When it came time to put together his own mixing and mastering space, two-time GRAMMY-winning mastering engineer Emerson Mancini was sure of two things: one, that it was going to be an Atmos room, and two, that the sound would be powered by an array of his favorite studio monitors, the Focal Solo6s.
Thus emerged The Juniper Room, a state-of-the-art immersive mixing/mastering studio in Juniper Hills, California, built by Emerson and Gold-certified producer/mixer/engineer Dajaun Martineau.
We sat down with Emerson and Dajaun recently to learn about the process of building the studio, why the Focal Solo6s were Emerson’s top pick, what it’s been like working with the team at Vintage King, and the other mastering and mixing tools that are key to their process.
Tell us about the studio and what your vision was for it.
Emerson: The making of The Juniper Room has been a pretty long journey. I bought these speakers from y’all fine people at Vintage King coming up on four years ago. Due to logistics, every time I had tried to put the room together somewhere, it just ended up not making sense, until now. I finally got to put this amazing room together at my own house up in the mountains in Juniper Hills, and it's been a dream deferred, but it’s finally come true.
The goal was always to create an Atmos room and use it for immersive mixing and mastering. When Atmos first started, it was all about mixing; people didn't really know if mastering was going to get involved, but I knew that I wanted to put an Atmos room together for mastering, and I knew for sure that I wanted it to be an exclusively Focal room, so that was the vision, and we did get there.
Take us through the process of putting the space together.
Dajaun: The process was interesting because it was set up in a house, so we were walking into a space that already exists. It's not like we got to design the building or go in and build something acoustically perfect.
There were two rooms side by side, and I remember going up there and trying to figure out how to make it work because Atmos has such precise specifications. While we were doing the dimensions, I remember walking between the doors of the two rooms and calling Em over. We stood between these two rooms and said, “What if there wasn’t a wall here?” We thought that was impossible, so we got back to figuring it out. Two days later, Em called me and said, “Hey, so the wall is gone.”
Emerson: [Laughs] I mean, it wasn't two days, but it was fast. We really did get lucky with this room. We set up stereo speakers, a laptop on the box that the sub was in, and just moved the speakers around and listened to what the room wanted to tell us. I think each of us had a different idea of what the room was, which way it was going to face, what it was going to look like, and what it was going to sound like, and then the way it ended up happening was not at all what either of us was imagining. It was really a great case of ‘what does the room want to be,’ and we worked around that.
Dajaun: After we got rid of that first barrier, literally, we did measurements on the room. Normally, when you're designing a room, the biggest thing you always run into is low-end issues. With the magical new dimensions that we had, we ended up with no issues below 100 Hz, and that drastically changed what we could get away with in the room. Suddenly, we were only dealing with really basic issues like reflections. We didn't have to deal with any tuned membranes, serious bass traps, or anything like that, so we were able to dive in way faster.
What drew you to the Focal Solo6 studio monitors?
Emerson: I cut my teeth mastering on Focals. I spent seven years in New York under Dave Kutch at The Mastering Palace, working with a lot of different Focals, and the ones I loved most out of all of the ones that came in and out of those rooms were the Solo6s.
I remember hearing music I thought I knew on them for the first time and realizing I didn't know what excellence sounded like yet. I went through all of my 10,000 hours, really understanding the difference between volume and compression, learning the speakers, learning my ears, and then learning my mind.
When I had the opportunity to build my own room, I knew I would get the Solo6s – there was no question in my mind. I have been dreaming of the day I could put as many Solo 6s as possible in one room for a long time! [Laughs] I converted Dajaun to them as well.
Dajaun: Yeah, very much so. I remember we were having dinner one night, and Em was like, “So, what monitors have you been working on lately?” I told him, and he very politely said, “Oh, okay. You should take a pair of mine home with you tonight and go listen to your mixes again.”
We’d been working together for a while at that point, and I was like, “Are my mixes bad?!” [Laughs] So I took them home and listened and, at first, I thought they were so different from what I was used to. Over the course of the next few weeks, I just started hearing everything so differently. Em, what is it you always say about distortion in the Focals?
Emerson: If your track is even thinking about distorting, the Focals will tell you. [Laughs] If there is an iota of a concept that distortion might possibly happen at some point in the future, they will tell you.
They're very honest and very accurate, and I know that doesn't always necessarily make them the most fun for mix engineers, but as a mastering engineer, that is the gold standard for what I need.
Dajaun: After working with them for a few weeks, I entered this phase, for the first time ever in my career, where I could trust my ears more than my eyes. Before, I'd always be mixing and checking the meters, and if there was a red light somewhere, I’d think that I had to go fix things because I might not be hearing something.
Em got me to a level where I can trust my ears and ignore meters; if the meters are going red, that's fine because if you don't hear it on the Focals, it's not real. That has made my masters and mixes so much better because I can trust them. I went out and bought my own pair too because I couldn't live without them.
Tell us a little more about how the Focals are set up.
Emerson: We've got a 7.1.4 setup, so we've got four Solo6s on the ceiling, seven at ear level, and we've got the huge Focal sub. I had a smaller CMS sub that I was using in my previous setup with different midfields, and I still love that sub, but now, with the new setup, I've got a room that's large enough to accommodate a very large sub, and it sounds gorgeous in there. I was shocked at how quickly we got it to sound incredible; I expected there to be so much more resistance.
I'm using the Grace Design m908 monitor controller as sort of the brain for the monitoring system, and now that we've figured it out, I can't imagine having done it any other way; it’s so versatile.
I’ve got two computers, and at the touch of a button, I can switch between my stereo mastering coming out of the PC and the Mac, and we have the Atmos as well. You can switch between the stereo and the sub, and it intelligently chooses what gets fed to the sub and what stays on the monitors. In the Atmos setup, the sub is its own discrete channel. We’ve also got a bit of a movie theater setup and the stereo setup, and we can switch between everything at a glance.
Setting up time delays was also really easy; there’s EQ… everything that you would imagine you’d need a much more complex system for; the Grace will do it for you. I was expecting to hit a wall where we would need another box for tuning or for some type of calibration, and we just never hit that wall.
The conversion in the box is gorgeous as well. After years of using a bunch of different equipment, I wish I had spent my whole career using the Grace instead of other things. We've reached excellence! [Laughs]
How easy or difficult was it to tailor the Focals to your space?
Emerson: I think getting the speakers on the ceiling was definitely the most challenging element of putting the room together.
Dajaun: Yeah, agreed. I don't even know if it was necessarily challenging physically as much as it was challenging mentally to just be like, “Hey, let's take this couple-of-thousand-dollar speaker and just stick it to the roof!” [Laughs]
Emerson: There was an emotional moment. We were both hanging on to the speaker, we've screwed it into the mount, and we know that the mount is screwed into the ceiling joist – we've hung off of the ceiling joist and we know that it can definitely hold the weight of the speaker – but we were still afraid to let the speaker go.
Dajaun: We had all four hands on the speaker, and were like, “Should we let go now? You let go! No, you let go.” [Laughs]
Emerson: [Laughs] That was a leap of faith!
How do mixes and masters on the Focal Solo6 monitors translate to other systems?
Emerson: I will hear things on the Focals that won't be heard on any other system. I’m listening at the highest sensitivity level for distortion, for artifacts that might appear, for loudness, and I know that if it sounds good on those speakers, I’m good.
Sometimes, if I'm really worried about something, I will go check it in a car, on other speakers, or on AirPods, just to double-check. But I always know that when I'm doing that, it's just an exercise in nervousness or self-doubt because I've never had the experience of thinking something sounds perfect on the Focals and then listening to it on earbuds and going, “I don't like this. I should make a change.” So that's one of my other favorite things about having the Focal setup – it makes translation a no-brainer. If it works in the room, it's going to work anywhere else.
Dajaun: I fully agree. I would say the thing that affected my mixing and made it a lot better is that when you're listening on Focals, the soundstage is so much more precise. You have a full spectrum, and you can place things in more detail; if you have two things stepping on each other, you can just move them – you almost have more points of resolution in your pan. Having the ability to declutter your mixes by giving everything its own place is great and even when you listen on a system that’s less good, the mix does sound clearer and better overall.
As consumer immersive audio devices get better, it will be an exciting time for everyone.
Emerson: That's what's so exciting about Atmos specifically, the versatility and the foldability of the format. I think the reason it has survived this long, and will survive long term where all of the previous attempts at immersive and surround systems have failed, is that the format itself is so adaptable that you can really put it anywhere and it will work.
Folding into binaural for earbuds, for example, has changed the game because now people can really hear a fully immersive mix without having to spend too much money. If you experience it and you like it, it'll be something that you care about. It’s really beautiful to see the industry moving forward together. I, personally, have watched so many attempts fail, so to see this one succeed is really great.
Atmos has also given artists and engineers the ability to take a step back and think more about shape, size, arrangement, and placement rather than just being worried about the competitive loudness portion of the game, which is the least interesting part. The more we get into immersive audio, the more we're going to get back into talking about art instead of loudness, and that's what's really exciting.
What is it like working with Daniel Ackerman and the team at Vintage King?
Emerson: Every time I have an emergency, I just call Daniel, and he fixes it for me. Sometimes I’m like, “I need these things to talk to each other and here are my options. What have you got for me?” It's really great to be able to talk to people who are so willing to come up with a solution for you, so it's been a pleasure! I don't call anybody else anymore; I can't remember the last time I did.
Tell us about some of your favorite mastering gear from your studio.
Emerson: I’ve talked about the Grace already, so that's definitely my favorite piece of hardware that I've got in the room, aside from the Focals, of course. Even though I've been mastering in the box for about 11 years now, I came up in an analog world, so I still think about signal flow and gain staging in an analog way; I just use digital tools in the same manner.
From that perspective, I have to say, no matter how hard I try to replace iZotope’s Ozone in my setup, I haven't done it yet, and the Ozone collection has been my go-to for 15 years now, and it remains in my toolbox on a daily basis. I've got nothing but love for my friends over at iZotope and Native Instruments.
Dajaun: I'm going to stick with iZotope too because they're great, but I'm more on the RX side of things – it’s my go-to tool for everything. The first time I used RX was probably something like 20 years ago. I was tracking a vocal in an apartment, and a bus drove by; I tried out RX, and I was just like, “I literally had a bus drive through my track, and I was able to get it out.”
It’s an insane tool for cleaning out noises, but over the last few years, I've started to get creative with it, which is interesting because I always thought of it as a corrective tool. I've started to get really into the idea of: “What can I do to reshape a vocal or even a full track?” and in the case of mastering, I’m thinking of the song in four bands – low, low-mids, mid, and high end – rather than being like, “the kick drum is doing this or the vocal is doing this”. It’s just one waveform. How can I reshape that waveform to do what I want it to do?
iZotope’s RX really lets me look at exactly what the speaker is going to be doing, and you can take the pencil tool and draw stuff in and make it do exactly what you think is in your brain. Artistically, there’s something special there, and I think you're going to see people doing that in the future.
What's a typical day at work like for you?
Dajaun: I try to get the admin out of the way first. Then, once I actually get to work, the first thing I'll do is compile a list of all of the things that I'm going to be working on that day and listen to it, just to get my ear on everything. I'm a firm believer that your hearing changes every day, so you have to retrain yourself each day to be like, “Okay, this is how I'm consuming audio today. Let me try and use that as a baseline.”
Then, I organize the projects that I have to work on that day, making a sort of mental to-do list. I'll start with the easiest thing first because I'm a human being who needs rewards mentally to just be like, “I can successfully do this”, and then I'll dive into some harder stuff. And then, when everything starts sounding horrible to me, that's when I know it's lunchtime because I become an emotional being again. [Laughs] I go eat some stuff, come back, and it all sounds good again.
Things can be wildly variable because one day I'll just be here at my place doing some prep work or at Em’s place finalizing things, and then I also spend some time out in the wild with artists. I just helped build an orchestral show with St. Vincent, so I flew to Pennsylvania and did rehearsals for that. I also just came back from the Special Olympics with Demi Lovato, and obviously, those days are very different, where it's just pure chaos, but it still always ends up being about the same; you have to have your own routine, even when it's chaos.
Emerson: I also like to start off the day with a little bit of admin because my brain is all over the place, so if I don't have a system that keeps me organized, I don't know what's happening. I remind myself of what's on the horizon for the week and what I'm expecting to get done today, and set up all the sessions.
If I'm working on an album, I’ll pull up any references that the artist wants me to keep in mind. If I've done any previous work with that artist, I'll pull that up, especially if it's recent. If it's from a couple of years ago, I'll take it with a grain of salt because things just get louder so quickly, and something from three years ago probably isn't going to sound loud enough anymore. But I do like to keep a frame of reference, especially if it's an artist or a client that I've worked with a lot.
It's so funny how different people are, though, because I always start with the hardest thing first, so if I have a day where I have an album or a couple of singles to master, and then I've got easier stuff like revisions, or running alternate passes, I always do them in the order from hardest to least hard.
Dajaun: I didn't know that about you.
Emerson: Yeah, I didn't know that about you either. It’s so interesting how people will organize things differently!
Dajaun: Yeah, I need a win before I can try something hard. [Laughs]
Emerson: I need to know I'm going somewhere easy. [Laughs] I’ve got to land softly, so I'm going to start at the top of the mountain, and then I'm going to fall my way down.
Are you working on any exciting projects right now that you're able to talk about?
Emerson: There are a few exciting things I can’t talk about, but what I can talk about is Sueco’s single “Rearranging Scars” that came out for the Scream 7 original motion picture soundtrack. It’s always really fun working with Sueco, but it was even cooler to realize what the single was for.
Dajaun: I just wrapped up mastering four songs for Meghan Trainor’s most recent release, Toy With Me, and I've been working for the last year with Jessia on a handful of projects. I'm working on her acoustic EP right now, and I don't know if it's been announced yet, but I just started working on mixes for her next project, all of which are going to be mixed in the Juniper Room very soon. I'm very excited to be working on the stereo and Atmos mixes for that, now that the room is up and running!
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