Z Los Angeles specializes in music composition, sound design and sound mixing for radio and television commercials. My brother Alvaro and I founded the company in 1990 with the belief that technology serves as a critical bridge between heaven-sent and man-made genius. As AZ Los Angeles has grown, we’ve remained committed to using the latest technologies to keep sound engineering in the hands of the artist, and virtually everything about our facility speaks to this goal.

Our state-of-the-art facilities combine style and technology to facilitate creative sound engineering within an environment that’s comfortable for our staff and clients. In collaborating with creatives and directors, our sound engineers bring their musical vision and sound design artistry to bear in communicating those clients’ ideas. To support this process, we have brought online a new Fusion™ R400Q four-drive Serial ATA (SATA) rackmount storage system from Sonnet Technologies. We work with many dozens of clients and deal with an enormous volume of content on a daily basis, and the Sonnet system’s capacity and convenience made it a very appealing solution for us.

Once we received the R400Q rackmount unit, getting it up and running proved to be very easy. We simply installed a Sonnet Tempo™ SATA E4P SATA host controller card in our Power Mac® G5 (dual 2.3 GHz with 2.5GB of RAM), connected the G5 to the R400Q, and renamed each of the system’s four drives—Sonnet 1, Sonnet 2, Sonnet 3 and Sonnet 4—to keep our media clearly organized. There was no software to install, nothing else to it. The process was so straightforward that we wondered if we’d forgotten a step!

The G5, running Mac OS® X Leopard™, is equipped with Pro Tools HD® and a variety of plug-ins. As they work in Pro Tools, our sound engineers record directly to the Fusion system. The hot-swappable drive modules employed in the Fusion enclosure serve also as a neat solution for media backup. Thus, the Fusion system serves dual purposes. When we’re done with one drive, we can remove it and bring in another, and the process of connecting and disconnecting drives is easy and quick, thanks to cable-less connections and integrated levers that function as handles. As a result, we no longer need to spend valuable time and human resources copying files over the network to another drive for backup purposes.

The R400Q’s interface allows data to pass directly from drive to the SATA host controller, providing more speed than FireWire® 800 connections. While we have noticed improvement in speed over our previous system, the greatest benefit for us has been moving from a storage capacity of about 250GB to 2TB.

In the short time that we’ve been using the Fusion R400Q, we’ve completed commercial projects for numerous clients, brands and products including Wells Fargo, Nature’s Choice, Dominos, Miller Lite, Nestle, and the “Got Milk? ®” campaign. We may work on one or two projects within a single day, and the capacity and flexibility of the Fusion storage system enable our engineers to focus on the creative, artistic elements of each project rather than worry about drive capacity, media access, data speeds and media backups. The Fusion R400Q has lived up to Sonnet’s reputation for reliable storage systems, and we’re enjoying the positive impact it has had on our workflow.

As our company continues to grow, the Tempo card installed in our G5 gives us the freedom to add additional Sonnet storage systems to suit our needs. With technology as the foundation for all our work, the Fusion R400Q has become an integral part of our operations.


Alonso Zevallos—co-founder AZ Los Angeles

To learn more about AZ Los Angeles, visit www.azlosangeles.com.



Reprinted with permission of prosoundnews.com March 2008. Copyright ©2008 prosoundnews.com. The AZ logo is a trademark of AZ Los Angeles. All rights reserved. Photos courtesy of AZ Los Angeles. Photos used with permission.