What's to be learned from all this? Some initial insights have to do with the process of realizing your dreams. First, realizing your dreams takes time. Second, it is important for you to do a lot of dreaming, a lot of thinking, a lot of planning, to get the dreams to take a shape you can live with when they do become reality. Third, it helps to share your dreams, your thoughts, and your plans with others. Other people, simply because they are other people, can really help you to clarify things. I've been amazed at some of the really simple suggestions that people have made that I had missed. You can get so close to the trees that its hard to see the woods, and then you lock yourself into mind-sets that lead to Really Expensive Realities. Fourth, realizing dreams takes some luck, as well as the patience to wait for the luck to come around.

On a more practical level, the first studio design decision that I made had to do with monitoring. We all get so caught up in the hardware and the technology that it is easy to lose sight of simple acoustical issues. What I decided, right up front, was that the monitoring in my studio had to be both quite accurate and also relevant for home audio listening. This means that I need a reverberant listening space and monitors capable of working effectively in such a space. My previous studio control room was quite heavily damped, and my monitoring was essentially near-field. I found that in such an environment it was fairly hard to predict how recordings were going to sound in more typical listening environments. I also have a particular research issue to pursue: I've been involved for about ten years in the development of wide-dispersion high-frequency lenses and I want a listening space in which I can study the effect of such lenses in comparison with more conventional designs.

If you look at ads featuring home studio setups, you will see that they are mostly based on in-your-face near field monitoring. Such monitoring is an immense convenience for hardware manufacturers, who don't have to make any allowances for more demanding acoustical configurations. It is often also a necessity, given space limitations. Don't make the mistake of making necessity a virtue, however. End-users don't listen to in-your-face stereo monitors any more than they listen to soffitted behemoths lurking above a picture window. Consider the possibility that a monitoring setup related to the conventional living room hi-fi situation might be desirable if you want to successfully predict how your music is going to sound in such a space. Such a setup will occupy some space and may present practical problems for you. But if you can work through those problems, the resulting monitor system may turn out to be very effective.

The above reasoning is what made me hold out for the room I've now got. Much work remains to be done. The bar has to come out, of course (damn!), and I've got to refurbish the walls, floor and windows, not to mention drapes, desks, closets, storage space, etc. Then I've got to start installing equipment (oh boy!).

To be continued
Dave Moulton teaches at Emerson College and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. He is also obviously having a lot of fun at home!