Taking the Home Studio to Extremes

Nashville, TN (July 19, 2024)—Nicolas Hosford and Lisa Kacos have transformed much of their south Nashville home into their workspace, linked via an extensive Dante network framework and Focusrite RedNet interfaces.

“We have multiple rooms of our house connected,” reports Kacos, an artist and multi-instrumentalist who is also an adjunct instructor at Belmont University and Lipscomb University. “We’ve transformed our home into a studio space in which we also sleep and make food! Our main areas are a drum room, a live room, two guitar rooms and the control space with the console.

“Whether we are working together on our own material, or working with artist clients, we have a lot of options in terms of configuration and how to record. We work together and separately, and we work with outside artists. We need to be able to reconfigure our setup on the fly to meet the needs of each project. The Dante network, and the Focusrite interfaces, give us that flexibility.”

The duo, who met in college, studying classical music while making records and touring with their rock band, currently use multiple Focusrite RedNet PCIeNX PCIe Dante interfaces as well as a RedNet A16R 16×16 analog I/O with independent level control. Fast forward through several degrees, albums, tours, a publishing deal, a wedding and relocating to Nashville, and they are busier than ever with a variety of music projects.

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Hosford, an artist and producer who also teaches at SAE Institute, emphasizes how important flexibility is to their work: “We’ve been doing this for over 20 years now, and I’ve learned that every project needs something different. Maybe a group has multiple drum sets, or maybe you need to record a solo classical guitar. Of course, vocals, guitar amps, whole bands tracking live with multiple sources in the room together—it all comes at you, depending on the project. Dante and Focusrite give us the ability to connect up whatever source we want through the space, as well as whatever computer or tracking device we’re using.

“We used to have microphone cords and patch cables running everywhere, but now we have literally none of that clutter, and way more flexibility in terms what we can set up for a project. So Dante has been transformative, but also the Focusrite PCIeNX is absolutely crucial for us. If you use a Mac and you want high channel counts and low latency, PCIeNX is the card, period. The artists I work with can never detect any latency whatsoever, and I consider that a big win for this setup.”