GRAMMY®-Winning Producer/Engineer Frank Filipetti Relies On HARMAN's JBL LSR6300 Series Studio Monitors

NORTHRIDGE, California – GRAMMY®-winning Frank Filipetti is one of the music industry’s most accomplished engineers and producers and was recently nominated for a 2012 GRAMMY for “Best Surround Sound” for the 5.1 mix of An Evening With: Dave Grusin. Filipetti began his career in the 1980s and has worked with top artists including Foreigner, KISS, Luciano Pavarotti, James Taylor, Andrea Bocelli, Billy Joel, Liza Minnelli, Elton John, Korn, Barbra Streisand and dozens of others. One thing stays constant through Filipetti’s variety of prestigious projects: his HARMAN JBL LSR6300 Series studio monitors.

An Evening With: Dave Grusin is a live recording that captured a 75-piece orchestra performing a collection of 12 songs by Grusin, Gershwin, Bernstein and other composers, with guest artists including Jon Secada, Patti Austin, Gary Burton and others. “Producer Phil Ramone and engineer Eric Schilling recorded the concert and I did the mixing and mastering,” Filipetti said. ”The challenge here was taking this large ensemble of instruments and performers and bringing clarity and focus to all those open mics in a 5.1 sound field. Trashing a prime directive of recording, I knew from the start that I was going to need to pan the instruments in a way totally at odds with the stage setup. But to do that and keep things from smearing, I needed to be absolutely sure I heard every element of the mix accurately. Accurate monitors are even more important in mixing for 5.1 than they are in stereo—any inaccuracy is now tripled! And the JBL LSR6300 monitors deliver accuracy in spades.”

“You can’t record, engineer, produce or mix anything well without an accurate sonic reference,” Filipetti continued. “If you can’t trust what your monitors are giving you, you’re always going to be working against yourself and everything you do will be a crap shoot. I know I can depend on the JBL LSR6300 Series studio monitors. They’ve proven themselves to me time and time again.”

Filipetti also recorded and mixed The Book of Mormon, which earned a GRAMMY Award for “Best Musical Theater Album.” “Recording The Book of Mormon was very challenging because of the number of open microphones in close quarters [especially the singers], which magnified phase issues and other sonic difficulties,” Filipetti said. “Having accurate, high-resolution monitors like the LSR6300’s was absolutely critical. We needed to be able to hear every nuance of what the mics were picking up both on and off axis before ever hitting ‘record,’ as there would be no time to fix it in the mix.”

Recording an outdoor concert can be one of the most daunting tasks in live production – especially when it’s Concerto, One Night In Central Park by Andrea Bocelli. “We were recording this in 5.1 and stereo for Blu-ray, and it was a one-off performance—so we had to get the entire concert in one evening, no second chance,” Filipetti noted. “Talk about high stakes—we had Alan Gilbert and The New York Philharmonic, along with Andrea; guest artists including Celine Dion, Tony Bennett, Bryn Terfel and Chris Botti. There were up to four opera singers onstage at one time, along with a full orchestra, a pop rhythm section, assorted soloists, a 100-voice choir, and 10 audience mics for a total of 160 mics traveling through nearly a quarter-mile of fiber optic cable into our truck. On top of it all, it was raining.”

“I’ve used the JBL LSR6300 monitors in hundreds of situations for nearly 10 years,” Filipetti concluded. “With other monitors I find I’m always wondering how things are going to sound on other systems, and mentally compensating. I don’t have to make those mental adjustments with the LSR’s, and that confidence gives me the ability to do what I feel is best because I know my productions are going to sound the way I heard them. What you hear is what you get!”

Headquartered in Northridge, California, JBL Professional is the world’s leading manufacturer of loudspeakers used in demanding recording, post-production and broadcast applications and facilities worldwide. JBL Professional is the recipient of numerous awards including a prestigious Technical GRAMMY® Award “for continual mastery and innovation…to ensure exacting standards for the most accurate sonic experience.” JBL Professional is part of the Harman International network of professional and consumer audio companies. For complete product and company information, go to the JBL Professional website at www.jblpro.com

HARMAN (www.harman.com) designs, manufactures and markets a wide range of audio and infotainment solutions for the automotive, consumer and professional markets — supported by 15 leading brands, including AKG, Harman Kardon, Infinity, JBL, Lexicon and Mark Levinson. The Company is admired by audiophiles across multiple generations and supports leading professional entertainers and the venues where they perform. More than 25 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and infotainment systems. HARMAN has a workforce of about 12,500 people across the Americas, Europe and Asia, and reported net sales of $4.0 billion for twelve months ending September 30, 2011.
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