Designing iZotope’s Portable Recording Studio

For those who have never picked up a guitar and dreamed of being the next Tom Petty, iZotope designs award-winning audio products and technologies for musicians, music producers and audio post engineers around the world. In a nutshell, they develop the software that makes the music you listen to sound awesome.

As a talented musician himself, iZotope CEO, Mark Ethier saw a need for a professional recording system where technology didn’t get in the way of a creative moment. iZotope then set out to develop a simple recording system that could be used by anyone from professional musicians and garage bands to aspiring solo artists. Spire Studio was born.

Spire Studio is effectively a portable music recording studio. It is an all-in-one, wireless, multi-track, battery-powered recording system. With a built-in studio mic, 2 inputs, automatic soundcheck and 4+ hours of battery life, it has everything for recording a song. It auto-adjusts the recording levels for instruments and vocals thereby making the recording process intuitive for the musician. The built-in Wi-Fi connection simplifies the process of collaborating with other artists. Finally, the mobile app provides a highly visual set of tools to the mix the final track.

With the goal of creating Spire Studio to be portable with professional sound quality, iZotope approached Cardinal Peak with an innovative industrial design, a user experience vision, and some demanding performance requirements. Our hardware engineering team worked closely with the iZotope development team to create a product that maximized functionality and performance, and realized the user interface. This included developing the detailed electronic hardware design for the housing as well as all the circuit boards. Beyond the hardware, Cardinal Peak set-up the Linux environment and developed and tested all the drivers for this innovative connected product.

So, grab your friends, plug in the Gibson and start recording some hits using Spire Studio.