Musician and mastering engineer Nick Cooke has opened a state of the art mastering facility in Wrington, near Bristol, which is now the base for his new enterprise, Nick Cooke Mastering.

The bespoke facility, designed by White Mark, is equipped with analogue processors by Maselec, Dangerous Music and Avalon Design, a Maselec mastering console, audio conversion via Burl Audio and two Prism Sound Lyra 2 converters and audio workstations Pro Tools and SADiE 6.

For monitoring, Cooke has installed a pair of Meyer Sound X10’s acquired from Abbey Road Studios.

Formerly chief mastering engineer at Extreme Music, the London-based production music arm of Sony ATV, Cooke decided to relocate to Wrington, the Somerset village where he grew up, close to the thriving music scene of Bristol. Having found suitable premises in a building that was once part of Wrington railway station, Cooke tasked White Mark with the job of converting his unit into an acoustically accurate mastering room.

White Mark’s managing director David Bell, who was recently a keynote speaker at the AES’s first Mastering Conference in the UK, said: “It was a very straightforward conversion because Nick’s unit had already been developed into offices in the 1980s and the structure of the building was very sound. We increased the basic isolation performance of the ceiling to allow for future expansion of the facility and created a suite on the ground floor that was optimised for the accurate monitoring environment demanded by top mastering engineers.

“The need to offer RT balance with frequency, a room free of modal clusters and with a light accurate feel was fully achieved here in a building that was ideally suited to the task. The ability to also include daylight and an external view was also a strong positive in creating a great space in which to work.”

Cooke added: “I am delighted with the room and the exceptional audio quality it is delivering thanks to the marvellous synergy of the room acoustics with the Meyer X10 speakers. White Mark did a great job and I couldn’t be more pleased.”

Nick Cooke Mastering is now open for business and Cooke is busy on a number of projects for local and international artists as well as continuing to master production music for library music clients.