So first let me say I've been following YOUR posts here for quite a while and have a lot of respect for your knowledge and wisdom.
Next, thanks for complimenting my messy, low-budget studio with our quarantine haircuts. We kind of resisted sending a photo, but in the end sucked it up.
If it said that we share a studio, we meant the building. We actually have several studios set up here. Serban has a dedicated room and I have a dedicated room. We've been in these rooms since 2003. And yes, the amount of work passing through here astounds even myself sometimes. We have to be super efficient, streamlined, and distraction free. Which is not so difficult when all clients are remote and no-one ever visits us! Basically we've been self-isolating for 20 years!
You might make out from the photo that we are working out of a house environment and not a commercial space. We designed and built out these rooms ourselves. Keep in mind the because we don't do recording, the need for good isolation is minimized.
We do have to maintain pretty much identical setups as far as hardware, operating system, protools version, plugins, and plugin versions; so we are very careful about making sure we don't do an upgrade or add a plugin without the other system matching.
I've added the Atmos hardware on top of the existing system, so I could streamline it a bit more if I didn't need to maintain perfect session interchange compatibility.
Happy to participate and share more now; you can imagine the reasons to stay quiet in the past. I'm sure as more forum members figure out exactly who you are talking to I'll get a lot more questions, so just let me say I'm not going the be the Serban Whisperer! I'm happy to talk about my experiences but won't be sharing his "secrets" (of which we all know there are none except excellent skills and a super work ethic).