There is something wonderfully reassuring about walking into a studio that feels like it has been built around music first.
Not hype. Not fashion. Not the endless pursuit of looking like a studio on Instagram.
Music.
That is exactly what Marc Urselli has created with Audio Confidential, his new studio on 29th Street in Manhattan. Marc has had the room for just under a year, however it already feels settled, purposeful and full of character. It is a studio designed by someone who has spent a lifetime working with musicians, collecting microphones, learning rooms, making records and understanding that great recordings are rarely about one single piece of gear. They are about people playing together, listening to each other and being given an environment where they can perform at their best.
Before we get into the room itself, it is worth underlining exactly who Marc Urselli is, because his résumé gives Audio Confidential a huge amount of context. Marc is a three-time Grammy-winning, seven-time Grammy-nominated engineer, producer, mixer, sound designer, composer and musician, based between New York City and London. His credits span rock, jazz, metal, pop, avant-garde, experimental and contemporary music, with artists including Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Mike Patton, U2, Elton John, Kesha, Joan Jett, Les Paul, Jack DeJohnette, John Patitucci, Esperanza Spalding, John Zorn and Laurie Anderson.
Marc has recorded and mixed an extraordinary amount of John Zorn’s catalogue, including well over 100 albums for Zorn’s Tzadik label. He also recorded and mixed AngelHeaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan & T. Rex, produced by Hal Willner and featuring artists such as Nick Cave, U2, Elton John, Kesha and Joan Jett. His Grammy-winning work includes Les Paul’s 90th birthday tribute album Les Paul & Friends: American Made World Played and Lila Downs’ Una Sangre. Beyond records, Marc has worked in opera, film, television, live sound, education and music journalism, and he continues to serve as Chief Head Audio Engineer at EastSide Sound, one of New York’s longest-running recording studios.
He is also widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost collectors and experts on ribbon microphones, with a collection that runs into the hundreds. That deep knowledge of microphones, especially ribbons, is central to the way he records, the way he listens and the way Audio Confidential has been built.
That makes his latest collaboration with JZ Microphones especially exciting. Marc has worked with JZ for many years, and his experience blending ribbon and condenser microphones directly shaped the idea behind the new JZ MU-1. The MU-1 is a hybrid studio microphone designed by Marc Urselli for real studio workflows, combining ribbon warmth and large-diaphragm condenser detail in one phase-coherent microphone body.
You can pre-order the JZ MU-1 here for a big discount: https://intshop.jzmic.com/products/mu-1
A full review of the MU-1 is coming ASAP, where we will dig much deeper into what makes this microphone so special.
In other words, Audio Confidential is not simply a room full of interesting equipment. It is the personal workspace of someone who has spent decades recording some of the most adventurous, iconic and musically diverse artists in the world.
Audio Confidential sits in an interesting part of New York’s post-pandemic studio landscape. As offices emptied and commercial spaces became more available, Marc found that Manhattan suddenly offered more options, and better value, than some parts of Brooklyn. He had originally been looking around Williamsburg, where he lives, however the search pulled him back into Manhattan.
The result is a studio in the middle of a surprisingly vibrant recording community. In Marc’s own building alone, there are multiple studios. Within a few blocks, there are rooms run by friends and fellow producers including John Kilgore, Pat Dillett and Dave Darlington. It is a reminder that New York’s recording culture is still very much alive, not just in the famous legacy rooms, however also in the smaller, deeply personal spaces where people are quietly making remarkable music.
And then there is the daylight.
That might sound like a small thing, however in New York City studios, natural light can feel almost exotic. Marc knows this better than most. He is also Chief Head Audio Engineer at EastSide Sound, a legendary New York studio that has been operating for decades. EastSide is a beautiful, historic room, however as Marc points out, there is no daylight in the control room or live room.
At Audio Confidential, the light comes into the control room in the morning and into the live room later in the day. That changes the feeling of the space. It gives the room a sense of life. You can walk in, see the city, see the day and start working without feeling cut off from the world.
For a studio designed around long days, real players and deep creative work, that matters.
A Neve Genesys Blue at the Centre
The centrepiece of Audio Confidential is Marc’s Neve Genesys Blue console.
It is a 32-fader desk with 64 channels available across layers, plus additional returns, and it perfectly reflects the way Marc likes to work. The Genesys is fully analogue, however it also has a digital control layer that allows it to operate as a DAW controller via HUI. That means Marc can work traditionally through the console, or flip into digital control and write automation directly into Pro Tools.
This hybrid approach is a huge part of the room’s workflow.
Marc will often start a mix at home in the box, bring it into Audio Confidential, break it out across the console, set the analogue faders at zero, then use the digital layer for rides and automation. That gives him the feel of a console with the recallability of a modern Pro Tools session.
The Genesys also gives him recallable EQ and dynamics on the desk itself. The control is digital, however the processing is analogue. Select a channel, access the EQ or compressor, make adjustments, and those settings can be recalled. For someone who loves the sound and feel of analogue, however understands the reality of modern recalls, that is an incredibly practical middle ground.
The console also has a personal history. Marc originally bought it from S.A.E. in Mexico, where he teaches workshops every year. After being decommissioned and stored, the console needed significant work to bring it back to life. It spent time at EastSide Sound before being placed into storage again when that room moved to a new Harrison console.
And, in a way, that became the push Marc needed to open Audio Confidential.
He had a Neve sitting in storage, and that just felt wrong. The studio became the home the console deserved.
A Tracking-First Philosophy
Although the room has outboard gear, Marc is refreshingly direct about his approach. He is not trying to impress anyone with racks and racks of equipment for the sake of it.
His tracking philosophy is simple.
Microphone, preamp, Pro Tools.
In most cases, he likes to preserve the performance without over-processing it on the way in. That does not mean he is anti-outboard, far from it. The studio has tools such as a Distressor, an optical compressor, a Purple Audio 1176-style compressor, DBX units, reverbs, AEA preamps and high-quality Japanese Sym Proceed preamps. There is also a custom mastering-grade limiter and EQ being built for him in Italy, intended for the master bus.
However Marc’s priority is always the music. If the source sounds right, he does not feel the need to stamp too much processing onto it while tracking. In mixing, he can use plug-ins, the recallable Neve EQ and dynamics, or selected outboard when it truly serves the song.
The converters are handled by a Lynx Aurora 32, which gives Marc 32 channels in a single rack unit, perfectly matched to the console’s main I/O. There is also an HDX interface feeding the headphone system, giving musicians in the booths individual control and allowing the studio to support full-band sessions comfortably.
Monitors from Latvia and a Room with Personality
Audio Confidential’s main monitors are made by Reflector Audio in Latvia. They are a coaxial design, with a tweeter and four woofers pushing sound forward in a focused, directional way. Marc uses them as his primary monitors in this room, with Adam Audio monitors as a second reference.
The Reflectors are striking speakers, both sonically and visually. The company also makes larger, even more dramatic versions, including bright red models that are almost impossible to ignore. However the important thing is that Marc has chosen monitors he knows and trusts. That is the point of any monitoring system.
It is not about whether a speaker is famous. It is about whether the engineer understands it.
That idea runs through the entire studio. Audio Confidential is not a generic collection of fashionable gear. It is a curated set of tools, chosen because Marc knows what they do and how they fit into his work.
Pedals, Texture and Strange Machines
One of the joys of Audio Confidential is Marc’s love of unusual sound-making tools.
There are guitar pedals available for musicians who want extra colours, including custom and boutique pieces from Mexico, Italy and elsewhere. There is a Fuzzonauta pedal from Tamayo Amps in Mexico, the PhA fuzz by KURO Custom Audio in Italy, a Metal Muff, a Super Boost and other oddities designed to spark ideas.
Then there is the Demon Box by Eternal Research.
This is not a normal effects unit. Marc describes it in simple terms as being almost like three guitar pickups. It responds to electromagnetic fields, allowing you to “play” it with objects such as an iPhone, a drill, or anything that generates a magnetic field. The changing speed of a drill, for instance, creates different sounds. The Demon Box can also output MIDI, making it a tool for creating strange, dark, electronic textures.
Marc has used it on records with Jim Jarmusch, Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth and Hungarian drummer Balázs Pándi. That gives you a pretty good sense of the kind of creative world this box belongs in.
Audio Confidential is not just a room for capturing conventional sounds. It is also a laboratory for finding sounds you did not know existed.
The Live Room and the Yamaha C2X
The live room is compact, however extremely functional. At the centre is a Yamaha C2X piano with MIDI capability.
This is a real acoustic piano, with hammers, strings and action, however it also has sensors that allow Marc to record MIDI from a performance. He can then send that MIDI back to the piano and have it replay the part acoustically, with the hammers and strings physically performing the music again.
The obvious use is correcting a mistake. A pianist plays a great take with one issue, Marc can edit the MIDI, send it back to the piano and record the corrected performance through microphones.
However Marc has found other uses that are even more interesting.
For example, in a live session with multiple musicians in the room, he can record the piano performance as MIDI while capturing the band. Later, he can play the piano part back through the real piano and re-record it without the original bleed from drums, saxophone, bass, or other instruments. That means he can preserve the feel of a live performance while gaining the isolation needed for a cleaner final mix.
He has also used it for a piano duo without needing two pianos. A pianist can record one part, play it back through the acoustic piano and then perform alongside themselves.
It is a brilliant example of modern technology serving an organic recording process, not replacing it.
Guitars, Basses and the Necessary Classics
Behind a velvet curtain in the live room is a collection of guitars and basses chosen to cover the essential studio needs.
There is a 1977 Les Paul, a Fender Stratocaster, a Telecaster, a Yamaha acoustic, an Ovation 12-string, a Yamaha five-string bass and a remarkable 12-string bass. Marc has around 30 guitars and basses in total, with a selection kept at the studio and the rest at home.
His thinking is practical. Most guitarists bring their own instrument and amp, because guitarists are, as Marc says with affection, particular people. However a good studio should still have the classics available. A Strat, a Tele, a Les Paul, a six-string acoustic, a twelve-string acoustic and a few unexpected colours can save a session or inspire a new part.
The 12-string bass is especially fun. Rather than four single strings, it has four sets of three strings, with a low string and two higher octave strings in each set. Played through distortion and octave effects, it becomes enormous. Marc used it on SteppenDoom, a doom metal record featuring throat singers from Tuva, Mongolia and Siberia, playing slow, heavy music at 50 or 60 beats per minute. You can hear the album here: https://steppendoom.bandcamp.com/album/steppendoom
That is the kind of detail that makes Marc’s studio feel like Marc’s studio. It reflects a career that moves between jazz, metal, experimental music, film directors, avant-garde players and everything in between.
A Serious Microphone Obsession
Marc Urselli is one of the world’s foremost collectors and experts on ribbon microphones, and that passion is visible throughout Audio Confidential.
His total microphone collection is somewhere around 300 to 350 microphones. Only some of them live at Audio Confidential, with others at EastSide Sound or in storage. The studio’s mic lockers contain a selected group of condensers and ribbons, chosen for the work Marc does most often.
He owns multiple RCA 44s and a dozen RCA 77DXs, which tells you quite a lot about how deep the collection goes. He also has a habit of buying several examples of the same piece of gear, testing them, keeping the best one and selling the others. He does this with microphones, amps and keyboards.
It is not hoarding. It is selection.
Vintage gear varies. Two supposedly identical pieces can sound different depending on age, condition, components and restoration. Marc’s approach is to compare, listen and keep the best example for the studio.
That level of care is exactly why musicians and producers trust rooms like this. The gear has been chosen by ear.
The JZ MU-1: Ribbon Warmth, Condenser Detail
There is also a very exciting announcement from Marc and JZ Microphones, and it is one that makes perfect sense given Marc’s lifelong love of ribbons.
The new microphone is the JZ MU-1, a hybrid studio microphone designed by Marc Urselli for real studio workflows. The idea behind it is wonderfully practical: what if you could get the body and weight of a ribbon microphone and the detail and clarity of a large-diaphragm condenser in one perfectly aligned microphone?
The MU-1 is described as the world’s first studio microphone to combine a ribbon and a large-diaphragm condenser inside one level-matched, phase-coherent, perfectly aligned microphone body. Built around a patent-pending hybrid capsule architecture, it combines a ribbon capsule with JZ’s Golden Drop™ condenser capsule, capturing ribbon body and condenser detail simultaneously.
That is a hugely useful concept. Anyone who has blended ribbon and condenser microphones on a source knows how powerful that combination can be. You get warmth, weight and smoothness from the ribbon, with clarity, transient detail and articulation from the condenser. However you also have to deal with placement, phase, level matching and repeatability. The MU-1 is designed to solve that by putting both capsules into one aligned body.
The MU-1 gives you independent dual outputs via a 5-pin XLR split, so engineers can blend both signals or use either one independently. That means you are not locked into one sound. You can use the ribbon side, the condenser side, or blend them together depending on the source and the production.
It is designed for any situation where you might normally reach for two microphones. That includes drum overheads, saxophones and horns, electric guitar amps, acoustic guitar, piano, strings, vocals, room sounds and ambience recording. In other words, any source where you want body and detail, weight and clarity, at the same time.
The technical details are impressive too. The condenser side uses JZ’s Golden Drop™ capsule technology, with a cardioid polar pattern, 20 Hz to 20 kHz frequency response, 134.5 dB SPL handling, a very low 6.5 dB-A noise level and 128 dB dynamic range. The ribbon side uses a figure-of-eight pattern with a 1.2 µm aluminium ribbon, 35 Hz to 15 kHz frequency response, 125 dB SPL handling and a toroidal transformer design.
Each MU-1 is handcrafted in Latvia and comes as a complete studio package, including a custom shockmount, wooden storage box, dedicated 5-pin to dual XLR cable and ownership certificate. It also comes with a 5-year warranty.
The MU-1 is available to pre-order now for a big discount, with shipping listed for August 2026.
Pre-order the JZ MU-1 here: https://intshop.jzmic.com/products/mu-1
A full review of the MU-1 is coming ASAP, where we will dig much deeper into what makes this microphone so special.
Keys, Amps and Colour
Audio Confidential also has a healthy collection of keyboard instruments, including a Rhodes 88 with stereo vibrato, a Wurlitzer 200 with upgraded amplification and variable-speed vibrato, a Korg CX-3 for drawbar organ sounds and a Nord.
There is no Hammond B3 in the room, simply because of space, however Marc has access to real B3s elsewhere in the building and at EastSide Sound when needed. Again, the studio is practical. It gives musicians immediate options while staying connected to the larger community of rooms around it.
The amp collection is similarly varied.
There is a beautifully restored 1967 Fender Twin Reverb, restored by Matt Wells, one of New York’s go-to tube amp specialists. Marc bought three Twin Reverbs, had them all restored, then kept the best one. There is also an Ampeg for bass, Quilter amps, an Ampeg Gemini, a metal-friendly Genz Benz and a converted Italian Geloso amp with simple Italian-labelled controls for volume, lows, highs, on and off.
The Geloso is especially charming. Originally associated with turntable amplification rather than guitar, it has been converted into a guitar amp and produces a bluesy crunch when pushed.
For cabinets, Marc has two approaches. One speaker cable runs through the ceiling into an isolated cubby hole containing a permanently miked guitar cabinet with an SM57. That allows guitar amps to be recorded without filling the room with volume.
However for guitarists who want to stand near a cabinet and feel the air moving, there is also a custom 4×12-style cabinet loaded with four different speakers. Each speaker has a different character, meaning that simply moving the microphone to a different cone changes the tone dramatically. Combined with mic placement, mic choice and amp choice, the range of possible guitar sounds becomes enormous.
A Studio Built for Musicians Playing Together
One of the most important things about Audio Confidential is that it is designed for people to see each other.
The vocal booth can function as a vocal room, upright bass booth or isolation space, however it has sightlines into the control room and live room, plus a direct line of sight to the drum booth as well. The drum booth is positioned so the drummer can see the live room, the vocal booth and the control room. Even the hallway is wired, meaning it can become another isolation area for an amp or instrument if needed.
This is not accidental. Marc believes in musicians playing together.
He does a lot of jazz and a lot of rock, two genres where performance interaction is essential. He is not interested in building records one isolated part at a time unless the music demands it. He wants players in the room, responding to each other, making musical decisions together in real time.
That philosophy feels especially important now.
In a world increasingly fascinated by generative AI, Marc is clear about where he stands. He is not pretending AI does not exist, however he is deeply committed to making real music with real musicians. Audio Confidential is, in many ways, a response to that moment. It is a place where the human element is not only preserved, it is prioritised.
The studio has headphones and personal mixers in every room, so musicians can control their own balances. However they can also look across the room, make eye contact, breathe together and play.
That is where the magic still lives.
The Drum Booth and the MU-1
The drum booth is compact, however very well equipped. Marc has two drum kits available, a larger Ludwig kit for rock and a smaller Gretsch bebop kit for jazz. There are additional snares, percussion instruments, handpans and other options tucked into the space.
One of the key microphone choices in the room is the JZ MU-1, which Marc has started using as a true centrepiece microphone. That is a big statement coming from someone with Marc’s microphone collection and knowledge. When one of the world’s foremost ribbon microphone collectors and experts starts leaning on a new mic this heavily, it is worth paying attention.
On drums, Marc uses a pair of MU-1s as overheads. Before that, he often used Coles ribbons for rock sessions and 414s for jazz sessions. With the MU-1, he can capture both ribbon warmth and condenser detail from a single, phase-coherent microphone body. For drum overheads, that is incredibly powerful. You can blend the weight and smoothness of the ribbon with the articulation and detail of the condenser, without setting up two separate microphones and then fighting phase.
This is one of the most exciting parts of the tour, because the MU-1 is not just being shown as a new piece of gear. Marc is already using it in real sessions, on real instruments, in a real studio, with a lifetime of experience behind those choices. It is designed for exactly that kind of work: faster setups, consistent results and the ability to blend body and clarity in a musical, practical way.
A full review of the MU-1 is coming ASAP, so stay tuned for a much deeper look at what this microphone can do. You can also pre-order the JZ MU-1 here for a big discount: https://intshop.jzmic.com/products/mu-1
On kick, Marc has used combinations such as an AKG D12 and a Sennheiser e602, with the e602 being one of his favourite kick drum mics. His absolute favourite is the Lewitt DTP 640 REX, which combines dynamic and condenser capsules in one microphone. He already has one at EastSide Sound and plans to add another to Audio Confidential.
The snare setup includes the classic SM57, with a condenser underneath. Toms are captured with vintage white Sennheiser MD421s, another example of Marc’s preference for proven tools with character.
It is a drum room built for flexibility, not excess. Rock, jazz, experimental music, tight grooves and open textures, all of it can happen here.
Why Audio Confidential Matters
Audio Confidential is not the biggest studio in New York. It is not trying to be.
What makes it special is the combination of Marc Urselli’s experience, his gear choices, his musical curiosity and his commitment to live performance. It is a personal room, however not a vanity room. It is a working studio built by someone who knows what musicians actually need.
There is a Neve console with hybrid workflow. There is natural light. There are rare microphones, practical instruments, great amps, strange sound-design tools, thoughtful sightlines and enough isolation to capture a band without killing the energy of the performance.
Most importantly, there is a clear philosophy behind it.
Audio Confidential exists to capture people making music together.
In an era where so much production is assembled, corrected, prompted or generated, there is something deeply exciting about a studio that says, “Let’s put the musicians in the room and record what happens.”
That is the heart of Marc Urselli’s Audio Confidential.
And that is why rooms like this still matter.
