Whitfield Street Mastering upgrades with customised Crookwood 5.1 desk

Whitfield Street Studios, acquired by Robin Millar in March, has revamped its mastering facilities, the first results of an ongoing renovation and upgrade programme.
As well as providing some unique new services, Whitfield Street Mastering offers one of Europe’s few dedicated 5.1 rooms featuring a customised and unique Crookwood mastering console. Whitfield Street can handle mastering to all surround formats including SACD and DVD in addition to stereo, CD and vinyl mastering, extensive copyroom facilities, high sample rate converters for archiving and an FTP server allowing clients to upload their projects via the internet for same-day mastering.
Whitfield Street’s 5.1 room, permanently set up to handle all audio formats, owes much of its efficiency and flexibility to the Crookwood mastering console designed in conjunction with the facility’s experienced 5.1 engineer Mazen Murad. Murad worked with Crookwood to design a desk that would facilitate mastering stereo and surround, SACD, DVD, CD and vinyl, and could also be used for Upmixing. It is the first desk in the UK to feature Crookwood’s next-generation Igloo technology, which replaces the Mastering Bricks range of consoles.
"The Crookwood desk functions as both an analogue and digital router," said Murad. "Recordings can be sent through any EQ or compressor by the push of a button without the need to plug in cables, so the sound is very clean. Although it’s great to have full surround mixes, not everyone has the budget to mix to 5.1. But here we are able to create credible 5.1 masters from stems or by Upmixing from a stereo source. I can use the desk to create a 5.1 mix from a few separate components such as backing vocals, strings etc, and it can also be used for fine-tuning mixes - for example for turning up a lead vocal by a few dB. With budgets stripped right back, it’s important to find a way of helping clients creatively, to save them time and money."
(GB)