Westlake Audio

Westlake Recording Studios

A mixing desk in Westlake Studios
Type	Recording studio
Industry	Music, Radio drama
Founded	1970s
Founder	Tom Hidley
Headquarters	West Hollywood, California, USA
Number of locations	2
Website	www.westlakestudios.com

Westlake Recording Studios is a music recording studio in West Hollywood, California.

Westlake Recording Studios was founded in the early 1970s by the American audio engineer Tom Hidley under the name Westlake Audio. Hidley was experienced in the development of audio technology, having collaborated with Madman Muntz in the development of the first car stereo in 1959, and along with Amnon "Ami" Hadani, he had previously set up another recording studio in Hollywood, TTG Studios, in 1965. The layout of the rooms at Westlake Studios aimed for an acoustic design that could give a fairly flat frequency response at the recording position, with low reverberation delay and extensive use of bass traps. As the need to transfer audio material between different studios grew, there was an increasing demand for standardization across the recording industry; the success of Hidley's acoustic design was copied at other sites, and "Westlake-style" rooms spread to a number of other studios by the late 1970s. Westlake has been credited as "one of the first big commercial efforts to produce acoustically standardised 'interchangeable' rooms".

Artists who have recorded music at Westlake Studios have included Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, Quincy Jones, Bruce Swedien, Missy Elliott, Madonna, Marilyn Manson and Justin Timberlake. Notable recordings produced at Westlake Studios have included Michael Jackson's album, Thriller (April-November 1982), the number-one-selling album of all time; and Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill (1994–1995).