Main room at Pricetone Studios, featuring Smart Active Monitors™ from Genelec
Since first entering the recording and pro audio space several years ago, Sean Price has built ever-more sophisticated iterations of Pricetone Studios, from a (literal) home base in the Bay Area to the current 2,000-plus-square-foot facility he designed and largely built himself in Burbank, California. Most recently, that location opened its second room, adding more capacity for the recording, mixing, mastering, ADR and other audio services on which Pricetone Studios has built its success. A thread that’s run consistently throughout Price’s pro-audio narrative is monitoring by Genelec. As soon as he completed his education in 2010, Sean acquired a pair of Genelec 8250A Smart Active Monitors™, which became literally the foundational components of every facility he’s created since then. “In school, we used a ton of different monitors to train on, including Genelec 8240As,” Price recalls. “But the best sounding mixes were the ones I did on the Genelec monitors. When I was just starting out, I knew I needed them.”
Today, Pricetone Studios’ main room is dominated by a massive, 130-inch UHD acoustically transparent screen, giving it the heft the facility needs to contend in Burbank’s competitive audio-for-picture industry. Studio A’s 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos array is composed of the following: Genelec 8361As for the left and right of the L-C-R array; 8350As for the center channel and surrounds, four Genelec 8340As for the overheads, and a pair of 7380A Smart Active Subwoofers – managed by a Genelec 9301A AES/EBU Multichannel Interface, which also expands the 7300 Series Smart subwoofers’ AES/EBU I/O from stereo to eight channels. And Sean’s original Genelec 8250As? Those same monitors are still there, serving as the main stereo pair for the newly opened Studio B. “And they still sound as clear and punchy as they did 10 years ago!”
Both rooms also share another unique Genelec advantage: Genelec Loudspeaker Manager™ (GLM), a sophisticated software platform that automatically manages levels, distance delays, and frequency balances of over 80 networked monitors, all in a single intuitive interface, coupled with Genelec’s AutoCal algorithm, which automatically measures, analyzes, and adjusts monitor settings and relationships.
“Thanks to GLM, I can continue to use all of my Genelec monitors in any configuration,” says Price, who also designed and crafted all of the acoustical treatment paneling used in the studios, including diffusers, in his woodworking shop. “No matter which monitors you want to use, they’ll always be properly calibrated to the room through the GLM software. That’s enabled me to continue to use Genelec monitors for many different applications throughout my career. Monitors I purchased a decade ago still produce consistently excellent results and can still be utilized in future critical listening scenarios.” That capability also significantly helps ROI on his monitoring investment, he adds. “Upgrading by adding new monitors over time never causes existing models to become outdated,” he says. “Of all the equipment and technology I’ve ever bought over the years, Genelec monitors have been one of the few things whose cost has been worth every cent and that have only grown in value.”
