How it all works, sound-wise (or, the acoustical goodies)

The studio, as I said before, is in half-a-duplex in a fairly isolated residential section of uptown (literally) Montpelier. Vermont being what it is, the home-studio zoning issue is no big deal. In 1987, a fire destroyed the house on the site, including Mike's home studio. After some interim solutions proved unsatisfactory, Mike decided to rebuild on the site, which is a very small one severely constrained by property lines. There is no yard. In the new plan, half the site went for a residential house and half for the studio - the two are basically a single structure with decoupled floors. The outer dimensions of the studio half-building are approximately 22 feet wide by 48 feet long - tiny! Mike has fit a 16x20 acoustic room, a 12x22 control room, plus small entrance lounge, kitchenette/bath, archives and tech space. The ceiling height in the acoustic room is 16+ feet. Because Mike was starting from scratch, he was able to build in low-cost PVC conduits for mic lines, etc., below the decoupled studio and control room floors.

Because of the location, outside noise is not an issue. Every hour or so a car goes by, and that's about it. Even so, he went to some effort to get decent isolation, and the result is quite quiet. The interior noise floor was below what I could measure (26 dBA using a low-noise B&K 4003 supplied by Mike). The acoustic room, with its irregular shape and high ceiling, has little problem with standing waves. Mike has also installed novel low-cost high-frequency diffusers on the walls. The room is pretty dead, with an RT60 measured at approximately .4 seconds across the audio spectrum.

Mike, having just pulled an all-nighter before I came up to measure, was beginning to miss on a few cylinders and forgot to ask me to remeasure the room with the rug pulled up so we could see what the RT60 was with the hardwood floor. I would guess that the room would sound distinctly brighter, and might measure an extra tenth of a second longer at high frequencies. Whatever, the room is too small to produce a stereophonic recording of an acoustic ensemble with serious live reverberance, and Mike's entirely sensible solution is to make such recordings on location. The room works extremely well, however, for tracking and the small multi-miced pop/rock/jazz session (oh, say, a drum kit, keyboards, rhythm guitar and bass), plus acoustic solo acts. In the best Vermont Verit© style, the "vibes" of the room are folksy, comfortable and unprepossessingly funky. Not a bad place to hang out and play, not bad at all. Comfy, if you know what I mean.

The control room is comparatively narrow, with a peculiar double-ended layout. At one end, looking through a small window into the acoustic room, is the console(s), with Tannoy NFM-8 monitors on either side of the glass, about 4' apart. A video monitor is neatly soffitted in a sloping trap above the glass. Tape transports and the editing station run along one side wall, and synths, signal processing, a sofa, etc. are on the other side wall. At the back of the control room are reference monitors, a pair of B&W 801-2 Matrix speakers on stands set out in the room on either side of a rear entrance door/mudroom that intrudes into the room about 3 feet. Mike does his tracking, overdubbing, mixing, and all of the normal utility studio operations over the Tannoys. He does his critical listening, editing and client approval playbacks by turning around to listen to the B&Ws. The little video remote controls he uses for editing are mounted on a computer monitor extension arm (made by Rubbermaid - really a nice piece of hardware) that he can pull out and work while sitting on the median plane facing the B&Ws. It sounds clunky, complicated and confusing, but when you're there it actually makes considerable sense and Mike really knows his way around it.

The noise floor of the studio, with the multitrack off, is almost as quiet as the acoustic room except for one anomaly that only a noise analysis geek would notice: raster noise at 17 kHz. from the main video monitor, which is always on in its hardwired standby mode. It looks terrible in the spectral analysis, but was inaudible to me, and Mike allowed as how he'd never exactly, er, noticed it before. Aside from it, the room was about 30 dBA SPL. The multitrack added about 6 dB.

Air handling is simple enough: the acoustic room has a variable speed ceiling fan that Mike just turns off when its time to hit the ol' record ready button. The control room is cooled by a window-unit air conditioner mounted in the back wall of the adjoining tech-room/archive and run through baffled and lined drier hose ducting to a cold air feed through the door into the Control room. This knocks down the noise of the AC by about 20 dB, for a cost of maybe $25 in parts, a little carpentry, and a definitely rustic look.

The control room is extremely dead, with an RT60 generally under .2 seconds, even at low frequencies. Mike has done considerable ray-tracing study of the room and has gone to considerable length to suppress or diffuse early HF reflections from the monitors to the listeners on the median plane. In addition, he has installed some rather massive traps in the cavities on either side of the mudroom door, behind the B&Ws, plus a huge (88 cubic feet) trap in ceiling. The result is commendably flat response in the room, even at low frequencies. Response curves of the B&Ws taken from 15" from the midrange and then at 6', which was well into the reverberant field and includes the early reflections, show strong consistency, which indicates that the room is supporting the speakers, not interfering with them.

The subjective performance of the B&Ws is excellent (as it should be!). The stereo image is narrow (meaning between the speakers), stable and solid, and appears to originate from in front of the speakers, as I would expect in a system where the room has been so thoroughly damped. Kind of an 800-lb. gorilla nearfield® (er, in-yer-face®) monitoring system, which works very well for general purpose recording production work. In place of Auratones, Mike uses Radio Shack Minimus 77s.