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    RA The Book Vol 1: The Recording Architecture Book of Studio Design
    RA The Book Vol 1: The Recording Architecture Book of Studio Design
    RA The Book Vol 1: The Recording Architecture Book of Studio Design
    Ebook314 pages1 hour

    RA The Book Vol 1: The Recording Architecture Book of Studio Design

    By Roger D'Arcy, Hugh Flynn and Neil Waving

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    RA:The Book - The Recording Architecture Book of Studio Design was first published as a single, hardcover volume in 2011 and which has sold in over fifty countries to critical acclaim. A necessarily large format dictated by the detailed drawings it contained, RA:The Book was unavoidably heavy and costly to produce and ship. This iBook version is the first of three stand alone volumes which will hopefully make this essential guide to recording studio design more accessible. It includes a new introduction with previously unavailable photographs. The following description is for the original hardcover: Established by Roger D'Arcy and Hugh Flynn on April 1st 1987 Recording Architecture has risen to become one of the premier recording studio design companies in the world. First Commissioned by ex Def Leppard guitarist Pete Willis for Blue Room studios In Sheffield swiftly followed by projects such as Hulgrave Hall, for composer Keith Hopwood the company has grown to design key installations around the world. Now for the first time they will be publishing a history of these ground breaking designs covering all aspects of architectural, acoustic and interior design of these studios and spaces specifically related to sound on a project by project basis. In a Career spanning Three decades Recording Architecture has virtually unrivalled experience in the design of studios which range in size and purpose from classical orchestral, residential, mixing, mastering, post production, film dubbing, video editing and rehearsal studios over 40 countries worldwide. Stating his desire to expand awareness with the new book Roger D Arcy states Over the years, and perhaps surprisingly, the only available books on recording studio design seem to have been written by individuals with little or no qualified background in Architecture or design in the field - we are trying show the detailed architectural/acoustic input behind a successful design with each studio study showing drawings in large format . This is not a theoretical guide but a detailed presentation of tried and tested techniques as applied to real, built projects in many of the case studies, the actual drawings issued for construction are reproduced. The examples illustrate not only what we think should be done but what was in fact physically (and successfully) implemented in a wide variety of situations from small, private project studios to large, commercial land mark studios such as Lansdowne and CTS. Examples range in scope from individual spaces and rooms to multi studio facilities and cover the two principal strands of recording and mixing: MUSIC studios recording (tracking), mixing and mastering (including cutting) project to orchestral in scale examples have been taken from the private, commercial and educational sectors. POST PRODUCTION studios voice over (dubbing), FX recording ( Foley ), film mix studios (dubbing theatres) from small voice over studios for TV to large Dolby Premier Certified film mix theatres. Contents include hundreds of photographs together with detailed plans and construction drawings - including comprehensive specifications of materials and techniques - showing exactly how these environments were created.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherM-Y Books
    Release dateFeb 2, 2015
    ISBN9781909908918
    RA The Book Vol 1: The Recording Architecture Book of Studio Design

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      Book preview

      RA The Book Vol 1 - Roger D'Arcy

      "Jonathan (Miller, M-Y Books) is trying to persuade me to write a book too, encouraging perhaps, and I do intend to start sometime early next year. It might well be a tome since I joined the industry in 1954 at IBC when it was all very much in its infancy."

      The universal and everyday experience of sound:

      Every day of our lives we are exposed to sound in our environment in one form or another, even before birth. Though we generally take sound for granted, we naturally become more aware of it when listening to music, whether live (at a concert or broadcast on radio or television), recorded (on cd, vinyl, or downloaded on our computers and iPods) or accompanying film (in cinemas or on dvd) and in television programmes and advertising.

      The absolute need to record (or evaluate the recording process) in an acoustically controlled environment:

      Recorded sound, particularly music entertainment, is almost universally available and in order to achieve the best possible results and for it to translate into such widely varying situations and formats, the recording engineer must record in a controlled environment. For those professionals reading this, that is taken for granted - if you are not hearing an accurate representation of what your music sounds like during recording, then there is little chance of producing a high quality end result. I have had the none too pleasant opportunity to record in a number of studios over the years where the acoustic-architecture has been appalling, where a controlled and balanced room frequency response did not exist and the client was not at all happy with the results - It doesn’t sound like that when I play it at home, what did you do?

      How many times have you heard someone remark: "I went into this or that building/concert hall/room and it sounded odd when I spoke or I could not clearly hear the music/the speaker" or There was too much echo et cetera. The acoustic in which we hear sound has an enormous bearing. In concert halls and other large enclosed spaces not particularly well designed with acoustics for listening in mind, a common defect can be that of excessive reverberation - the slow decay of speech or music (a long reverberation time) due to the repeated reflections occurring at the hard, relatively smooth surfaces of walls, floors and ceilings before the energy is finally dissipated.

      The need for a balanced approach to acoustic control and the avoidance of excessive high frequency absorption:

      An extreme and unfortunately all too common solution would be to cover the all of the surfaces with sound absorbent materials but this can lead to over correction of the reverberation time, particularly at higher frequencies (frequencies vital for the harmonics which define the very timbre and quality of the sound) producing a deadening effect, most uncomfortable for performers (of both music and spoken word) and the listener. Many older studios and control rooms were treated thus by acoustic consultants with an outdated mind set.

      Sabine and the beginnings of architectural-acoustic investigation:

      As early as 1900, an American physicist (Wallace Clement Sabine, 1868-1919), became a pioneer in architectural acoustics, devising experiments to investigate the impact of absorption on reverberation time which he was ultimately able to formally define. Sabine’s formula still helps define an important characteristic for gauging the acoustical quality of a room, providing the ability to predict how wet or dry a room is likely to be.

      Sabine derived an expression for the duration T (time) of the residual sound to decay below the audible intensity and laid down three simple rules which must be followed if satisfactory results are to be obtained. 1) The sound heard must be loud enough. 2) The quality of the sound must remain unaltered - that is to say the relative intensities of the components must be preserved. 3) The successive sounds of speech or music must remain distinct. i.e. there must be no confusion due to overlapping of syllables - whether sung or spoken. These are basic principles which hold good today. The first auditorium designed by Sabine, applying his new knowledge in acoustic architecture, was the new Boston Music Hall (Symphony Hall), formally opened on October 15, 1900 and still considered one of the finest concert halls in the world.

      Thus a new branch of physics, architectural-acoustics was born. It was on the 29th of October 1898, at Harvard University, that he established the precise nature of the relationship between these quantities and placed the subject on a scientific footing long before the invention of the recording studio and the new breed of architects and designers that was to emerge into a new world of recording architecture.

      The Precedence Effect, the control of standing waves and the importance of other acoustic parameters:

      Reverberation time is no longer considered to be the only acoustic parameter that must be addressed in a recording studio. It is vital to consider the Precedence Effect, the psycho-acoustic phenomen RQ whereby the brain fails to separately distinguish a reflected sound arriving within a few milliseconds of the direct sound (for example from the monitor speaker in a control room) effectively perceiving a single and misleadingly enhanced sound. The best control rooms I have ever worked in are those in which the sound arriving at the ear is not coloured by the room or by multiple standing waves (by the monitoring system itself, which must deliver a faithful reproduction of the original instrument/s). Achieving such lack of colouration gives the engineer the chance to equalise the various sound components and to be creative in the final production without the worry of "what will it sound like when I play it at home or in the car?" The above, of course, holds equally good for post production mixing rooms for film and television.

      The significance of wavelength variation over the audio spectrum:

      The generally accepted frequency sound spectrum for audio is 20Hz to 20Khz, which in it’s self poses a potential problem. The wavelength at 20Hz is a huge 17.2 metres and at 20Khz just 17.2 mm. For large halls, such long low frequency wavelengths may be easily accommodated, but not so in many recording studios. Especially in control rooms, the studio designer is often constrained by size and space limitations which generate complex and difficult design criteria. Mathematically, one could not squeeze a pint into a quart pot. Primarily in the 70s, this was overcome by large amounts of deep absorption and bass trapping which engulfed a large part of the room - not at all satisfactory if space is at a premium – and created an unbalanced, overly deadened acoustic. The art of tuned and low frequency membrane absorption, pioneered at The BBC, appeared to be lost! The effective use of diffusion rarely made an appearance until the 90s.

      The importance of combining architectural/acoustic disciplines in a coherent design strategy and the value of experience:

      From architects not understanding the technical and acoustic needs of studios to acousticians not grasping the ergonomic and three dimensional practicalities of architectural space, I have met them all - architects caring only for abstract visual statements, acousticians preferring to bury their heads in data rather than looking and listening to what is actually going on and the builders grinning with a reassuring "Don’t worry, Guv’, I’ve built studios before."

      The one designer I had previously encountered in my professional career who actually seemed to grasp the issues, (a career which started in the early years of this still relatively young industry), was acoustic-engineer/architect (and significantly, clarinettist), Sandy Brown. He was responsible for the original design of Lansdowne Studios where I cut my sound-engineering teeth with the likes of The Dave Clark Five, big band and jazz groups, and working alongside the legendary maverick, Joe Meek. I eventually acquired the studio in the 1980s. Decades later, RA too seemed to recognize the need to bring together the aesthetic, ergonomic and technical requirements of a recording studio into a single, cohesive architectural/acoustic design solution.

      Jonathan Miller and the rise of Recording Architecture:

      RA were first introduced to me in 1988 by a young engineer I had personally taken under my wing at CTS and Lansdowne, one Jonathan Miller. In those years, Studio 1 was invariably full with orchestral sessions for the great films of the era (Full Metal Jacket, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, numerous Bonds…..) but Studio 2, though a good large space, was tired and old and the control room acoustics were based on outdated theories and techniques, as for many control rooms of the 80s. The spaces just did not work and were consequently empty most of the time and so, I invited RA to have a go – but just the control room. I liked what they had to say and the way they said it but I thought I’d let them prove themselves. I detected an underlying and solid understanding of acoustic principles and a good, practical architectural eye - but with a refreshing and innovative angle. The result was a resounding success. RA applied their recently developed Black Box technique, a prefabricated and bolt-on solution for all the key acoustic control elements. They effectively threw out all the old 70s treatment

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