Designing a studio with proper acoustics

The first and largest component of the ultimate web sound studio is the room itself. A proper recording environment with pleasing acoustics and no echo or noise is essential to high-quality recording. (For more information about optimum room acoustics, see Chapter 3.) Successfully building a great sound studio depends largely on having the proper budget to design and remodel a room from scratch or the ingenuity to repurpose an existing room on a budget.

Pro option

Money and space permitting, most professional recording studios are customized from the ground up to have the ideal acoustics and optimum recording functionality. Professional studios generally have a minimum of two rooms: a control room for mixing and monitoring and a soundproof recording room for capturing the audio signal. The control room is where the audio engineer resides during a recording or mix-down session and contains mixing boards, a digital audio workstation, studio reference monitors, and so on. The recording room is where the musicians, voice-over artists, and microphones reside. Generally, the control room is directly adjacent to the recording room with a soundproof window built in-between so the engineer can supervise microphone placement and communicate with the recording artists.

Professional studios optimize good room acoustics by placing high-frequency-absorbing audio-grade foam on the walls and ceilings, bass baffles and traps on the floors and corners, and reflective ...

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