A.R.T. Studios was the private music studio of music producer Michael Cretu, located in his mansion in the hills of Ibiza, Spain. In May 2009 the mansion together with the studio were demolished. The studio itself was used by Cretu until 2005, when he moved to a mobile computerized system "Alchemist" and from 2010 a new system named "Merlin".
Bernd Steber came up with the idea of hiding all acoustical trapping behind a full-size piece of canvas which could be stretched from one side of the room to the other and painted like a picture. The artist painted a night sky with thousands of stars and some very close star nebulas, similar as seen on images taken from the Hubble Space Telescope. The walls were built with blocks of open porous sandstone which seemed to break in an irregular line just under the ceiling. The big monitor speakers and the outboard equipment racks were built into these sandstone walls, with the entrance into the room positioned between two large Arabic sandstone arcs in the back. The floor was covered with a wall-to-wall carpet printed with a reproduction of the Moon's surface. In the front of the room, there was a huge arc-shaped window with a view down the hill to the sea.
Technical Details
All external equipment was wired to a large digital mixing console which was custom built by AMEK and the German Company Mega Audio according to Michael Cretu's preferred working procedures. The console, while physically small, had 160 inputs to collect most signals coming from any MIDI source, computer or microphone without the need a patchbay. This is possible because all active components were located outside in some huge racks in the machine room. This kept all noise and unnecessary heat out of the control room and reduced the physical size of the mixing console.
All recording is done on a Pro Tools system hardware and Emagic's latest version of Logic Audio Platinum software. Software samplers as SampleCell, Steinberg's HALion and the PC-based StudioSampler are all linked and sync-ed together on demand. There are several racks full of external MIDI modules and hardware samplers as well as a selection of reverb systems as the Lexicon 480 and 960 as well as some more exotic reverbs like the vintage Yamaha REV1, REV7 and REV9, the Eventide DRP9000 and the Dynacord DRP20. Integrated is Michael's old Waveframe 1000. This was the machine that made Enigma happening in the first place in 1990. It was the first real fully professional digital "Studio-in-a-box". Its constant sampling rate system is brilliant and the sample editing and archiving feature is still unmatched. The monitoring system was especially designed and built by Quested Acoustics.
Michael Cretu worked in the A.R.T. Studios only on his first five Enigma albums. For the sixth and seventh album he used "Alchemist", an all in one computed mobile studio. And for the eighth album he will use "Merlin", the successor of "Alchemist".
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