September 5th 2025: From his earliest days in Macedonia, where a teacher nicknamed him “Mozart” for his ability to play back music entirely by ear, Kostadin’s life has been intertwined with sound.
Kostadin’s music education began at the age of six with an upright piano, but it wasn’t long before bands, bass guitars, drum kits, and keyboards became part of his world. A modest Tascam 4-track cassette recorder opened the door to recording, and before long he was capturing performances on an ever-growing collection of gear in his parents’ home.
As technology evolved, so did Kostadin’s studio. From ADAT machines and a Mackie 32/8 console to one of the city’s unused bomb shelters, prized for its natural isolation, word spread quickly and his reputation grew. A move to Skopje brought him into the capital’s vibrant recording scene, working with top musicians, labels, and festivals, and introducing Macedonia to the possibilities of computer-based digital recording.
In 2000, Kostadin and his family relocated to Clifton, New Jersey. With little English and no industry contacts in the USA, his first break came from a test mix on 2” tape for a local studio. The mix secured him the job on the spot. Since then, he has built Studio Mozart into a 1,700 sq. ft. purpose-designed facility with cathedral ceilings, five isolation booths, a NEVE VR60 console (extensively modified), and an enviable mic and outboard collection. The live room features a Yamaha C7 grand piano, a 1967 Hammond B3 with Leslie 122, Wurlitzer A200, multiple high-end drum kits, guitar and bass amps, and a carefully curated selection of analogue tape machines.
Studio Mozart’s work covers an enormous range: vocals for blockbuster films such as Dune I & II and X-Men: Dark Phoenix, full big-band recordings, jazz, fusion, rock, pop, folk, and immersive Atmos productions. Kostadin has worked with a stellar list of artists, including Lenny White, Steve Smith, Ron Carter, Stanley Clarke, Bernard Purdie, Oz Noy, Neal Schon, Gloria Gaynor, and many others. He has also engineered complex multi-studio remote sessions, captured 14 tracks in just six hours with Broadway’s finest, and collaborated directly with composers like Hans Zimmer.
When upgrading his conversion, Kostadin turned to Prism Sound’s flagship DREAM-ADA, a modular, networkable audio conversion system offering up to 128 channels of premium Prism Sound AD/DA conversion in a single 2U frame. Designed for mission-critical applications in recording, mastering, broadcast, and post-production, the DREAM-ADA delivers unmatched sonic transparency, extremely low noise and distortion, and vast configuration flexibility. Its card-based architecture supports a choice of analogue, AES, MADI, Dante and Pro Tools HDX I/O modules, allowing it to be precisely tailored to any workflow and expanded as needs grow.
Kostadin’s DREAM-ADA is fitted with four AD and four DA cards, providing 32 channels of analogue I/O hardwired to his NEVE VR60, plus dual Pro Tools HDX interface cards – one feeding his main HDX3 tracking system and the other dedicated to high-sample-rate mix capture. A Dante module connects to his LiveMix-32 headphone system, while an AES card routes audio directly to his Grace Design M908 monitoring controller.
“The DREAM-ADA is the centrepiece of my conversion,” he says. “The headroom is unbelievable, the low frequencies are huge and realistic, and the whole spectrum is so clean and deep it feels three-dimensional. Like you are right there in the room with the players. It is crucial to my work.”
With support for multiple simultaneous sample rates, ultra-precise internal clocking, and Prism Sound’s renowned digital signal integrity, the DREAM-ADA enables Kostadin to connect multiple systems at different sample rates without compromise. Its intuitive front-panel touchscreen and browser-based control make it easy to manage complex routing, while Prism Sound’s legendary build quality ensures long-term reliability.
Looking to the future, Kostadin is excited about immersive audio and the chance to place listeners inside the performance. “I want to be able to play a piece of music and feel like I am in front of the band or orchestra,” he explains. “That is the direction I hope we are going, using immersive sound as an artistic tool.”
From analogue warmth to Atmos precision, Kostadin’s career is defined by a pursuit of musical truth. With Prism Sound’s DREAM-ADA at the core of Studio Mozart, that truth is captured with absolute clarity.
