THE SPACE

The studio is located in a 1200 square foot section of Newburyport's Tannery mill complex. Details about the individual rooms of the studio are below. There is a large drive-up exterior door in the hall to the right of the iso room which allows easy load in from outside. The back (bottom) of the control room is a raised platform with a big sofa in the median plane of the monitors. The area labelled storage now serves as the kitchen, with microwave, coffeepot, fridge and toaster.

    The control room is 15' x 20' with a sloping ceiling averaging 10'6" height and with windows to the iso and live rooms. The listening environment in the control room was carefully designed- no rack is taller than 32" to maintain an open median plane, and the acoustic treatment balances room response with the direct sound of the monitors. There is a comfy client sofa (sometimes a little too comfy) on a raised platform at the rear end of the room behind the center conference table/equipment rack.

The isolation room is a little bigger than the average booth, at about 12' x 9' with a 9' ceiling and with wall to wall carpet. It's heavily sonexed and tube trapped and sounds really dead. There are 10 mic feeds in this room and windows to the control and live rooms.

    The "live" room measures 17' x 24' or so with a 10' ceiling. It can be live or dead, depending on the needs of the session. Most of the keys are here, including the Yamaha baby grand, the Hammond, Rhodes, Wurlitzer, MidiBoard, K2000, Juno 106 and Matrix 6. There are 28 mic feeds and windows to the iso and control rooms. The live room also has wall to wall carpet. There are an additional two mic feeds and a headphone feed outside the live room in the hall, just in case. A speaker enclosure is also in the hall, with tie lines to the live room.
The lounge is 14' x 14' with two comfy sofas and a big purple chair, and there's a microwave, fridge, coffee maker, etc., at the end of the hall by the live room door. Good food, fresh baked bread and other baked goods (cookies!) are available in The Tannery. There's a bookstore down the hall and there are three massage studios in the building. You can get your hair cut and get your bike fixed here, too. It's a pretty big place.
The studio was purpose-built, using carefully designed walls and windows to keep the rooms as quiet as possible. All the rooms have raised, floated floors, and heavy, multi-layer doors. Walls are multiple layers of dense materials (really, really heavy-- believe me), and windows are multiple layers of laminated glass (four pieces of 1/4" glass with varying air space per window). Despite all the technicalities, it's a pretty comfortable place to hang out.