90° SQUARED
18 August 2014
Newcastle’s Musos Corner, recently launched its new multi-purpose 90º Studio Training Facility, which features a fully functional recording studio showroom and control room, as well as practice and training rooms (you can read about the launch here). However, utilising the facility’s square rooms presented a challenge for project planning.
Allon Silove, Director for the facility enlisted, Amber Technology’s Daniel Sievert to consult on planning the facility, with a major concern being the natural acoustics of the different spaces. Particularly as 90°’s owner Andrew Lindsay chose to make the room configurations square; a less than optimal situation when it comes to acoustics.
Silove explains the decision: “Square rooms are far from being the ideal acoustic space configuration. Parallel walls, floors and ceilings create a multitude of standing-wave issues; the Gyprock walls are also highly reflective and low frequencies have nothing to absorb them. We also had a very large glass viewing window between the control room and tracking room.”
Sievert produced a 3D room model for the acoustic treatment plan: “The design of all the rooms had to incorporate a substantial amount of infrastructure including cabling, television / computer screens, air-conditioning, ceiling / wall mounts, windows and doors. I offered suggestions of treatment that would work harmoniously with the planned infrastructure whilst being flexible enough to re-arrange if layouts and infrastructure changed during the setup process.”
Silove chose to outfit the facility with the Primacoustic line of acoustic treatments, in order to: “achieve two workable audio production spaces that would demonstrate how anyone could create a complete an affordable studio environment, regardless of their current space.”
Sievert explains, “The main challenge from a layout perspective was the positioning of door and windows in the recording and control rooms. The proximity of some doors to corners of the rooms meant that Maxtraps (bass traps) could not be used. The guys at 90º Studio solved this problem by using Fulltraps mounted flat on the wall in the affected corners.The front wall of the control room was designed to have at least two large screens mounted on it, so the size and positioning of treatment had to take that into account. The solution was a mix of Scatter Blocks and Control Columns.”
Silove reports on the end result of the treatment plan, stating that the tracking room: ” is now a relatively ‘flat’ acoustic space, able to facilitate an entire band-at-once session while still maintaining a comfortable SPL for working and performing.”
“We also decided to apply the acoustic treatment to our Lab room (housing 6 computer/digital workstations and a Master/Teacher Station) and the remainder of our adjoining music tuition rooms. The outcome has been a very successful conversion of ordinary square rooms to more usable and acoustically balanced music and production spaces.”
Sievert also offers his opinion on the spaces after treatment: “It was definitely clarity of the sound in the rooms that I was most impressed with. The rooms still have a pleasant ‘space’ to their sound but the treatment seems to be removing any ring or echo.”
Musos Corner already services nearly 200 schools every year, along with professional development programs for secondary teachers and also offers commercial audio courses. The training covers the full gamut of software to hardware configurations, acoustic treatment solutions and studio design.
If you’re interested in doing a course at 90º or to book the studio, check: www.musoscorner.com.au
Excerpts from Press Release
[…] on creating an acoustic treatment for the facility’s stylised square rooms (you can read that, here). Using a 3D model of the studio, the trio incorporated a “substantial amount of […]