Pro Audio News

April 26, 2004

Sadie Final Stage Mastering

FINAL STAGE MASTERING PREPARES FOR
SACD HIGH-RESOLUTION MULTI-CHANNEL AUDIO MASTERING WITH SADiE DSD8 SYSTEM

— Leading Nashville mastering facility cites innovation, quality and support for its decision to team with SADiE when embarking on the new advanced audio frontier —

— New SADiE DSD8 system will become the centerpiece of
new mastering suite planned for later in 2004 —

— The first project to be completed with the SADiE DSD8 is the new
Sam Bush album, King Of My World on Sugar Hill Records —


NAB CONVENTION, LAS VEGAS, NV, April 19, 2004 — Acclaimed Nashville
audio mastering facility Final Stage Mastering has purchased a new SADiE DSD8 multi-channel digital audio workstation. The system, which was delivered in December 2003, will share space with an existing SADiE 24/96 at the facility before it becomes the centerpiece of a new mastering suite, designed by Chris Huston, planned for later this year. The new SADiE DSD8 system was acquired expressly for the purpose of enhancing Final Stage Mastering’s capabilities and services in the domain of high-resolution multi-channel audio, and specifically for the SACD audio format, which has been lauded as one of the purest expressions of recorded music ever achieved.

“The acquisition of the SADiE DSD8 system opens up an entirely new client base for the studio,” comments Randy LeRoy, Chief Engineer at Final Stage Mastering, which opened 12 years ago as part of the Sound Stage Studio Group. “We can now handle the increasingly popular SACD format and the DSD technology that it’s based on. Since the DSD8 can also work with PCM audio, it expands our capabilities in that format, as well.” LeRoy, an enthusiastic fan of SACD’s sonic quality (“I was hooked ever since I worked on the Jerry Douglas album Lookout For Hope,” he recalls), is equally enthused about SADiE systems. “Our past experience with SADiE has shown us that they have a level of customer support that’s unsurpassed in the industry,” he says. “They have treated us like no other company ever has. By choosing the DSD8 system, we can not only move directly into the SACD domain but can do so very smoothly, since we’ll be integrating the DSD8 with the SADiE 24/96 system initially. The first project we completed with the SADiE DSD8 was the new Sam Bush album, King Of My World on Sugar Hill Records. When our new mastering suite opens later in the year, we’ll have one of the first dedicated SACD mastering rooms in the world. We never had a second thought or a second choice: SADiE’s DSD8 was exactly the right solution for our future plans,” LeRoy concludes.