Studio Tour at request of KevWind

[Bob Womack]

Over on the Sib Hashian thread KevWind asked me to provide a photo tour of the studio where I work so here we go. The official name of the suite is "Audio Post Production Suite 1" though for some years it has been unofficially called "Bob's Room." It is a combined recording studio/post production room. When I joined the company many moons ago we began working towards the realization of this room. Fifteen years later in 1996 it was done. Leadership asked that it be state of the art so we sent a designer to Syn-Aud-Con to study their design principles. He came back and designed this space, including an unlicensed Live-End-Dead-End © (LEDE) control room. That design features rigid walls with deal spaces and a shell designed to be as anechoic as possible in the front half and diffuse in the back half. The idea is to create an environment where the output of the monitors arrives at the mix position with as few reflections or secondary paths as possible in order to maintain phase coherency and proper spacial relations across the sound stage. The room was built from the ground up, with floated floors. Here is a detail of the multi-layer, 2"x2" rubber floating blocks placed in fiberglass insulation under the pans into which the slabs were poured.



The wall assemblies consist of three walls. Each of the three walls is built-up of three thicknesses of 3/4" sheet rock, glued and screwed with seams overlapping for rigidity. There are 18" spaces with absorbent mounted on one side between each of the three walls. The combination of rigidity and isolation increases attenuation from the outside.



Monitor pillars were mounted on their own newly-excavated and poured sub-foundations before the walls went up. Custom monitor boxes were built onto the pillars to carry the monitors so that vibrations from them aren't transmitted into the foundation or walls and thence to the mix position, because sound travels more quickly through a solid than air and thus would arrive early and cloud the phase picture.

The suite consists of control room, medium-dead recording room, live room/waiting room, and machine room.

At the back of the corporate studio building, behind a pair of double doors and a pair of heavy fire doors, there is a small lobby. In this lobby, the dark door to the left is the entrance to my suite.

In the plan drawing it is the door at the bottom left corner.

Step inside and turn right and you see the live room/waiting room. Note non-parallel walls and ramp up to floated floor. Direct work lights and indirect lighting are provided. There is a wall box with eight mic lines, four returns, and two headphone feeds, built in right behind the structural pillar on the left.


This room is great for acoustic guitar and with some rearranging you can fit a drum kit in as well. Guitar amps are GREAT here. You can space mics apart for room reflections. The ambient SPL is 38db so it also works well as a reverb room. Here is a typical application:



Inside the second door on the left in the picture above we find the medium-dead recording room.


There's room for a LARGE drum set and I've put a string quartet in there as well. Two mic panels offer 24 mic lines, 8 returns, and 4 headphone jacks as well as video feeds. In the back corner is a self-serve system that allows voice-over talent to record themselves in the room if I am occupied with a mix in the control room. The ambient SPL is 38db.



Step inside and turn to the right and you find the mic closet where stands, mics, cords and headphones live.



Now go back out to the live room/waiting room and open up the first of the two doors to get a detail of construction. Note the width that the three walls take up, the gasket filling the space between the casement halves to prevent shorting the inside and outside walls, and the double doors. Each door weights 200 pounds and features a mechanical sweep gasket on the lower edge that moves down and seals against the threshold.



Going through the door here's the first glimpse of the control room. The front (dead end) is to the right. The machine room is dead ahead.


Here's a pic looking towards the front from the back of the control room. Note the square bezels over the monitors to the left and right of the studio window. They hide the Urei 813b/c monitors.


Here is a detail on the monitors.


The surround array and secondary monitors are Bag Ends with sub-woofers and a managed sub feed. I hoist the speakers onto pedestals on top of the subs when it is time to use them. It looks like we will be replacing these with a networked JBL LSR array soon. Tertiary monitors are Auratones and TV Monitor speakers. My wife suggested I put up the Christmas lights to add some cheer and everyone has loved them so they stayed.

Here's a back wall view from the speakers. The producer's desk features mic panels on each end panel that are identical to the one in the live room. The rack looks a tad empty now that I moved the mic preamps to a turret rack to the left of the mix position and we've gone to mixing inside the box.


Here's a reverse view. You can see the turret rack at center bottom.


Here's a detail on the three-pane window and the depth between the two rooms. That's FOUR walls and spaces,by the way. I can put a drum kit in the studio and there is no significant bleed into the control room. The ambient SPL is 40 in the control room.


More in the next post...

[Bob Womack]

Here is a direct-on pic my desk. Below the patch bay is the Avid/Euphonix MC Transport with a large, weighted alpha wheel for transport control and zooming. There are soft keys for transport and editing controls. The two Mac monitors contain the GUI of the DAW. Above the window is a large monitor for video. The software is Steinberg Nuendo with several plugin packs. We've got several waves series, a UAD accelerator card with various plugs, a bunch of iZotope plugs, Antares Autotune, Drumagog, etc. The console is a Yamaha DM2000 96 channel digital box and is interfaced with Nuendo for fader and front panel control. DAW keyboard is in front of the console. To the right of the GUI monitors is the little DK Audio MSD600M metering device. It provides a display of phase coherence and energy from mono to stereo and up through 7.1 with a phase meter on the left, "jellyfish" display in the center, and channel metering on the right. It is indispensable for surround mixes and fantastic for quick phase info. There are monitoring controls below it and my personal engineer's computer on the right.


Turn ninety degrees left from the above shot and go through the door with the window and you are in the machine room. Everything with a fan (except the console) goes in here. This pic was facing left from the door. Since the room was built in '96, gear has gotten smaller, freeing up space. The department storage has spilled over into here. There is processing gear, interfaces, preamps, power supplies, storage boxes for many of the 250 mics we share between the studios, etc.


Turn forty-five degrees to the right and you see the machine racks and the analog tape machines. That's a Sony (MCI) APR-24 multitrack with integrated Dolby SR noise reduction. Great machine, the final stage of analog high-tech. It stores three sets of biasing and EQ for each speed. A Sony APR5003v two track sits behind it. Note the damaged cone from my Gretsch reso now hanging as industrial art. PC and Mac frames below.


Another forty-five degrees to the right shows my little office and the kitchenette at the other end of the machine room. All of the appliances are courtesy of my thoughtful wife. Note the RCA BK5B ribbon mic on the desk. I'm repairing its shock mount. The floor panels are concrete-filled for rigidity so they don't serve as tympanic sound transmitters.


Down at the end of my office on the right is the amp rack. We've got David Haffler TransNova P7000 amps and Clark Teknik third-octave room equalizers for both main arrays. The mic stand is where I hang wet socks on cold winter days to warm and dry them.


So there you have it. My little world. I am spoiled rotten, of course. Questions?

Bob

[broadcaster]

So there you have it. My little world. I am spoiled rotten, of course.

Its just because you are worth it !
Thanks for sharing.
As an broadcaster I fully understand your joy !
cheers

[Gitarre]

Good gawd holy guacamole jumpin jehosephat sweet mary! That was a great tour Bob. Pretty amazing technical stuff going in there. Awesome looking studio. The only disappointing feature was that the door to your "office" doesnt have your name on it.

[KevWind]

Hey thank you so much for the tour. I had picked up some info about the studio from your various post over the years I have been a member. But this organised and added greatly to an overall picture of "Bob's World" . Interestingly I had read a bit about the LEDE design, but had not seen one put into practice .
I take it the big TV display above the window between the Urei monitors is for the Post work ?

[Bob Womack]

Originally Posted by KevWind

I take it the big TV display above the window between the Urei monitors is for the Post work ?

Yes it is. I do post production for film and video as well as music mixing.

Bob

[Halcyon/Tinker]

Sexy!

.......

[DanR]

Very interesting. Very cool. Thanks for sharing!

[runamuck]

Thanks, Bob. That was fun.

Jim

[muscmp]

thanks, bob! great tour!

play music!

[Bob Womack]

Thanks, guys!



The highly technical method of drying the socks.

Bob

[cotten]

Fascinating world you live in, Bob. Thanks for giving us a peek, for telling us what we are seeing, and explaining a bit about what you do in there. I understood the part about the socks!

cotten

[MaurysMusic]

This is TOO COOL! I will re-read and re-re-read many times (just glancing right now).

[Bob Womack]

Oh, and a bit of history: When we opened the room it was centered around an SSL 4040E/G mixing console. We updated it to a 4048 (eight more channels) by the time this pic was shot in 2003. At the right-rear is the remote for the Sony 24 track. Oh, and the meter over the old CRT is a Dorrough equal loudness meter that shows peak and VU at the same time. In the modern pics above you can see that two of them are integrated into the new console. Oh, and I'm skinnier now.


Pre-Hi-Def days: The TimeLine Lynx remote on right sync'd six transports. The turret console at far right contained Dolby surround encoding units. Keyboard at left was a Fairlight MFX workstation. That's where i got my love of big, heavy alpha wheels. oh, and my scheduling was still on paper. The notebooks in the foreground contained the daily schedules and work orders for two shifts.


Mixing a Phil Keaggy performance right after the transition to Hi-Def video and a totally non-linear production flow. Still, a yukky flip phone pic. This would be about 2005 and note my same Svetlana Electron Devices mug as in the modern shots!

Since we've gone non-linear, server-based, and totally digital, the big console hasn't seemed necessary so we switched to the Yamaha. I miss all my knobs, but frankly, working inside the box is quite a bit slicker and exchanging product with the other three rooms is quite a bit easier. For instance I can move to another studio, access my project from the central audio server, and record grand piano if I need to or I can take over only part of a mix, say dialog cleanup, foley, or music mixing, on a long-form job from another room.

Bob

[Captain Jim]

Wow! The only thing I can relate to is drying my socks on a mic stand.

Impressive design - thanks for the tour!