Bad news for Elvis fans: the Sony Studios, New York, where SonyBMG mastered a lot of Elvis back catalog material in DSD (starting in 2002) will be closing their doors on Aug 31, 2007. What these studios produced in these five years were simply some of the best sounding digital Elvis releases we have ever seen (the highlight for me being the "Close Up" box set), so this definitely can't be good news for us, and perhaps the end for DSD or any Elvis reissue program for that matter!


Sony Music Studios NYC, 460 W. 54th St.

150 employees, 8 mix rooms, 8 mastering rooms, 6 audio post for video rooms, 2 stages, video production control, Avid, Smoke, Inferno, DVD authoring, the whole place. A general staff meeting was called June 8 where Sony Music Entertainment COO Tim Bowen broke the bad news. Aug. 31st is the final closing day. Some operations will wind down sooner.

The writing had been on the wall for many years. The studios were Tommy Mottola's baby and had always bled money since it opened in 1992. Tommy kept Sony Japan at arms length convincing them the losses were a cost of doing business. When Sony merged with BMG and Tommy left in 2003, the BMG management team came in and took a hard look. Credit to them for trying to salvage the viabillity of the place for the last 4 years, but corporate wheels turn slowly and they were either unwilling or unable to trim operating budgets and steer the business model toward more profitable work.
All this time, the NYC real estate market continued to go through the ceiling.

Intent to sell the property to a real estate development firm which would lease the Studios to a LLC that incorporated a 3 year work contract with Sony/BMG was announced early March and seemed to be moving forward as late as April 30th. Even though the rooms have been quite busy, the numbers have been real bad and the parties involved came to the conclusion that there was no way anyone was going to turn the beast around.

Sony/BMG will retain a small crew and relocate facilities to handle archives and master distribution.


http://recforums.prosoundweb.com/ind...7875/250617/0/

http://www.amny.com/news/local/am-so...82,print.story

Quelle: www.elvis-collectors.com

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__Elvis - Artist Of The Century__

oh, das ist ja fast ein weltuntergang für elvis-fans, wenn irgendein tonstudio von sonybmg dicht macht


nimmt man halt ein anderes, oder besinnt sich endlich auf wenigere, dafür qualitativ hochwerigere veröffentlichungen.