Over the past few weeks, Nick Sanabria has been moving gear and furnishings out of his Radio City Recording and Audio studio at 445 E. Ohio Street in preparation of closing Sept. 1 after 30 years of business.
Radio City will reopen in a downsized studio in his Aurora home, where Sanabria will continue to record, narrate, compose and produce original music.
He will retain Fox News’ Chicago billboards, a client of a dozen years, and several retail operations and automotive dealerships of long duration. His studio will be fully equipped with ProTools, samplers and synthesizers.
Jim Doherty, Radio City’s engineer of 20 years, will remain in Studio A at Ohio Street and maintain his long-time retail clients.
Radio City’s Ohio St. facility of 1,800-sq. ft. had three offices, two control rooms and two voiceover booths ? “one hastily built,” Sanabria describes. “There’s no door and you have to walk around a pillar, but it’s perfectly quiet and it worked fine.”
If all had remained well, Sanabria was going to convert the conference room into a third control room.
“Business was fine until the January, 2009 economic meltdown,” he recalls. “But by summer our clients had stopped advertising. Then we got hit again in the fall when the retail business simply didn’t come back.”
A six-month break on the rent helped sustain the company for a while, “but even that didn’t help us cover the overhead.”
