[Clueless]

I hope you all don't mind a slight detour from the photo thread to talk for a moment about acoustics.

The original concept of the Music Room (explained on the website) is to be the acoustic instrument that perfectly complements whatever instrument is played within it (whether a solo voice, a choir, solo piano, classical guitar, jazz combo, power trio, etc). We scaled the room to be the largest sensible room for a solo voice, and yet have enough breathing room that we can easily record a chamber orchestra or a full jazz band. That's how we wound up with 24' ceilings and a 1380 sq ft floor plan.

One thing you might notice about the design is that the walls are parallel, which is very uncommon in studio design. I talked with Wes about this, and he explained that yes, when building smaller rooms, parallelism can lead to all sorts of modal buildups. But he assured me that once the room is large enough (and this one is), parallelism can work to one's advantage by creating a more uniform acoustic response, and allowing one to move mics around to change how the instrument is being recorded without radically altering how the room itself sounds. All well and good, but how will it sound?

As the walls started going up, I'd do a clap test, and I remember that very early on (when the walls were maybe 2' tall) you could hear a distinct echo. Moreso when the walls were 4' tall. When the walls were about 6' tall, up through about 12' tall, a new "feature" came into play: if you stood dead-center in the room and clapped, there was the very distinct decay pattern of echos spaced 50ms apart. The room had a ring to it! If you moved a few feet off center, you'd get just one echo, but dead center, it had a real RT-60.

Don't panic, I told myself: when the room is finished, there will be 10 6'x2' RPG T-fusor diffusors on the West wall and 10 12'x2' RPG T-fusor diffusors on the East wall, and those are surely going to go a long way toward spreading out the ring. But I noticed something new when the second diffusor pattern went up: no more ringing anywhere in the room! It's just a "live" room. Uncanny!

I'm sure the acoustic response of the room will continue to evolve, but it is encouraging to see that it is evolving toward our goal of acoustic excellence, one block at a time.