Music Gear & Audio Equipment

The Cat Mansion has a great selection of carefully curated, world-class microphones, outboard gear, and plug-ins to ensure your song, album, voiceover, or video sounds absolutely fantastic. The studio space is fully acoustically treated for critical listening and clean recording, and the Yamaha HS8 monitors are precisely calibrated with the IK ARC system to ensure everything translates beautifully to the real world.

Why choose analog or digital when you can have the best of both worlds? The Cat Mansion incorporates SSL and Audient preamps, SSL and Distressor compressors, and an SSL Fusion Analog Master Processor to achieve a professional, big studio sound. All permanent connections are cabled exclusively with Mogami Gold, ensuring noise-free production. Switchcraft patch bays and inputs, and a fully balanced DI path into premium AD/DA via a Ferrofish Pulse 16 AD/DA converter and an Audient iD44 MKII interface deliver the cleanest sound quality and conversion possible. Once in the box, a full complement of industry standard plugins from FabFilter, SoundToys, Softube, AutoTune, Melodyne, and others are available to finish the job.

Not a local? Not a problem. The Cat Mansion utilizes Audiomovers’ ListenTo for easy, real-time, private, studio quality audio streaming. Listen in directly to a mix or master session and collaborate in real-time so that your project turns out exactly the way you want. It’s the next best thing to being together in the control room.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why should I care about all this outboard audio hardware?

Outboard audio hardware, whether it’s analog or digital, provides a very different experience than using a VST, even with a great controller. It’s immediate. It feels like an instrument. The hardware is obsessed over by engineers, and they have to get it right when they ship it, especially the analog equipment. A firmware update can’t change a bad electrical design. Plugins can sound really good, but they can’t be as immediate and accessible as hardware.

Will outboard hardware make my music sound better?

The right hardware will absolutely make your recordings sound better.

Aren’t plugins just as good as hardware?

A great plugin is a lot better than bad hardware. And there are some software tools that are absolutely better at certain jobs than hardware, like FabFilter’s brilliant Pro-Q EQ, which is the best, most surgical, clean EQ ever. Of course there’s also the cost: the expense of running 32 SSL channel strips in VST form is certainly a lot less painful than buying a 32-channel console. Really, “are plugins as good as hardware?” isn’t a great question. A better question is “when can hardware do the job better than a plugin?” Most of the hardware at The Cat Mansion is chosen specifically for the ephemeral magic it adds to a recording. At The Cat Mansion, we use hardware extensively for tracking, production, and mastering, but often in a more limited way for mixing.

Why do microphones matter if I’ve already recorded everything?

Well, first and foremost, if you’re not totally happy with the recording that you have, you could come to the studio and make another recording using The Cat Mansion’s world class setup. But if that’s not an option for you, nearly all recorded sources can be re-amped. Re-amping is the process of playing a signal through a speaker (and effects, if desired) and re-recording it through a microphone. The Cat Mansion has a fantastic setup for re-amping any source that you’ve recorded. The best results from re-amping come from recordings that don’t have any (or many) effects on them. Direct injection (DI) recordings of guitars, basses, synthesizers, vocals, and so on re-amp beautifully. This process is the next best thing and can create incredible results.

Is analog better than digital?

Sometimes. But it also depends what you mean by “better.” Sometimes it’s worse, too. But that, too, depends on what you mean by worse. Analog is truly zero-latency. Analog is often a tiny bit unpredictable and impossible to recreate perfectly over and over. Analog isn’t really limited by processing power in the way that digital effects are. However, sometimes, digital effects do things that analog simply can’t. Realistic reverbs? Analog springs can’t do that. Drippy wet spring reverb that clangs when you bump it? Digital can’t do that. There’s also a certain charm to a lot of early digital and its aliasing and artifacts that analog doesn’t recreate. So, again, like the debate between hardware and software, it’s much less about which is better and far more about which is best suited for the job at hand.