Located deep in the bowels of a domestic residence in Virginia, MixCave Mastering is a new mixing and mastering studio centred on an Audient ASP4816 mixing desk. Not content just to sit back and relax into his retirement, owner Craig Lauinger is a man on a mission.

Having served 30 years’ active duty – much as senior recording engineer for the US Army Band, Pershing’s Own – Lauinger is a retired US Army Sergeant Major with solid experience of audio engineering. ‘Immediately following my retirement, I spent the winter excavating the basement of my home. For nearly three months, I removed more than 100 tons of Virginia clay and rock, built 24-inch thick concrete walls and poured 6-inch concrete slabs. The control room is entirely underground. It is a quiet space, and my design yielded an incredibly transparent and accurate mixing and mastering environment.’

Comprising a small tracking room and control room, Lauinger designed and built every aspect of the studio himself – including all acoustic treatments. ‘I was fortunate to have a high school intern who helped me with building the acoustics and music of the electrical wiring,’ he concedes.

After 35 years in the recording business, he is no stranger to British brand Audient, owning an ASP800 8-channel mic preamp as well as the new console. ‘We use the ASP4816 for tracking and mixing projects, with connectivity to Pro Tools via 48 channels of AD/DA conversion. We love the ASP4816 for its size, flexibility and ultra-quiet sound.’

It was the space constraints of the underground control room that dictated the size of the console, although that didn’t mean he compromised on specifications.

‘We required a compact console that combined features and flexibility, good connectivity to a DAW, and sounded clean and quiet with very little colouration to the sound,’ he says. ‘The price point of the ASP4816 worked out in our favour as well.’

Stand-out features for him were obvious: ‘We really like the upper and lower fader banks when using the ASP4816 as a summing mixer, and the EQ modules are very musical and incredibly quiet.’

The MixCave tends to have a few projects on the go at a time, most recently folk-Americana, chillwave, Afro-Cuban, reggae and rock. ‘We have clients all throughout the United States and also in other countries such as Cuba, Spain, Israel, Brazil, the Czech Republic and most recently, we started working with a reggae dub artist from Colombia.’

One of the greater surprises has been the amount of business picked up using social media. ‘We have had tremendous success in finding clients – and them finding us – on Instagram. The unsigned indie music scene seems to revolve on Instagram, and roughly half of our clients are from that source,’ Lauinger explains.

Perhaps more surprising is that just two years ago Lauinger was a social media novice. ‘I had no social media presence prior to launching the MixCave. My then 16 year-old son suggested I use Instagram to market the studio, and set me up with an account. He had to show me how to use it.’

Instagram followers cuerrently number nearly 5000...

These days Lauinger and MixCave Mastering can be found on Instagram and on the web at, where there is a full listing of equipment and services offered –with a few choice cave puns thrown in.

There is no restful retirement plan on the horizon for Lauinger, either – with lots of interesting ideas bubbling up for the future. ‘In 2024 we are planning to launch MixCave Live Sessions: a series of live performances recorded in The Cave by local and regional artists looking to increase their visibility within the music scene. We would either stream their performances live, or possibly record their performances, then do a rapid video and audio post-production prior to streaming.’