of the records he played on or engineered through that process in L.A. and New York.He realized that mastering was a missing link in Chapel Hill's own development as a recording center.

The Lamberts began the Kitchen in 1991 at home, literally in the kitchen. But the business has grown rapidly and the facility Is now located in a 2000-square-foot building in the Chapel Hill suburb of Carrboro. Designed by John Arthur Design Group, the studio features bass trapping and optimized speaker placement, as well as a mixture of RPG treatments. Abffusors in the front wall, ceiling and side walls to eliminate early reflections, Diffractals along the rear wall and Flutterfreee on the rear side walls to provide even energy distribution around the main listening and client reference position. The combination of the custom trapping and diffusion provides the room with complete sonic accuracy.

The interior design also reflects an eye for detail described as "comfortable yet modern, like a cool living room." The studio has touches like Tibetan rugs and original artwork and photography on its walls. Brent Lambert's mastering suite is warm and intimate, with red floors setting off the custom-made cabinetry.

"The location is fantastic in terms of its comfort and climate, and its proximity to one of the world's most interesting musical communities," says Kirsten Lambert. "But mastering isn't as location-intensive as recording, and we've been getting mastering projects in from all over." Those projects include mastering for a wide range of current hit artists and up-and-comers, including Squirrel Nut Zippers, Southern Culture on the Skids, Athenaeum, Cravin' Melon and Whiskeytown.

The Kitchen holds its own in the upper tier of the mastering market, but it also represents the shifting geographic and cultural emphasis that's been taking place in the music industry over the last decade. "We have a real affinity for all kinds of music and musicians," says Brent Lambert. "And this area truly fosters an ability to bring the best out in all of us."

-Dan Daley

Kitchen's sounds are music to their ears

By Tom Acitelli

In a nondescript white building alongside a gravel parking lo off a side street in Carrboro thrives an internationally known business with client both famous and not-so-famous.

And it all began in a room off a kitchen more than seven years ago. That's where Brent and Kirsten Lambert started their record mastering company, The Kitchen Mastering.

"It all started back in 1991 or '92 in a room off our kitchen, and yo had to walk throughout he kitchen to get to the room," Brent Lambert, 37, said. "My wife and I also used to cook for our clients. That's probably our biggest hobby, cooking. But clients would fly in from out of town and have to walk through the kitchen and see we were working out of the house, and that would kind of put them off, so we moved."

In October 1998, the couple moved the growing company from their Chapel Hill house to the cozy, high-tech offices at 109 Brewer Lane.

The Kitchen Mastering's clientele includes out-of-towners as well as locals, all converge on the Carrboro offices to have Lambert work his magic on their music.

Lambert said mastering a mix - the final product of a recording studio that mastering will eventually make into an album - involves a two-fold approach. First, he evaluates the mix, or studio recording, and polishes the sound, making it more focuses musically. Then he puts it into a format that can be sent to a plant for mass production, making sure the songs are in the right order, the CD stops and starts at the right time, and the songs end when the musicians want them to end.

Basically, mastering is the essential, but often forgotten, link between musicians recording in a studio and a plant mass producing CDs for music store shelves.

"Generally, my job ranges from taking a mix that's really bad and saving it to just polishing it if the mix is pretty good,: Lambert said. "Pop, for instance, should be punchier and loud, but not so for classical or jazz."

Lambert uses an array of high-tech equipment that includes a mastering console, compressors, a high-definition digital converter and a set of extremely accurate mastering speakers to master mixes in a warm sound-proof studio next to the Kitchen Mastering's reception area. Computer screens show the progression of a song, and unwanted parts can be deleted, sort of like erasing a sentence in a word processor.

The Kitchen Mastering offers analog and digital mastering in five different formats: quarter-inch analog, half-inch analog, DAT, ADAT - both types of digital recordings - and the newest Exabyte/DDP.

If such technology is Greek to most folk, it isn't to Lambert, who said he has the trust of many of his clients when it comes to mastering their hard-won musical labors.

"A lot of producers come here because they want my input," Lambert said. "Sometimes they push me in a certain direction. For the most part though, people come to me because they like what I do. They are my repeat customers. Bands in general don't really give me too much input. They're generally not knowledgeable enough to convey what they want technically."

the more than 200- 300 records per year the Kitchen Mastering masters are diverse. The majority are independent pop, but there have also been gospel, jazz, country, and a few classical projects. The producers of these mixes have ranged from Grammy nominees to those working out of their house. More than one-fifth of the Kitchen Mastering's clientele come from major recording labels, Lambert said, such as Carrboro's own Mammoth Records.

Other major labels The Kitchen Mastering has worked with include Mercury, Sony, Rykodisc. Some famous clients include Athenaeum, Cravin' Melon, Superchunk, Whiskeytown, The Connels, Far Too Jones and The Squirrel Nut Zippers, whose gold record for at least 500,000 sales of its album "Perennial favorites" shines from The Kitchen Mastering's reception area wall. Clients have also come from outside the United States, Lambert said, especially from Latin America recently, because some acts from that region have burned up the U.S. charts this year.

"I've worked with some of the top guys - the A-list guys in London and New York - and I think Brent's great," said chapel Hill-based producer Chris Stamey, who said he has worked with Lambert on more that 100 records. "I guess he's got the gear, the know-how, and he's a great musician on top of that, and that's pretty rare. His gear is as good as places you pay $400 an hour for. It's really just exceptional to have such capability in this area. Normally it's in a place where there's millions of people around you."

This "exceptional" business is booming because of work-of-mouth, Lambert said. He said the price of mastering varies, adding that he tries to give discounts to local clients but not to the major labels. It usually takes 15 minutes to an hour to master one song, he added, depending on the quality of the initial mix.

Our biggest advertising is having people see our name on the back of a CD they like," he said.

The business boom will eventually allow Lambert to expand the business into a second mastering studio. Lambert already has a CD replicating business on the side called K-Disc. CD replicating involves duplicating - CDs from the fully mastered CD. Lambert said he started K-disc to protect the masters he has made from inferior duplication somewhere else.

Lambert also has a second office at 205 Weaver Street in Carrboro to handle his Kitchen Media, a growing Internet-related business. The Weaver Street office was actually suppose to be the site of the Kitchen Mastering, he said, but the town would not let him build the proper facilities fro a mastering studio there. For instance, a very high ceiling is needed for the type of mastering studio now on Brewer Lane, he said, and Carrboro has height restrictions on buildings along Weaver Street.

Therefore, Lambert leased the office on Brewer Lane from some friends, and left one of his three associates to tend to the other Carrboro office.

"It worked out well," Lambert, a said of the Brewer Lane offices, "I really do think this area's here to stay as a music town.This is a very diverse area musically. There's a huge pool of talent with very diverse creativity, and not necessarily just rock either."

"Mastering studios have longevity,: added Lambert, a jingle-writer and touring musician after he left Miami and before he found satisfaction and stability in mastering. "Mastering has allowed me to stay in one place. I love it."

Brent Lambert's job is literally thankless: If he does it right, nobody will notice. But such is the mastering engineer's lot.

With his wife, Kirsten, Lambert runs Kitchen Mastering studio, an engine driving the local music scene's growth. Mastering is the final stage in album making - the fine tuning that happens just before a recording is pressed onto compact discs. Lambert likens his job to that of the colorist for a film.

"A colorist looks at the final print and says, "There's too much yellow in that green.'" the soft-spoken Lambert explains. "Or, 'that white looks kind of pink.; There are some boring housekeeping things, like making sure there's the right amount of space between songs. But the creative part is enhancing what's there with subtle corrections."

To demonstrate, Lambert sits at his console and cues a track he's working on from the upcoming Meat Puppets album. He plays the "before" version, pointing out the parts requiring adjustment.

"This was a really well-mixed song to begin with, but the vocals are a little blurry," he says. "The guitar is bleeding into the vocals, and I need to take the frequency where they overlap down a bit. Also, the bass is out of control, It's got too much blossom on the bottom. So here's what I did."

Lambert flips a switch to change over to the "after" version of the song, which suddenly snaps into focus.With only minor tweaking, every instrument sounds clearer and better-defined.

"See, the vocal pops out a lot more now, and it sounds cleaner," he says.

Mastering a song can take as little as 15 minutes or as long as several hours, depending on the quality of the recording. But those subtle touches can determine whether a song gets on the radio.

Quiet, low-key and seemingly content to stay in the background, Lambert has the ideal temperament for the job. His meticulous board work isn't so different from his guitar playing in bands like the Swamis - in both cases, what he leaves out is as important as what he puts in.

In the seven years since the Kitchen opened, Lambert has earned a reputation as someone who can clean up a rough record. His resume includes every regional act of note from Squirrel Nut Zippers on down, plus national acts including Better Than Ezra and Royal Crown Review.

Kitchen offers the same state-of-the-art equipment as mastering studios in the big industry centers, but at a cheaper price compared to New York, Los Angeles or Nashville.

"Brent is a huge asset to the community," says John Plymale, co-producer of the Meat Puppets album. "The alternatives to him are the major-league places in New York or L.A. - which aren't an alternative unless somebody else is paying for it."

With more local acts breaking through nationally with Lambert-mastered projects, Kitchen's profile is rising elsewhere, too. Mix magazine recently included Kitchen in a ranking of the 18 best mastering studios in the United States, a publicity coup that should keep Lambert booked for a while.

"I've got a great job," he says. "I get paid to listen to music all day, which just rocks."

By David Menconi

Master Chef

Brent Lambert's Kitchen Mastering is one of the finest studios of its kind in the Southeast

By Angie Carlson

It wasn't long ago that mastering an audio recording was a huge ordeal: You booked time with one of the handful of trusted mastering engineers, located mostly in New York or Los Angeles, then tucked your boxes of half-inch reel-to-reel tapes under your arm, braved the X-ray/metal detector folks at the airport, and spent the day manually cutting and splicing tape. Finally, you were ready to "cut a record," meaning you left the studio with an actual acetate or direct metal master.

These days, most mastering studios use computers to program their "moves," and the mixes are mastered onto a Sony 1630 cassette, slightly larger than a videotape. While home recording has become affordable, mastering studios (and good mastering engineers) are still a rare breed.

Which makes it all the more extraordinary to have a bona fide mastering facility here in Carrboro. Since'99, Kitchen Mastering studio occupies one side of a white two-story structure on a tiny industrial street,. Passing the building, you'd never dream that it's the preferred mastering studio for bands and producers throughout the Southeast. Owner/engineer Brent Lambert, who started the Kitchen out of his home in the early '90's, has built a state-of-the-art facility with a growing national profile - check out the framed gold and platinum albums for the Squirrel Nut Zippers in the front lobby. While the space is small, the Kitchen exhibits a feng shui sense of order: The furnishings are sleek and upscale, from the blond, wood-and-metal, curved front desk and sage-green sofa, to the mastering room itself, acoustically designed by the prestigious John Arthur Design Group.

I ask Lambent how the Kitchen compares to, for example, Gateway Mastering (owned by legendary mastering engineer Bob Ludwig). "I have the best stuff you can buy, but I don't have, say, every make and model of tape machine manufactured," he says. "I've got one excellent tape machine" (a modified, hot-rodded Ampex ATR 102 1/2 inch).

I quietly crash a mastering session for Austin-native Alejandro Escovedo's forthcoming solo disc. Escovedo, in town for a Go! Rehearsal gig, sits next to producer/engineer Chris Stamey on the gray leather chairs that line the back wall. Holding his session notes, Stamey directs questions and comments to Lambert, who seem s to be literally sculpting the sound. "I carved a little out of the low end, did you like that?" he asks over his shoulder. Everyone likes it. "Hey Chris, is the bass actually panned or is it a stereo effect?" Lambert asks. Stamey looks bemused. "I wouldn't have put stereo ... Oh, I was trying to build a fake orchestra thing: It's acoustic and electric bass," he says. Lambert makes a few adjustments and steps back. "The guitars sound huge," he says, thoroughly enjoying himself.

The mastered tracks seem more immediate that the pre mastered mixes. There's greater clarity and separation - the instruments take on a three-dimensional quality. "Let's say the bass is playing up the neck a lot and it's overlapping with the guitars, or the snare drum has a lot of low midrange frequencies that are interfering with the guitars. I look for those areas that sound cloudy and refine them" Lambert explains.

"It's such a rush to finally hear it (the finished product)," Excovedo says, summing up the mastering experience. "I'm actually excited about my record again."

Lambert's take on his input is modest. Although he's mastered records by Soul Asylum's Dave Pirner, Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire, the Meat Puppets, S.C.O.T.S. and hot Mexican star Anahi, he still insists that, "The most important thing to me when I'm working on something is the bypass switch which lets you listen to the original unmastered recording. I mean, if you hit the bypass and what you've got going on doesn't sound better than the original track, then you're not doing the record any good," he says. Twice, he's gotten demos from young bands and has told them to go back and work on the tape. "I've learned to be pretty diplomatic," he says. "I point out the good things first, but you want to be honest, otherwise they're not going to come back."

A casually dressed, snappy-looking guy in his late 30s, Lambert is an interesting mix of musician and brainy tech wiz. One of the Florida native's earliest memories is of his dad's NASA job in the '60's: The family could watch rocket launches from their Cape Canaveral backyard. When the space program lost its funding, they moved to Miami's Coconut Grove, then still a hip artists' community. His family was anything buy traditional. His mom drove a Firebird and wore bellbottoms: She dug the Doors and played the autoharp. His sister became a professional ballerina, leaving home at 10 and getting picked by Baryshnikov to join the American Ballet Theater when she was 13. His father, besides designing software and computer programs, had a "weird sense of musical taste," Lambert recalls. "He was really into show tunes - Man of La Mancha, those kinds of things - and he loved the Tijuana Brass."

Lambert developed a passion for surfing, competing all throughout his high-school days. One of his surfing buddies had an older brother whose band had an MCA record deal. "They were pretty cool," Lambert says.

This was '74. "The '70's in Miami were, like, party city," he says. "The band had this big house in Miami. We were 'the little kids,' but occasionally they would let us hang," Lambert says. He and his friend would sneak in on nights when the band was out partying and check out the band's digs. "They had this big downstairs rehearsal/recording studio with 2-inch tape machines multi-tracks, the whole deal."

The mixture of guitars, gear and studio equipment - not to mention the pretty girls who hung around the band - seemed like Wonderland to the budding music fan.

"That made a pretty big impression on me, " he admits. "We thought, 'Man, this is what we want to do. Our parents work, but this looks like fun,'" he says.

But after his parents' divorce, he didn't see as much of them, especially his dad. "That had a lot to do with me getting into music, too, I think; I had a lot of angst," he recalls. Although he was only in junior high, he made up his mind to become a recording engineer.

he couldn't have lived in a better place. The University of Miami had one of the first four-year music engineering programs in the country. There was one catch: To be accepted into the program, you had to be an accomplished musician as well, considering you were competing with music majors for a slot. Lambert talked his parents into buying him a guitar and, at 13, started twice-weekly guitar lessons so he'd be accepted into the program. "I busted my ass for four years," he says.

the university had a renowned music program at the time, with a jazz program that spawned such heavy cats as Steve Morse (Dixie Dregs), Pat Metheny and Jaco Pastorius. Alongside his deep Purple and Allman Brothers albums, Lambert got introduced to jazz - from Joe Pass to Miles Davis - through his guitar teacher. "This guy had three jazz guitars and a huge jazz record collection stuffed in a little apartment, he says. "I used to get jobs working as a busboy at restaurants where he his guitar teacher was playing just so I could hear him more," Lambert confesses, laughing. "I'm sure they thought I was the biggest geek."

Accepted in '79, Lambert found the program to be a mixture of Zen discipline and an "old-school British, BBC approach": Two years of math, physics, and electrical engineering, with an emphasis on such basics as microphone technique.

"Everyone that went in there - of course - all they wanted was to sit down at the big console (mixing board) and get to twist knobs," he recalls, "and they did everything to keep you from doing that, which was cool, ya know?" He pauses, "It took me 10 years after I left there to appreciate it.

By '82, with one semester left, Lambert followed his father to North Carolina when his dad took a job with The News & Observer. Feeling at home - Chapel Hill reminded him of a pre-yuppie Coconut Grove - Lambert played in bands and picked up "solo and be-bop jazz gigs" while earning a business management degree. He developed a rep as a player, doing session work at Wes Lachot's studio and crossing paths with people like musician/producer Chris Stamey, with whom he gigged, and future MusicPak partner Tim Harper.

"When he got to town, he definitely had the rep of being the 'brainy jazz guy,'" Harper says. "The word was that Lambert had 'great ears,'" he adds.

At a jazz festival, Lambert met his future wife Kirsten (pronounced Shirsten). A DJ for WXYC, she landed a job at WQDR as the production manager in charge of voice-over spots. He saw a chance to get back into recording.

"I got a loan from my stepfather for $30,000, which was a lot of money for me," he says. "Now I pay that much for one piece of gear, but back then it was a big deal." he started doing radio production - commercials and jingles - in '91, and by '95 was mastering records in their home kitchen.

Lambert, an accomplished hobby chef, kept the Kitchen name after they moved to their present space. "To me, cooking and doing music are very similar," he explains. "In both, you have to learn the basics. You need an understanding of how food works - the ingredients - and you have to have the technique to do certain things. You have to learn everything you can, and then just forget about it and go on intuition.

He compares mixing an album to cooking a wonderful dinner. "When somebody comes in, I look at their project - the ingredients - and then I think, 'How could this sound?' It's like, 'Here's what I've got; here's what it could be,' then you use your technical skills to get there," he says."I think every mastering engineer has an aesthetic, just like every mix guy, every artist."

I ask if it's hard dealing with the expectations of bands and/or producers. "Before I got into mastering, I was really critical of everything - just like young bands are," Lambert admits. "One th ing it the job has taught me is tolerance. You learn to look for the good things.Even in the crappiest, out-of-tune, out-of -time, punk rock thing that comes in, there's always something good."

Idyllic Master of Chapel Hill

As transitory as places like Seattle and Minneapolis eventually proved to be as alt-rock capitals, the seemingly sleepy college town of Chapel Hill, NC, has been able to endure in the shifting milieu of postmodern pop music. Building on a base starting in the early 1980's with producer /artists like Mitch Easter (R.E.M., Let's Active) and Don Dixon as well as established bluegrass and southern gospel acts, the Chapel Hill area burgeoned as an indie-rock mecca, with successful labels like Mammoth Records" producers such as Brian Paulson (Sun Volt), John Custer (Dag) and John Plymale (Clarissa, COC): and hit acts like Squirrel Nut Zippers, and the Ben Folds Five.

Because of its semi-isolation, the development of Chapel Hill's recording industry paralleled that of the project studio; only develop artists and producers but to carry them through their finished products. And also like the project studio world, mastering came in later, almost as an afterthought. It is , however catching up quickly.

The Kitchen Mastering started like other studios, in the home of Brent Lambert and his wife, Kirsten, in the adjacent town of Carrboro. The Miami native attended the University of Miami's pioneering music production and engineering program in the early 1980's and moved to Chapel Hill shortly thereafter. During stints as a session musician and assistant engineer, Lambert was exposed to mastering as an art, a science and a business when he followed the course of some of the records he played on or engineered through that process in L.A. and New York and realized that that was a missing link in Chapel Hill's own development as a recording center. "Everything was moving forward, and the recording community - the studios and the producers - was going to a higher level and requiring mastering of records," he says. "But you had to educate people about what mastering actually was. It wasn't even in the local vocabulary."

Lambert and his wife started their mastering business as B&K Productions from home in 1991; by 1994 a SADiE workstation, Lexicon 300, TC Electronic M5000 and reams of other ancillary gear had turned them into the Kitchen and taken over the entire house, prompting the decision to move to a dedicated facility. The plan called fro two large mastering suites (Lambert would train a second engineer), a surround-capable mix room, and a continuation of the company's multimedia and enhanced -CD authoring services in 4,000 square feet of an 80-year old former mill house. Lambert contacted Miami-based studio designer John Arthur and, in conjunction with area architect/interior designer Cindy Spuria, plans were drawn up three years ago. Then things got interesting.

Bureaucratic Tangles

The city of Carrboro is not unaware of its growing reputation as a music center, but it also wants to maintain its turn-of-the-century charm and has come to place severe limits on how and what can be built. While The Kitchen's plan called for it to maintain the facade of the mill house, it also included significant ground-up construction behind that. "The planning commission had problems with the design from the start," Lambert recalls. "But a lot of it was the strangeness of their own regulations. For instance, they had built the roads higher than the lots, so every new construction had to have a drainage plan. We put one together, requiring tons of new dirt for grading. Then the town finds that the new dirt will kill the trees. So we hire an arborist who confirms that, so we have to throw out the entire civil engineering plan for drainage and start all over. A year later they tell us they liked our original plan better."

Three years' worth of that kind of bureaucratic struggle, combined with a business that had already outgrown their home, convinced the Lamberts to look at an interim solution. Spuria made available to them a smaller, 2,000-square-foot building she owned, and as of late October, a combination of existing, transitory and future equipment had been shifted into the new structure. Arthur says that he had never been asked to do a temporary installation before and now having done it, would not recommend it as part of a normal game plan. "This was necessary because of all the delays this project faced," he says. "It didn't come out of impatience."

Arthur considered a combination of materials and techniques that would allow the Lamberts to maximize what could be transferred to the final facility from the temporary one, which is about 15 percent smaller than the ultimate destination but which has approximately the same rectangular dimensions. An MDF pre-stretched fabric system, RPG Abfussors in the front and sidewalls and ceilings and RPG diffractals around the rear of the room will all migrate to the final facility, which is expected to be ready by late 1999; all that will be left behind, he says, are some lateral sidewall diffractals behind the fabric and the rough framing of the design. The final facility will have its mixing studio and one of its mastering suites set up for surround mixing and mastering; the main mastering suite will have that as an option which can be exercised later. "The key thing was to build a final facility which could accommodate the fact that much of the clientele will be coming from outside the area," says Arthur. "It has to be on a par with facilities in other cities." Aside from acoustical design considerations such as freestanding monitoring and three-way permanent rear-wall diffractals, Arthur poured the double floating concrete slabs of the studio's areas deep enough so that when filled they are at the same level as the rest of the facility, so as to be in compliance with all handicapped-access regulations.

All of the technology will be transferable from the temporary to the final facility, including the Duntech Sovereign 2001 monitors and the Focusrite 300 mastering console (Lambert is having custom consoles spec'd out, as well). But even the temporary structure may yet have a future, if Lambert's assessment of the region's potential is correct. "We may eventually keep it as a budget mastering facility if business continues to grow," he says. "I wish that we didn't need this middle stage to the project. But if that's what it takes, then that's what we do."

by Dan Daley

Kitchen Mastering Selects Chevin A3000 Amps to Power Duntech Sovereign Speakers

Old Lyme, CT: In response to continued growth and a need for a larger room, Kitchen Mastering, one of the leading mastering facilities in the Southeast, recently moved to a new facility in Chapel hill, NC designed by the John Arthur Design Group. Brent Lambert, chief mastering engineer at Kitchen Mastering, says "John (Arthur) did a great job on this room. The low end is so accurate it's scary." John Arthur Design Group has designed studios for Phil Ramone, Crescent Moon and is currently working on a new room for producer Matt Serletic.

Highlighting the room are the Duntech Sovereign speakers, Pacific Microsonic's HDCD Convertor, a custom ATR-102 and two Chevin Research A3000 amplifiers powering the Duntech speakers. "I first heard the Chevins powering the Boxer system at Sony, NYC and at Circle House in Miami. I was immediately impressed with Chevin's high slew-rate and consequently the quickness of their low-end. With today's tendency to mix with so much more information, particularly in the low-end transient area, I welcomed the A3000's fast response. Initially there was some concern regarding the Chevin's ability to handle the Duntechs. Well, they operate beautifully. In f act, the Chevins are a lot softer on the top-end than most solid state amplifiers. They're powerful, quick, and not the least bit brittle sounding."

Lambert's unique mastering style has attracted a loyal and diverse following of producers, recording artists and labels including: Mammoth Records' The Squirrel Nut Zippers, Far Too Jones, and Backsliders, Mercury's Cravin' Melon, and Atlantic's Athenaeum to name a few.

Kitchen Mastering offers both digital and analog mastering from a collection of notable equipment.

Placed in Audio Media Magazine

"Best product support on the planet... Period!"
--Brent Lambert

You know Brent as the owner of The Kitchen Mastering. You can hear his mastering and editing talent behind such artists as The Squirrel Nut Zippers, Cravin' Melon, and The Gladhands.

We know Brent as a friend and SADiE owner for five years. He really hammers his SADiE and we get great feature ideas from him. Brent works on a wide variety of music and we are proud to be a part of the great sound associated with his facility.

We work hard to keep all our customers satisfied, but don't take our word for it - ask a SADiE owner!