Collaborative Systems for Audio

Nearly two decades of technology that grew with the business

Sonic Union is a leading NYC audio post-production house, collaborating with major creative agencies and global brands out of two Manhattan studio locations — its original home at Union Square, and a second studio near Bryant Park added as the business grew. Macktez's relationship with Sonic Union dates back to 2009, beginning with hands-on onsite support before it had any dedicated internal IT staff. As Sonic Union eventually built its own technical team, Macktez's role evolved from doing the work directly to advising, architecting, and co-managing alongside them.

What's kept the partnership running for nearly twenty years isn't any single piece of technology — it's a habit of re-evaluating what Sonic Union actually needs as the business itself changes, rather than defending past decisions. Every major shift in this case study — a second studio, a pandemic, an industry-wide move to cloud-native production — prompted a real conversation about whether the existing infrastructure still fit the business, not just a technology refresh for its own sake.

Infrastructure that kept pace with how the business actually worked

Macktez's work with Sonic Union has never been a single project — it's been a continuous relationship that rebuilt Sonic Union's infrastructure in layers, each one driven by a real shift in how the business operated:

• Replaced Sonic Union's original single-studio network after years of service, and rebuilt it again as its needs continued to grow
• When Sonic Union opened a second studio near Bryant Park, connected both locations with site-to-site VPN, then upgraded that connection to direct fiber once real-time collaboration between studios became part of daily production rather than an occasional need
• Configured dynamic routing so each studio's internet connection automatically serves as a live failover for the other — recognizing that once two studios depended on each other operationally, neither could afford to go down alone
• When the pandemic forced a shift to remote production overnight, deployed Wasabi cloud object storage so editors and engineers could access large production files from anywhere, and recommended and deployed JumpCloud as a cloud-based identity layer for a suddenly distributed team
• Built a new storage backbone using Morro Data CloudNAS technology bridging on-premises and cloud-cached storage, backed by new Dell and Synology server hardware sized to support the growing live dataset — now over 100TB — with both on-site and cloud backup redundancy
• Years later, as cloud-native production tools matured industry-wide, guided Sonic Union's move off Morro Data and onto Suite Studios' cloud-native file-streaming platform — and found ways to repurpose their existing on-premises hardware into the new architecture rather than writing it off
• Executed multiple full network overhauls over the years — replacing generations of SonicWall firewalls and switching hardware as both the business and the threat landscape changed — and untangled years of accumulated cabling neglect with dedicated rack cleanup, patch panel work, and full cable testing and certification
• Rolled out real-time network monitoring integrated with Macktez's Claude-based tooling, giving both Sonic Union and Macktez live visibility into network health and performance for proactive tuning rather than reactive troubleshooting