Control Room: Glass vs. Video - Design Suggestions Welcomed

Hello All, THE LOVE I've been reading through your site for months now trying to soak up as much information as I can. And like so many, I admire and appreciate all the talented people who are so willing to share their expertise. This is my first post, so hopefully I have provided enough information without rambling. THE QUESTION My big question is: How practical is video in lieu of a control room window? I know there are serious latency issues, usually something like 6 video frames of delay between in & out with modern digital video equipment (about 200 milliseconds). So how badly does the recording community hate video for visual contact? THE SITUATION I'm in the final design phase of constructing a new building for my install business and audio & video recording purposes. I expect to do some commercial recording ( based on past experience it will be mostly rock & contemporary Christian). Although in the past we've recorded very eclectic acoustic folk music and even madrigal choirs at other locations, I expect this building will primarily be used for my own projects ( rock & blues ) & my teenage son's rock projects. (translation = loud). I know visual contact will be important, especially for the outside clients. At the same time, those are the projects that will benefit most from a more spacious control room. My current design doesn't easily allow for a window between the control room and the main recording space unless I cut the control room size in half and rotate it 90 degrees. I can maintain some semblance of optimum room ratios if I shrink it, but I'm afraid it will be a little too cozy with more than 3-4 people. THE BUILDING I'm building with ICF (Insulated Concrete Form), which means I'll only have one good shot at getting everything right before the cement trucks arrive. We're fairly close to a road that gets a lot of truck traffic and I need all the isolation I can get. The energy efficiency and STC ratings of the solid concrete shell are VERY good, but obviously not very forgiving if you change your mind after the concrete is poured. I've also allowed for a couple solid concrete interior walls as well, to provide solid bulkheads on either side of the central stairwell. In addition to bearing their share of the load from the floor above, these bulkhead walls/stairwell will provide a sizable airlock between the Control Room and Main Recording Room. The building will be 32ft. W x 55ft. L (OD). There will be 12ft. of height from the top of the basement slab to the bottom of the floor above - hopefully netting around 11ft. of useable height when all is said and done. This level will be mostly below grade, but not entirely as the lot slopes front to back. The floor above this level will also have another large wide open live room approximately 28.75ft. x 19.25ft. (ID) - with 14ft. cathedral ceiling. This is directly above the control room and will be used for rehearsal and a more live recording space - and wired to the main control room in the lower level. This ground floor level will also have a roomy garage above the Main Recording Room. These two floors will be separated by... you guessed it... a 14 inch slab of insulated concrete using steel reinforced LiteDeck. I've uploaded a SketchUp model of the 3 floors. I know there are a lot of parallel walls, but I can deal with that after we get a solid building with reasonable proportions. MORE LOVE Thanks again to everyone involved in the great site, I'm looking forward to your input!

Hi DvdHawk - I am _not_ one of the resident experts, but, from a musician's point of view, I would much rather be able to see my mates through glass than througha monitor system. The video approach seems too sterile to me. Having said that, the whole point of things is to optimize the quality of each room's acoustics. I would counter my own statement above by saying that if using the video hookup lets you improve the sound quality and isolation characteristics of your rooms by avoiding the use of glass, go for it. Regards, Shaun McArthur

Thanks shamca, I appreciate your input! As a lifelong musician myself I'm torn between the issue of form and function. I would really prefer the window(s), but with my current layout I don't see how to do it without making the control room really cramped. I'm hoping some of the designers out there can visualize a workable approach that can give us a control-room-with-a-view without compromising the structural strength and acoustic mass of the concrete building / bombshelter. I occassionally do video editing work, which is why I gave my control room a small theater feel for the client viewings. That means I will need a big HD monitor, as big a sweet-spot as I can get, and comfy seating for 6 - 8 anyway. As a musician I've recorded tracks in a number of studios over the past 20 years and I have seen the gamut of - great results in a converted one-stall garage, and a studio with a million-dollar live room that sounds like crap! (sorry, but you know who you are). Some of the most commercially successful recordings from this region were done in the former, nothing worth a shit (if you'll pardon my French) has ever come out of the latter. Any many many studios comfortably somewhere in-between. As a recording engineer I've been doing location recording for 12 years, because I didn't have a studio building, and I guess I'm just accustomed to cueing people through the talkback and not having any visual feedback between me and the musicians. They are at the other end of the snake doing what they do, and I'm at my end doing what I do. Far from ideal, but that's just been the norm for me. The goal for me is always to make the musicians comfortable, so it feels natural to them, and as organic as possible. The approach I had in mind with this building design is more along the lines of a soundstage. I would encourage the band to play together in the big room during tracking as they would at a rehearsal or performance. At the very least, I believe the rhythm section needs to be in close proximity to one another. I would keep the guitar amps etc. in iso-booths, but let the guitar players themselves in the live room with the drummer and bass player - so they could all see each other and interact. If the guitarist needs the reactance between his hi-gain amp and pick-ups, either he can go in the booth, or overdub his final track later with his amp turned to 11 in the big room. If the bass player doesn't like the sound of my Avalon U5, he can go stand in the yard with his SVT cabinet (':D'). I want all the keyboards direct and on separate channels, if there's a B3 - the Leslie is in the next room. In other words; isolate the sounds, but not the musicans. I do plan to have some glass in the iso-booths so that a singer(s) could see his/her bandmates while doing a scratch-vocal. So in this scenario, the only one banished to video monitoring is me - or whoever else is left to engineer this mess from the control room. And that to me would be a giant leap forward from what I've been doing for the past 12 years on-location. My belief with the soundstage mentality is; if I can proportion and acoustically treat the two large rooms so they sound great with loud, live acoustic drums everything else will be gravy. The upstairs room will be more open and lively, with the downstairs room being a little more subdued acoustically. I honestly don't foresee being the kind of studio that has an in-house grand piano any time soon (as much as I'd like one), so I'm leaning away from building a separate drum booth in either of the large spaces at the present time. For more folk style music, with multiple acoustic sources, I've had success with moveable folding foam-lined gobos to give some natural sounding separation to acoustic groups while maintaining comfortable sight-lines. It's been my experience that those kinds of groups rarely want to overdub instruments anyway. There's nowhere to hide in the more acoustic genres, so they really tend to listen to, and rely on, each other moreso than rockers - generally speaking. There just aren't as many things you can 'fix in the mix' with folk / acoustic music. It either feels right or it doesn't. With the acoustic groups I've recorded anyway, it's usually been sink or swim - as a group. And if one member doesn't like it, they all go back and do it again, and again if necessary until everybody is satisfied. (Or until the dreaded 'goodnuff' monster gets them.) As a player, I know it's important that the musicians feel connected. I want them to be able to put all of their energy into the song. I want them to feel as relaxed as possible so they can focus on the music, not the process of making music. I'm good-to-go with a great headphone system and I know they'll be able to hear one another, but for me, the magic is in the interaction that happens on some other level. With my Aviom audio monitoring system, if I wanted to, I could literally put any two people 1000ft. apart, each with a personal headphone mixer via 2 x 500' cat5 cables going opposite directions with less than a millisecond of latency end to end. But I think that extreme defeats the purpose of music. In that case you would really feel like you were phoning it in. I don't want the video to create that same effect, but there's certainly no practical way to put glass between the downstairs control room and an upstairs secondary recording room. I don't think I can afford a soundproof 2-way periscope! - although someone probably makes one. Which brings us back to the video monitoring for a second, as I think about it, there may be an upside. It may alleviate some of that "Oh my God, I feel like I'm in a fishbowl and EVERYBODY is watching me redo my guitar solo for the 229th time, and I liked the 2nd take, but everybody else said "no, you can do it better than that", and I've been butchering it ever since, why do I play it perfectly until the red light comes on? alright,...so I screwed up! - don't you roll your eyes at me, oh man the band is gonna hate me 'cause I'm costing us so much money everytime I mess up, but I don't care because I'm a perfectionist, and part of that is MY money, and I won't settle for less, because I'm going to have to live with this recording forever, so if <<insert other guitar player's name here>> doesn't like it, let's see him come in here and do it in OOOONE TAAAAAAKE!!! You can all just go.... ---- Ooh, sorry had a flashback! Can I get a witness?? Again, I'd welcome anybody's input or advice on any of these and other burning issues as well. Thanks again and all the best, Dave

I see that this was quite a long time ago. Did you ever have any luck with it? I am trying to figure out a good video system for a friend who is doing a basement recording studio. Michael

For what it's worth, there's no rule that dictates that the controlroom window has to be at the front, ahead of the desk, between the monitors. Many studios have windows on the left or right, and in many cases this is full length or in some cases a sliding door. Have a look at some of John's examples. If you do go with a video system, then a dedicated CCTV would be best (as opposed to a webcam type over PC) and the video should be multiway, i.e. the musicians should also be able to at least see the engineer in the CR and even preferably one another if in separate rooms.

Interesting thread ... I'm kinda in the same situation with my design. I plan to use two way video between the control room and the live room. Curious to see what system you will employ for this :) I suppose using Cat5 or Cat6 to stream the feeds is the best way to go but I don't know ready made systems that include camera etc... Would be cool to figure out. Cheers, Daniel