30 Years / 30 Studios: Dimension Sound Studios

Producer/engineer/mixer/studio owner Dan Cardinal had been splitting his time as a live sound engineer on tour and working on albums in studios when he, and two of his engineer friends, heard about an abandoned studio in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. When they visited the space, which had been built in the early ‘70s, they found that it was in need of some TLC, but the sonic foundation was solid. 

Dimension Sound Studios version 2.0 opened in 2011 and has since hosted a steady stream of artists from the local music community, particularly those who like to get in a studio and record while performing together.

For our 30th Anniversary interview series, Dan sat down with us recently to talk about restoring the old studio, working with Vintage King to meet his gear needs over the years, and how the changes in the industry have impacted his workflow.

What was your vision for Dimension Sound Studios when you first started? 

When we first saw this place, it wasn't really in use as a studio anymore. There was an old PA system and a drum set, and bands would pay to come in for the evening, drink beer, and rehearse. The floor was pretty ripped up, and people had been chain-smoking for decades in this place so there was kind of a yellow tinge to everything, but we figured the bones were good. 

The studio is incredibly isolated from the outside world—we’re in Boston, and there's an intersection right beyond the walls of two of the iso rooms. The original designers had soundproofed it in such a way that even if an ambulance goes by, you would have no idea. So it's an incredibly quiet space for where it is, which is a huge asset. I work on a lot of acoustic music and the playing can be very quiet, so the microphones are really cranked up and that's where you would normally start to hear the surrounding environment but there's none of that here. 

There was one iso booth in the original space that was big enough for a vocal or upright bass, so we kept that and then added two more booths: one is eight by eight, and I can do a full drum setup in it, and the other is four by eight, which is mostly for guitar amps, but also sometimes functions as a vocal booth. Being able to really isolate the drums and then baffle the rest of the band in the live room gives me great isolation. Everyone's playing together, everyone can see each other, and it feels very live and very real, but it's also mixable, which is very helpful.

The vision was to keep this historic space intact as much as possible. There is a vibe here and people like walking into a space that feels lived in. We didn’t want to just blast it out and make it a brand-new, squeaky-clean studio; we tried to preserve as much as we could.

Tell us about some of the memorable artists you’ve worked with at the studio.

I’ve worked with the folk artist Josh Ritter in the studio, and also on the road a lot; before opening the studio I was his touring sound engineer and he’s really great—he's played venues like the Ryman and the Fillmore, and he’s put out more than ten albums. We’ve worked together for a long time. Some of the songs on his most recent album "Spectral Lines" were recorded at Dimension. 

I’ve made several records with the indie folk band Darlingside. We all met shortly before I produced and engineered their album "Birds Say" in 2015. Since then, they’ve become some of my best friends. We work together on lots of different projects now, and we talk about the record-making process (and gear) a lot. 

I also recently worked with a folk artist named Jim Kweskin, who came up around the time of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul and Mary; he was right in there with the ‘60s folk music scene, the peace-love, anti-war songs era, playing a lot of traditional American folk music. We just finished a full-length, 18-song album of duets with female singers. They tracked it all live, and it was the most crowded the studio's ever been! It was a nine-piece acoustic band, but there were also a lot of people hanging out and watching the sessions and recording video; there were people in every little nook and cranny, and I was trying to do my job, but I was also trying to keep people happy. [Laughs] It was stressful, but it was also really awesome to be a part of that.

How did you first become aware of Vintage King and what was your first experience working with us?

I got into audio recording in high school when I wrote and recorded an album of original songs my senior year for class credit as an ‘independent study’; I immediately knew that it was what I wanted to do for a career. So, I guess I started collecting gear at around 16 or 17 years old, knowing that if I kept working at it, eventually I'd have enough equipment for a ‘real studio’. 

Early on, I wasn't aware of Vintage King because I wasn't buying pro-level equipment yet, so at that time it was mostly gear catalogs. Later, I became aware that there is a huge difference between equipment that is aimed at hobbyists—like the four-track Yamaha MiniDisc recorder I used for my high school project—and equipment made for people who record professionally. Once I became aware of pro-level equipment, I decided that I was only going to buy something that I could potentially own for the rest of my life; I wasn't going to buy any interim pieces that would last me a few years and then make me want to upgrade to something else. I wanted all the equipment I was using to be at the same level, whether it was monitors, preamps, mics, outboard processors, converters, or whatever it may be. Once I started buying real ‘big boy’ equipment, I learned that there are different places to get that, with Vintage King being the main one. 

What are some of your favorite pieces of gear that you have purchased from Vintage King?

I'm a big fan of BAE—I have eight channels of their 1073MPF rack-mount mic preamps and a pair of their 10DCF compressors which have been on my mix bus for about a decade; I use BAE gear every day. I also bought two of the UnderTone Audio MPDI-4 mic preamps. Eric Valentine is great—he's so specific about what he wants, and he's willing to spend the time developing equipment for himself and then share it with other people. 

I also have four channels of API 512c preamps, and a Buzz Audio QSP-20 four-channel preamp, which is very transparent. It's got a ton of gain so it’s great with ribbon mics; I've got a stereo Royer SF-12 that I like to use as a room mic a lot, but it's not the active version so it needs a lot of gain. The fact that the Buzz Audio preamps can do 70 dB of gain without really generating much noise makes them very useful. I also have a pair of Ampex 351 preamps from the original Dimension 1.0, which were recently rebuilt by Electric & Co. in Austin and they look and sound amazing. Aside from the Ampex preamps, which are from the ‘60s, I think that most of these preamps were purchased from Vintage King. 

I bought a Spectra 1964 V610 compressor from Vintage King. I'd been wanting one for a while, after learning that Dave Cobb uses them regularly, so when I saw it show up on the VK used list I was like, “I'm going to get this!” It took me at least six months to really understand it because it's a very different thing—it's got this extremely fast peak limiter at the front, a whole separate compression circuit, there's no attack time, and there are two different thresholds depending on what you're doing. I really had to experiment and try it on different things but now that I understand what it does, it's a very powerful tool. I use it mostly on drums, as a ‘trash mic’ channel during recording, and as a mono drum parallel in mixing.  

One of the other things I got from VK that I really love is a four-channel analog reverb called the Springtime by IGS Audio. It has two short springs as a pair and two long springs as a pair, so essentially I've got two stereo outboard analog reverbs that I mix through all the time. I'll even use them as reverbs for headphone mixes during tracking just because they sound so beautiful. It's whisper quiet, very lush, and very three-dimensional; I use it on almost every record I mix in some way. The short pair is incredible for vocals, and the long pair is more of an instrument thickener. I think of it as a resonance machine of sorts, where everything just vibrates a little more; you don't feel the reverb like a physical space, but everything just feels a little bit richer. I love that piece and I'm really glad that I bought it. They even did a custom faceplate color for me!

Around 2016, I bought a turnkey Pro Tools rig from Vintage King that included a 32-channel Apogee Symphony I/O Mk II, which is the center of the studio; the computer, at the time, was a Trash Can Mac Pro in a Sonnet chassis with a Pro Tools HDX card and two UAD OCTO PCIe cards, and that all came pre-assembled from Vintage King. I gave them my login and password information and they basically pre-built the rig for me, including the plug-ins. 

I also bought an Avid S3 control surface, which I use every day. In the previous version of the studio, we had an old Digidesign Procontrol with 16 faders, which was very rudimentary and was also a very inefficient use of space. At a certain point, Digidesign became Avid and they stopped supporting it and it was like, if we update one more thing on this computer then the Procontrol is essentially dead, so we were kind of trapped in that time period. When I switched to the Apogee/HDX/S3 rig, everything just jumped into the present and I was like, “Oh, this is how most people are working. This is amazing!” [Laughs]

How has Vintage King helped you with gear selection, purchasing, and servicing in the past?

When I was figuring out the new HDX rig, I spent some time with my sales rep discussing what I needed; I also had a very small window to install everything because I had a busy session schedule and needed to be able to switch out the system in a day or two. I bought the turnkey service and it all arrived set up and ready: the Mac operating system, the correct version of Pro Tools, and the S3 software (Eucon), my plug-ins were all already on there, and that probably saved me a week!

So whatever the cost was for that, on top of the rig, was absolutely worth it. It was huge for me, as a small business owner, to be able to just switch over my entire system in two days and get right back to work. Canceling sessions at the last minute is not professional, so it was very helpful to have VK set the system up for me and have it drop right in.

I do need to send my S3 in for service because I've got a couple of sticky faders and a few of the buttons I use the most are cracking a bit, so they'll just have to replace those, but I haven't really had any other service issues so far.  

What sets Vintage King apart from other pro audio gear companies?

I think it's the knowledge and the access to smaller brand manufacturers, which I like. UnderTone Audio, for example, is a pretty small company; Buzz Audio is small; I've got two Wunder Audio CM7s and they’re the best-sounding capture I have here, especially in stereo. I also have two Wunder Allotrope EQs in my 500 rack, which sound amazing.   

I've bought things from other dealers and I'm sure they’re good but there's one extremely well-known dealer that obnoxiously follows up on trivial purchases and insists on sending you candy… it just feels very corporate and patronizing, getting emails out of the blue, like we're trying to be friends. When you're going to spend thousands of dollars on something, the smarmy salesman vibe just doesn't cut it—you’ve already lost me. 

The folks at Vintage King seem like serious people; the services and conversations feel real and helpful. Even if it turns out that I didn't actually buy something, it just doesn’t seem like the transactional fake friendship thing. So that's my main thing—Vintage King is about serious people, a wealth of knowledge, great brands, and great advice.

What sets your studio apart from other recording spaces?

I think a lot of artists come here because they want to record as a group playing simultaneously. Even if there’s some overdubbing, the core of the song was played together and that feels different than building up a song one part at a time because it’s a two-way conversation. As a producer, I always try to capture at least two people playing together whenever possible. There's good isolation and good sightlines here, people feel like they can do what they do when they're playing in very close proximity, but then get the isolation that makes the record sound better because of what you're able to do in mixing. 

Some projects aren’t as concerned about bleed, so they’ll set up really close to each other because it feels more natural to play that way. Even my live room is really dead, so nothing ever gets washed out and you can get some really nice distance between the instruments and the mics for a recording with lots of depth. In mixing, it lets me place things in the front-to-back plane, not just the left-to-right plane.  

I also feel like there's some spillover from my time working in live sound—when the artist is playing a show, there's an immediacy and a lot of pressure to get it right in the moment. During these live tracking sessions in the studio, it feels a lot more like a performance, or a very small concert, where you don't want to mess up—I don't want to be the one to ruin a take because of some technical thing! The skill set that I developed while touring carries over and applies to the way that I make records, which is to respect what is happening, capture it, and stay out of the way. 

How has the industry changed since you first opened your doors and how has your studio adapted to those changes?

One thing I've noticed, especially since the pandemic, is that more people are self-recording some parts of their albums. I have a lot of clients that now have the ability to record themselves pretty well, so it's like, “If we have this fixed budget of, let’s say, $10,000, let’s use my studio for the things that it's good for, stuff that you can't do at home. Then, off the clock, work on your backing vocals or your guitar overdubs where you’re not thinking of how much money you’re spending per hour in the studio, especially if you’re not sure exactly what you want to do yet.” 

Clients will send me stuff to re-amp as well since I’ve got some nice vintage Fender, Vox, and Gretsch amps. As long as there is a good DI signal, I can re-amp in my space, using my pedal collection, room mics, and some outboard gear. And it’s not just guitars and basses, anything can get the re-amp treatment. There have been some great happy accidents while sending random tracks in a session into a re-amping chain. 

Once they're ready, the client will come back in and we’ll use the studio for mixing, with my ATC monitors and all my outboard gear patched as hardware inserts. Writing automation with the S3 is incredibly fast, and I’ll print mixes through my Otari MX-5050 tape machine and back into Pro Tools. It’s really about using the budget in the best way possible. 

I also offer mastering now, which is something I kind of forced myself into, especially during the pandemic. I respect the craft of mastering, but I have had some bad experiences where the detail work that was done with the client in mixing was negated by the pursuit of loudness. So I got into mastering with a real focus on maintaining the dynamic experience but getting things to the level where they are competitive for streaming. I feel like if I can carry the project all the way through to the end, there's more consistency and we’re staying truer to the artist's vision. Now that we're in the streaming era and streaming services are normalizing things at a much lower level than the CD era, there's really no reason to smash the masters unless smashed is the sound you’re going for, which for me is not usually the case. 

I guess streaming has been good for something at least.

Yeah! Also, there’s lossless streaming as an option, which is nice. The fact that we're getting into high-res streaming now is the primary reason I committed to 96 kHz when I bought that new HDX rig from Vintage King. So it's really great that hi-res is available if you want to have that listening experience, but it would be great if the artist compensation could also get there and people could appreciate art in such a way that they were willing to pay for it, otherwise, it’s just not sustainable. It’s a huge bummer that a company like Spotify can have such dominance over the market and be worth billions of dollars and think that they are the product. Spotify is the gateway to music. It’s like, “You are successful because of the work of artists, and you are just devaluing, daily, the thing that is making you successful.”

Anytime I listen to an album more than once or twice, I'll buy that album from the artist, directly if possible, because I can't justify for myself the idea that I'm getting paid to do this thing that I love to do, but they’re not; I have to put my money where my mouth is. 

Looking back, what are you most proud of or excited about in terms of your studio’s history?

I feel lucky to be in a place that was essentially one of the first commercial studios in Boston—it opened around 1974. In terms of the studio’s history, George Thorogood made three albums here, including his giant hit "Bad To The Bone" in 1981; in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Aerosmith did some recording here; Pat Metheny was teaching at Berklee and would come through to record when he could. It was the spot for musicians in the ‘70s and ‘80s who were in Boston and wanted to do some professional recording. Rumor has it that Michael Jackson did some sessions here—some of the people who worked here back in the day said that Michael Jackson is one of the big names that came through the studio.

A subset of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with the conductor Gunther Schuller, did a sort of chamber ensemble thing where he would be standing at the top of the staircase, conducting, and the musicians would be fanned out in front of him—you could get maybe 20 or 25 players in here at once. 

Dimension 1.0 and the business that I've built are really two separate things; there's not a lot of crossover. I have worked with people who have experienced both versions of the studio and it's fun and interesting to pick their brains about what it was like and the equipment they were using. It's cool to learn more about the history and to know that I'm in a space where thousands of albums have been made. 

I’ve kept some of the historical parts, along with a very modern Pro Tools system, so it’s kind of the best of both worlds. It doesn't look like a brand-new studio, it looks like a very lived-in space. The live room floor is kind of sloping because the building has settled over time and if you wheel the piano across the room, it kind of dips. [Laughs] The floor here in the control room is a bit creaky in spots, and there are other quirky things about the space that people find endearing.

What are your plans for the future of your studio?

I feel like it took me 10 years to really get the studio how I wanted it to be, with the overall design, aesthetic, and equipment—it's been a slow process of buying one really nice piece of gear and adding to it—and right around the end of 2019 or early 2020, I was like, “Alright, I think I'm done, the studio's good. I think I'm just going to cruise with this for a while.” And then the pandemic happened. I had about a 60-70% drop in bookings, everything was suddenly remote, and it was mostly mixing. So I had just arrived at a great place, technically, and then the bottom fell out. Honestly, I just want to run a sustainable business; I don't have any large goals for the space, like some major renovation or equipment purchase. Just running a stable, functioning studio, in the current music industry, would be a success.  

If things go really well, I would consider another flagship microphone. I've always wanted a 251, because I feel like it's at the opposite end of the 47; it's much more airy and hi-fi and beautiful and sparkling, and the 47 is a little more crunchy and midrange-y. So long term, I would love to own a 251 or at least a serious clone. I just upgraded the studio computer this summer, so I can probably run this new M2 Mac Studio with my HDX rig for another five to eight years. 

I know there are much larger studios, even here in Boston, that have a staff, like a tech person, a studio manager, someone who does accounting, lots of interns… I literally do 100% of everything here. I'm doing cleaning and accounting and invoicing; sending things out for repairs; and I'm the assistant on any sessions with outside engineers. It's just me, so staying afloat always feels like a small victory and if I'm able to grow my business, that’s even better. But right now, I just want to keep doing what I'm doing. 

If you’re interested in purchasing any of the gear mentioned in this blog, contact a Vintage King Audio Consultant via email or by phone at 866.644.0160.