Designing A Tunable Recording Facility

When pondering the idea of music, whether it be live or replayed, there are certain laws that apply. The last few generations have brought about amazing technical wizardry, the fascination of finally being able to assign numbers as answers to so many problems and the ability to create values, specifications, quantities, standards and sums. All of this has enriched our lives with added convenience and has changed the realm of our everyday living. However, in the music world, technical wizardry can create its own dilemma. Music evolves from thoughts and emotions which create their own distinctive world -- a world made up of pace, time, rhythm, harmonics, crescendos, passages and the like. In essence, to play or recreate music is a momentary phenomenon -- a moment that is left for interpretation; a moment that stirs emotion; a moment that touches the human spirit and leaves an everlasting impression. It is the most pleasing part of one of our highest and adored senses. Preserving music and restoring it is of one of the highest callings. It gives us the ability to pass down a moment through time.

The simplest, and yet most intricate part of music phenomena has been the inner weaving of specific signatures we call musical notes. We have all heard musical notes displayed, with such mastery from the world's greatest performers, that they almost seem suspended with their own identity. This is the magic of music. It is the inner weaving of these musical notes, moved with emotion, to form meaning. This meaning is controlled by a particular function called "tuning". No sound uttered can live in harmony, on a consistent basis, without this function. How do we keep this musical note from falling prey to the environment while it goes through the storage and reproduction processes, let alone the production process? The answer is quite elementary, yet often overlooked. Not that long ago, it was believed that you could play a note and capture that note in an anechoic environment, but this has proved to be doomed and is not realistic to the human ear. We hear three dimensionally. It is easy to demonstrate. Let's use our own voices as our tool. Let's make a sound, any sound, and let's begin our tour. You notice that if we begin our tour outdoors, without many things around us except air, that the support to sustain notes (especially lower frequency notes) is somewhat lacking because of the small amount of mass in our throat and mouthpiece as compared to the space around us. As we step indoors, we immediately notice the change. This is called internal acoustical reaction. When we step indoors or around surfaces of mass, we are able to hear the effects of laminar flow. Simply stated, our voices become altered by the surfaces around us. These surfaces are busy absorbing, reflecting or vibrating, creating their own signature of the sound (or notes). Since the beginning of music, musicians quickly learned how to control and contour the signature of these sound waves of air pressure to conform to the musicians' desired results. Thus, we gave birth to instruments, the first mechanical and acoustical tuning devices. If we go back to our tour for a moment, we notice that when walking from room to room indoors, our voice, or notes, become dramatically altered. The instrument, because of its variable tunability, is built to adapt to not only each environment, but also has the unique ability to adapt to other instruments. The extension of this process is the ultimate control for meeting our objective of preserving and reproducing the music as desired.

The absolute idea of creating the perfect storage and reproduction process is to carry the flexibility and versatility of the musical instrument into the audio reproductive chain. Here we need a degree of understanding that sets us apart and separate from the technical world. Numbers apply to the absolute, but musical notes change from moment to moment. Let me give you an example. Let's take a single stringed instrument and apply a bow to the string. As we play this string, we can hear the musical note take on its identified character. This note will never quite be the same again because of many factors. The amount of pressure (weight) applied to the string, to the body and to the bow of the instrument cannot be exactly duplicated once played. Yet, our technology would read this note as a constant instead of a variable. It is important to not allow this absolute assignment to take place so that we are able to preserve the moment. Every part of the audio chain, no matter how insignificant it may seem, lends itself to changing the signature of the note that we have just decided to preserve, or alter, based on the requirements of the particular project. Without variable tuning, the note seems to lose all identity. By using variable tuning technology, we are able to alter, or align, the harmonic vibrations and keep the reproduced musical note as in tact as possible.

Now that we understand the objective, let's talk about the Tunable Recording Studio . When constructing any studio, it is important to look at the project from the "outside in". When building a studio from scratch, you must establish a balance between giving and receiving vibrations. If you are afforded a facility that can be built with minimal mechanical and acoustical "outside" influences, this would be optimal as you can make direct grounding paths which would allow you the perfect case scenario. If this is not the case, and you are using an existing structure, choose the room or the area of the building that has the least mechanical transfer interference. If there is still considerable or undesirable mechanical transfer which results in audible interference, you must "float" the new environment and stop most of the extraneous acoustical and mechanical buildup. This is commonly called your STC. I like to say your Sound or Signal Transfer Coefficient, or what can be defined as that the amount of sound transfer still taking place from the outside. Herein lies the danger -- we do not want to destroy the vibrancy needed for a tunable facility by the methods used to subdue the outdoor sound. After applying sound proofing techniques, it is essential to bring the internal structure back to a full frequency spectrum balance alignment . In other words, our goal is to create an environment that is an extension of the musical instrument in order to provide accurate reproduction of each note. Remember, the control room must be able to replicate what is happening in the performance room in order to create a true "mix down" or recorded representation of the live performance. Only after this is done can we feel secure in our manipulation or our direct-to-source recording techniques. You must know where you are to know where you are going.

The method used to create this facility is based upon the fundamentals of building a musical instrument. Each step of the signal path must be carefully guarded -- from the acoustics, to the microphones, to the cable conduits, through and to the mixer, to the source storage or recording equipment, and even to the playback monitors. Each needs to be carefully built and installed to create maximum tunability. The results then will be staggering.

Each particular part of the facility needs to be built with the most meticulous attention to detail. All the parts along the pathway must be able to reproduce a very linear full range frequency. Each board, for example, that is placed on the floor or wall surface must be individually prepared to create a uniform frequency response to assure the proper balance when assembled. All walls in the control room, as well as the performance center, must have the ability to sympathetically react to one another very much like tuning different instruments to play the same note. In-wall tuning devices will provide the flexibility needed to create the desired tonal pitch and linear control of its particular section. In conjunction with the laminar flow control that the Pressure Zone Controllers provide, the facility will be able to reproduce any desired musical note structure which will allow the engineer to have sovereignty over the recording session. Specially built grounding racks will also be made variable to assure the desired performance level of the electronic signal as it is traveling through each electronic component. Finally, the loudspeakers, again designed like the room and the instruments being played, will provide the tunability needed to accurately recreate the signal now being produced from the recorder. Never before have we come so close to touching the music. Between the miracle of electronic technology and the restoration of proper mechanical and acoustical properties, we can now feel assured that we have taken the necessary steps to pass on, to the next generation, the moments we have experienced.