Recording Studio Rooms

A recording room is not a room with foam on the walls. It is a structure built inside another structure, separated from it at every path sound can take — the floor, the walls, the ceiling, the door, the ventilation and the conduits that feed it. Get that separation right and the treatment inside becomes a question of taste and purpose. Get it wrong and no amount of treatment will fix it.

• Floated floors — the studio floor carried on isolators, so footfall and machinery in the structure do not arrive through the slab.
• Isolated walls and ceilings — an inner leaf built clear of the base building, with the cavity and mass chosen for the isolation the room needs.
• Acoustic doors and windows — the weakest points in any shell, specified as assemblies with their seals and frames, not as leaves.
• Quiet ventilation — attenuators and duct routes sized so the room can be occupied for hours without the air system becoming the noise floor.
• Service penetrations — cable routes, sockets and light fittings detailed so they do not bridge the two structures.

Once the shell is quiet, the room is tuned for what is recorded in it. A live room, a vocal booth and a control room want different things: reverberation held at different times, early reflections controlled at the listening position, and low-frequency energy dealt with in the corners rather than left to sit in the room. Absorption, diffusion and trapping are set against the room's own dimensions and the work it is for.

A control room is a measuring instrument. Monitors and listening position are set geometrically, the first reflection points are treated, and the room is checked with an analyser rather than by ear alone — so what an engineer hears is the recording and not the room's opinion of it.

1. Noise survey in the existing shell, including the plant and traffic around it.
2. Isolation target agreed against what will be recorded, and when.
3. Structure designed — floating floor, inner leaves, doors, ventilation.
4. Room modelled in our lab, treatment set from the model.
5. Build and install by our own crews.
6. Commissioning: isolation and reverberation measured, and handed over as a report.

We hold a recording studio and echo chamber in house for testing, alongside the simulation software and analysers used on every project.

• Room dimensions, including the height available under the slab.
• What is recorded, and what sits on the other side of each wall, floor and ceiling.
• Access — door sizes, lift, stair, and whether the floor can take a floated build.
• Whether the room has to work while the rest of the building is occupied.