The Control Room

Dimensions: 28.6' W x 22.6' D x 15.1' H, 475 sq ft

Features:

RFZ design enhanced with dual symmetric 4-step QRD rear wall
Direct sight lines to: Music Room, Booths A & B, Sound Locks 1 & 2
48-channel Solid State Logic Duality console
Main Monitors: Dynaudio Acoustics M4S, soffit-mounted
Surround Monitors: Adam s2.5a, free-standing
Patchbay: integrated SSL Duality standard (see page 38), extended with additional 48 mic inputs from and line signals to booths (a total of 96 signals to and 96 signals from outboard analog gear).
Analog support
- Up to two optional 42U credenzas (3x 14U) connected to patchbay (48 inputs and 48 outputs per credenza supported)
- Credenzas not in use can be rolled out of the control room into storage
- Client-provided racks can be inserted using ELCO or XLR connectors
Video support: retractable flat-panel HD video monitor
475 sq ft
- High-quality alternate tracking room
- Comfortably seat up to 16 co-producers + Engineer
- 22.6' depth provides flat monitor response down to 25Hz (worst case)

Control Room Panel Interfaces

The two interface panels at the rear of the Control Room each provide:

12 Mic Inputs (6 normalled to console)
1 MADI Input and Output (32 channels each direction at 96 kHz)
4 Analog I/O Lines
8 Audio Tie Lines
8 AES Inputs
8 AES Output
2 SMPTE 311M Optical Input
Clock signal (wordclock, video ref, or house black)
2 Composite Video Output
2 Composite Video Input
2 SDI Video Output (SD, HD, or 3G-HD)
2 SDI Video Input (SD, HD, or 3G-HD)
4 Aviom personal mixer ports
4 CAT6 Ethernet ports (powered)
1 Dual-link DVI video output
2 10-GigE Ethernet ports
2 10-GigE SAN ports

Control Room Particulars

The Control Room can be used in a number of ways:

As a control room for tracking. All audio signals throughout the studio route to the control room patch bay, allowing the use of house- or client-supplied preamps, channel strips, and/or A/D converters.
As a tracking room itself. In this case the artist and the recording engineer share the room. Pass-throughs to the Sound Locks allow amplifiers to be isolated from the Control Room environment.
As a mix room for Stereo and surround formats up to 7.1 (with optional video sync and monitoring). Client-supplied hardware can be patched into the mix chain, up to and including a side-car analog mixer for those who prefer to work mostly in the analog domain.
As a hands-on classroom for up to 16 students.
As an environment for co-production. Projects that remain exclusively in the digital domain can be completely recalled from the facilities 100 TB storage array (41,000+ hours worth of 24-track audio at 96k/24 bit or 7500+ hours worth of HD Video) or reloaded from off-line media.

Analog vs. Digital

In the course of designing the studio, many decisions were easy (though the implementation of those decisions was not necessarily easy). The laws of physics and acoustics told us how large to make the Music Room and how to properly dimension and treat the Control Room. The rules of architecture taught us how to lay out the program of the many acoustic spaces so that they could be used in a variety of ways to achieve a variety of goals. But when it came to the question of what console will define the nerve center of the studio, the question of analog vs. digital proved a challenging one, because the choice was fundamental, and because one is not clearly better than the other in all possible use cases. We decided to build an analog/digital hybrid as follows.

The 48 channel SSL Duality console provides unquestioned sonic quality. Its ergonomics are second nature to the vast majority of top engineers around the world. No "second conversion" is required between analog channel and analog summing. And for those who have dreamed of mixing on a real SSL, this is a real SSL!

Yet the industry is in transition. Analog may be the preferred format of many engineers, but digital formats (ProTools in particular) have become the new medium of exchange. And digital audio is now practically the only format relevant to video. Thus, if we are to build a valid archive of audio and video, the digital format must be our common denominator. But what digital format(s)? What digital interfaces? And how far up the signal chain?

The building blocks of the digital revolution, CPUs, disk drives, network interfaces, and communication protocols have taught us all the power of commodity economics. Proprietary interfaces, no matter how wonderful, have never sustained their price premium (or even maintained parity performance) against commodity technologies that are in full swing. For this reason, we have built our digital core around non-proprietary data formats and protocols, using proprietary format converters where necessary to meet client needs. The digital audio core is based on a 1536x1536 Harrison Xrouter. With 8 MADI inputs and 8 MADI outputs, a single router unit can serve the entire needs of the studio, routing any digital input to any digital output across both the audio and video infrastructure. AES and ProTools format converters (as well as native MADI interfaces in all booths and the Control Room) make this routing totally transparent to any digital audio workstation. A side benefit of using the Harrison routing solution is the multiple digital audio workstations (and video editing suites) can be used simultaneously and none need convert their project from one format to another. Thus, from a single interface we can support a video editor using Nuendo, a musician using Digital Performer, an animator using Ardour, and a producer using ProTools without bouncing any out of their preferred environment and with each able to save their edits in their own native formats.

In the world of digial audio workstations and quad-core (or more) CPUs, track counts are virtually unlimited. In our analog digital hybrid, we support 256 input and 256 output tracks as follows:

72 analog input and 72 analog output
64 AES input and 64 AES output
96 channels on 3 MADI wires (input and output, each)

Of course that is on top of the potentially unlimited tracks that can be mixed prior to stemming out to the console.

We are very exited about the 5.1 surround capabilities of the console. The bus architecture supports not only a surround main mix, but also up to four independent surround stem mixes using the track busses in groups of six.

For clients who are straight-through in-the-box users, the control room remains a highly accurate monitoring environment. ProTools control is supported by the console (using HUI emulation) and can also be effected by using tactile computer interfaces (including a 21" Cintiq touch screen). A third possibility is to mix "Massenburg-style," which is to say using a D-command or a (split) D-control surface oriented sideways to the surround field. Such a setup can be accomplished without moving the Duality console.

In the end, we believe that the compromises we have made will prove to be the winning ones for our clients. Feel free to send us an email with your thoughts!