Westlake Audio

Westlake Audio was founded by Tom Hidley (1931–2025) on Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles in 1971, named after Westlake Village, the suburb where Hidley lived while consulting at The Record Plant. The company name would eventually transfer to a recording studio and a monitor manufacturer — all deeply interconnected by origin, but separate businesses — and the resulting confusion understates how radical the original Westlake Audio proposition actually was.

Hidley's breakthrough was simple and at the time unprecedented: he offered a written Guarantee of Acoustical Performance with every studio he designed and built. The guarantee specified contractual, measurable tolerances — control room frequency response flatness, stereo imaging accuracy, high-frequency dispersion, low-frequency decay times, and room-to-room isolation levels. Studio acoustics had previously been treated as artisanal craft, with results varying wildly between designers. Hidley turned it into engineering: if the room didn't perform to spec, it wasn't finished.

The acoustic philosophy behind those guarantees was what Hidley called the Non-Environment — a hemi-anechoic control room design that eliminating the room's own contribution to what the engineer was hearing. The front wall was maximally damped down to low frequencies; large monitors were soffit-mounted (flush into the wall surface), turning them into an infinite-baffle system that removed front-wall reflections from the equation entirely. Hidley coined the term "bass trap" and was the first to codify soffit mounting as a professional standard. He also introduced the sliding glass isolation door between control room and live room — a detail so practical it became invisible through ubiquity.

Among the studios Hidley designed or rebuilt: The Manor Studios in Oxfordshire (1973–74, for Richard Branson / Virgin Records), Mountain Studios in Montreux (1975, later adopted by Queen as their home base), a private studio for The Moody Blues, and The Townhouse in London (1978, with collaborator Philip Newell). Philip Newell joined Hidley from 1975 onward and co-developed the Non-Environment concepts further through an extended research partnership.

The HR-1 monitor — a large, soffit-mounted main monitor featuring wood horns and Gauss midrange drivers — was not designed as a standalone product but as a component of the Non-Environment system. The room and the speaker were engineered as one. Westlake Audio later spun its monitor line and studio design work into separate operations; the manufacturing side continues today. The recording studio called Westlake Recording Studios, where Michael Jackson recorded Thriller and Bad, grew from the same origin but became independently operated. Tom Hidley died in May 2025.