Ardella, a native New Yorker well known and liked in the city’s music-production community and whose engineering and production credits include Ne-Yo, WizKid, A$AP Ferg and Flipp Dinero. Years back she joined founder Sonny Carson in the s5studio enterprise, which moved to its current space in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood in 2020. The facility features three studios (Midnight Blue, Crimson and Black), all decked out with active monitoring from Genelec: a pair of 8331A Smart Active Monitors™ are the near-field solutions for the Crimson Room — the facility’s largest studio — while two 1234A Smart Active Monitors are used for main monitoring there; the Black Room uses the 8320A Smart Active Monitors as near fields; and the newest studio, the Midnight Blue Room, designed primarily by Carson, has a pair of 8331As for close-in listening and a pair of 1238A Smart Active Monitors for mains.

This setup is unique for hip-hop production: “We are doing everything at this point without subwoofers in any room, and it’s blowing people’s minds!” states Ardella. “The Genelec speakers all have incredible low-frequency power. The lows are big, even for hip-hop. But what’s really amazing is that those lows are also so clear and clean. Engineers and artists come here and tell us that they can push the bottom but they can still hear lyrics very clearly, which is very important. With Genelec, we can get the full range of sound and hear everything on the track.” Ardella says the acquisition of subs for some of the studios is planned for, but she and her clients have been completely satisfied with the low-frequency response they’ve been getting from this array of Genelec monitors.

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