SaS has been chosen by Los Angeles based singer/songwriter Taylor Locke to design and build him his dream studio.

The projected design will have a large tracking room of about 500 sq. ft. and a control room of about 300. Designs are being finalized now with the expectation to begin breaking ground and pouring foundations within the month.

Today we started work on the Sunset Boulevard, location of the brand new Vintage King Los Angeles Showroom. Regular photo updates will follow the progress.

…and it doesn’t sound good to me…I searched online to see if I’m alone in thinking something’s wrong and found this excellent article which I want to share…

“The Myth of the Walt Disney Concert Hall

Should you end up in L.A. …

Sunday March 28

By A. Michael Noll

CONTINUED

. . . in my opinion.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall cost nearly one-quarter billion dollars, and for this princely sum the sound should be excellent throughout the hall, with no excuses. However, the sound quality is not good and has harshness in the upper frequencies, while the lower frequencies seem missing in some portions of the hall. The music sounded worse to me than at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion just across the street, the former home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The audience surrounds the orchestra on the stage of the Disney Hall: front, sides, and behind. I was able to sit in two different locations during two separate concerts. Both locations would normally have been expected to have excellent sound, but did not. One location was in the rear center of the first balcony. In this location, the lower frequencies of the double basses, bass drum and timpani were missing, while the violins had a very harsh, strident quality. The other location was on the right side, nearly above the double basses and celli. Here the lower frequencies of these instruments were quite strong, but the timpani were weak and the violins still sounded harsh.

Wood, we have been told, is good for concert halls–after all, violins are made of wood. Wooden floors can add resonance to a hall, but not when the wood is installed against concrete or in strong curved structures, as in the Disney Hall. In this case, the wood simply acts as a highly reflective surface, making sound waves bounce around and impact against the surfaces, thus creating a harsh acoustic environment. The curved flat wooden walls and ceilings might look nice, but it is a myth that they create a good acoustic environment.

We attend concerts to hear the performers–not the audience. Coughs, whispers, candy wrappers, and feet shuffling are amplified and heard throughout the all–by other audience members and also by the musicians on stage. This is because of all the hard wood floors. And that is why carpets were invented and used on the floors of most halls–namely, to absorb audience noise. This kind of blunder is not what one would expect from an experienced acoustician.

One positive note, the hall itself is absolutely quiet, with no noise from the ventilation system or from outside traffic, although one feels air moving through the hall. The public spaces outside the auditorium are intimate with many fascinating nooks and crannies, although the large gathering space of a formal lobby is missing. But there is a fine space for pre-concert talks, and the ushering staff is friendly and helpful. One little nook is called the “student listening room” and is located within the auditorium but behind the huge reflective walls. The sound there is impressive in the lower frequencies, although the highs sound distant, as one would expect, and there was nothing to see other than the back of the walls.

There is also a subjective dimension: how a h all looks can affect how many people believe it sounds. The light-colored wood walls and ceiling of the Disney Hall thus can make some people believe it has a warm wooden sound. There are some who believe that the change in paint color from a white undercoat to the final dark blue decades ago somehow affected negatively the early reviewers of New York’s Philharmonic Hall’s “ill acoustic”. Thus some of us close our eyes while judging the acoustics of a hall.

What can be done about the Walt Disney Hall? Unfortunately, the design of concert halls seems to be more of an art than a science with much good luck required for success. New York City’s Philharmonic Hall opened in the 1960s and was immediately cursed with acoustic problems, although some seats had fantastic sound. A lengthy series of renovations, including a renaming as Avery Fisher Hall, compounded the problems until the hall became uniformly bad.

We do know that the uniformity of the decay in reverberation is probably more important than the actual reverberation time. We know to avoid parallel surfaces that can create standing waves. We know that concave walls can focus the sound-creating echoes. We are learning that the surface of the walls and ceiling should disperse the sound, and large highly reflective surfaces should be avoided. But we know much less about how to repair poor acoustics. And the New York experience shows that poor acoustics can actually be made worse through tinkering.

In the case of the Disney Hall, clearly the aisles must be carpeted and vinyl tiles used under the seats to absorb audience noise. This might also reduce the overall harshness. Some of the low frequencies are being absorbed by a reflective wall behind the orchestra and also by the surrounding audience. Reflective clouds over the orchestra might help here but would create serious issues with sight lines. We did notice that the auditorium itself is a huge cube with sloping walls, almost as if expecting that some day the seats and reflective walls would need to be changed. That day might be sooner than later, once Los Angeles gets over the Hollywood excitement of the visual impact of the new hall.

When you are next in the Los Angeles area, do visit the Disney Hall, at the very least to see an impressive work of architecture. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is one of the great orchestras, well worth hearing, even if the acoustics of the Disney Hall are not great. The musical performance quality of the Shostakovich symphonies that I heard was superb. Visit too the new Cathedral of Our Lady of Los Angels, two blocks up the street, where a very fine pipe organ awaits you.”

..and it will sound terrible.

Today a potential client called me to talk about having a studio designed and built. He was well prepared and had some very good questions to ask, among which were “…and what do you think of ‘product XXX’, product ‘YYY’ and product ‘ZZZ’?” (and he named three highly advertised and consequently well known and lavishly priced specialist studio products). These items cost several times what the Home depot equivalent would…so what am I to advise?
Some people really feel the need to wear the Rolex, drive the Ferrari, and…you get the picture…but is the Ferrari really going to get you along the 405 any faster? If anything you risk looking more of a knob crawling along at 20 mph in your overheating Eurobruiser (and anxiously squinting at your Rolex doesn’t make the journey any shorter). And with reference to getting true acoustic performance from a studio what you need is a subtle understanding of how the materials perform in the real world, and how they work together. Just as with the subject of studio monitors, I think that you are far better trusting your own ears than reading charts. When reading published test results it can be a good idea to ask yourself if the test is a true analog of a real world application. Unfortunately many studios featuring ‘high end’ products have seen them so ineptly specified and/or applied that they are virtually useless. Sometimes we need flexibility and motion to waste energy, sometimes we require a true air gap, other times an airtight seal, and sometimes we need rigidity. Without a thorough understanding of what part we require each section of an acoustic assembly to play, we run the considerable risk of designing and building a lemon.

Properly applied, the ‘Home Depot option’ can achieve excellent results, providing the designer understands where they should be looking for rigidity, where they should be looking for weight e.t.c. Good design is often reflected in ‘bang for the buck’. It’s very possible to begin cooking with the finest ingredients and still prepare an inedible feast.

Good design will save money every time.

I’m at the imagineering phase (thanks Walt!) of a certain studio project right now. I’ve clambered all over the site and started to form a picture of what the potential client will appreciate and need. I’ve produced dozens of sketches, purely for my own benefit (and to organize my thoughts) and I’m ending up with a kind of medieval watch tower built into the side of a hill. Today I went to speak with a neighbor of mine who’s Inspector of Bridges and Tunnels for the State of California, sitting down with this Grizzly Bear of a man and a couple of bottles of strong cider we discussed the best way to build a tower on a Californian hillside, and I was very happy to know it CAN be done. We’ll have to sink big concrete casons down into the bedrock, and tie our rebar framework to them, then we’d spray the whole framework with ‘Shotcrete’ a special concrete mix that can be sprayed up to 2000 feet from its source. I imagine the tower to end up about 40′ diameter at its base and then rising up about 30′ with a Hungarian style spire on top of about another 25′ in which will freely hang the broad range baffles necessary to soak up the vented low end which will be trapped by the heavy concrete walls of the structure.
Naturally I’m going to come up with a much more conventional version as well, but I think that recording studios are a wonderful opportunity to let your imagination really fly, and hope you’ll spark inspiration in the many musicians who will use them in the years to come.