About Qualia Audio Lab

Qualia Audio Lab is a professional mastering studio and audio restoration and conservation laboratory with lab-grade specs and monitoring. That means a flat and precise monitoring condition, tight standards, and an extremely precise atomic clock reference with minimal phase noise clocking the entire system.

The studio is in Sintra, in the Lisbon area, and works with artists, labels, pressing plants, archives and institutions in Portugal and abroad.

The room

• Monitoring: custom Bowers & Wilkins 801 Matrix S2 system, aligned for an extremely flat response at the listening position.
• Clocking: the whole system clocked from an atomic clock reference with low phase noise.
• Transfer chain: calibrated reel-to-reel and cassette machines, digital format playback, and tools for cleaning, conditioning and maintaining legacy media.
• Certifications and memberships: Apple Digital Masters provider; member of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA).

Carlos Nascimento

Carlos Nascimento is an audio engineer specialising in mastering and the restoration of archival media. His work bridges technical precision and musical sensitivity, grounded in a background in sound recording, music, electronics and radio-frequency systems.

With over 18 years in professional audio, he also provides technical consulting for archival workflows and restoration projects. Formerly Senior Technical Coordinator at World Academy, he lectures on digital audio, recording and studio techniques.

His restoration work includes recovering the tape archive of Rádio Nacional de São Tomé, the post-processing of a 1965 IBM Magnabelt recording recovered by CuriousMarc, restoring Mário Viegas' private tapes for a Tradisom book release, and bringing a WaveFrame 401 workstation back to life with the help of its designer, John Melanson.