Sony Music Studios was a well-known former music recording and mastering facility in New York City. The five story red brick building was a music and broadcasting complex that was located at 460 W. 54th Street, at 10th Avenue, in the Hell's Kitchen section of Manhattan. It opened in 1993, and closed in August 2007.
In addition to being the production facility for new popular, classical and other albums, it was also used as space for soundtrack recording and mixing, post-production, and rehearsals. Sony Music Studios also had facilities for live and taped television broadcasts.
Prior to its acquisition by Sony in 1993, the industrial red-brick barn, was owned by Camera Mart for 20 years, and leased the space to movie and television producers.
History
Movietone Studio
William Fox, President of the Fox Film Corporation, had worked with inventor Theodore W. Case to develop a method for capturing sound on film eventually becoming the Movietone sound system. In August of 1926 the Fox-Case Corporation was created, making $200,000 worth of improvements to what had been the Fox Annex, a warehouse at 460 W. 54th St. (Fox Films New York ran out of the giant building at 850 Tenth Avenue, around the corner. It eventually became DeLuxe, and is now Independence High School).
A recording studio is a facility for sound recording and mixing. Ideally both the recording and monitoring spaces are specially designed by an acoustician to achieve optimum acoustic properties (acoustic isolation or diffusion or absorption of reflected sound that could otherwise interfere with the sound heard by the listener).
Recording studios may be used to record musicians, voice-over artists for advertisements or dialogue replacement in film, television or animation, foley, or to record their accompanying musical soundtracks. The typical recording studio consists of a room called the "studio" or "live room", where instrumentalists and vocalists perform; and the "control room", where sound engineers sometimes with producer(s) as well operate either professional audio mixing consoles or computers (post 1980s) with specialized software suites to manipulate and route the sound for analogue or digital recording. Often, there will be smaller rooms called "isolation booths" present to accommodate loud instruments such as drums or electric guitar, to keep these sounds from being audible to the microphones that are capturing the sounds from other instruments, or to provide "drier" rooms for recording vocals or quieter acoustic instruments.
Sony Music Entertainment Inc. (sometimes known as Sony Music or by the initials, SME) is an American music corporation managed and operated by Sony Corporation of America (SCA), a subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Sony Corporation. In 1929, the enterprise was first founded as American Record Corporation (ARC) and, in 1938, was renamed Columbia Recording Corporation, following ARC's acquisition by CBS. In 1966, the company was reorganized to become CBS Records. In 1987, Sony Corporation of Japan bought the company, and in 1991, renamed it SME. It is the world's second largest recorded music company, after Universal Music Group.
In 2004, SME and Bertelsmann Music Group merged as Sony BMG Music Entertainment. When Sony acquired BMG's half of the conglomerate in 2008, Sony BMG reverted to the SME name. The buyout led to the dissolution of BMG, which then relaunched as BMG Rights Management. Out of the "Big Three" record companies, with Universal Music Group being the largest and Warner Music Group, SME is middle-sized.
550 Music (originally known as Sony 550 Music) was a unit of Sony Music Entertainment, which operated through Sony Music's Epic Records division while in activity. Launched in 1992, the "550" name was inspired by the address of the Sony building, located at 550 Madison Avenue in New York. The label was absorbed in 2000 by Epic Records, it was part of the restructuring when Tommy Mottola was leaving Sony Music.