Nearly completed after 3 years - (Studio 3 Productions)

Its been a while since I've been on and posted anything. i wanted to first take an opportunity to personally thank John Sayers for putting me in touch with one of his BEST guys, Stuart Allsop (Soundman2020): he's been working with me for nearly 3 years on this build and he's an incredible man, engineer, designer, mentor and friend. a best friend that I've never had the privilege to meet in person and shake his hand, heck, hug him. I will post some pics and I will have him post some graphs and charts to show just what we have accomplished and built together. If you need to hire a real professional for a top notch job then he's def your guy!!! There's not enough time in the day or words in my vocabulary to express how amazing he is. Hire him now! While you can. (But wait a few more weeks so i can be finished first.) (:: pics to come. YouTube Link to a News Report about this studio: The sounds of solitude and rock collide in Lone Jack

a few details: 68 mic inputs 32 in and 24 out (for now) track and mixed in the box or on the console All wired with quad core Mogami 5 rooms: Control room 27x24x14, Vari-acoustic room 15x16x8, reverb room 12x16x15, tracking room 12x12x8, big room 25x28x14 Control room wall soffit monitors: Eve Audio-Germany SC407 4 way with ribbon tweeters Dynaudio BM14M sub Ref monitors: Genelec 1031-A Pro Tools HD with 2 Avid HD I/O converters, 1 Digi 192 for monitors thru Behringers P system, 16 channels hear back all timing thru Apogee Big Ben Clock NEVE, SSL, UA and Amek Mic Pres All patch bays and wiring provided and installed by David Rothchester at Technical Audio Services in Nashville, TN Design by Stuart Allsop Construction build and finish by Premier One Construction in Kansas City, MO.

Heres an update, after several weeks and lots of sitting watch rew files upload to Stuart, he thinks were almost complete, i don't think the line could get much flatter without an iron, ill post a few graphs he sent me, let me know what you think, and if you understand them... (:

:shock: Love the design. I don't fully understand all the graphs but know enough to say I love those, too. And I think a lot of people are going to love making music in there. You should both be very proud of yourselves.

Thanks for the kind words, Spinston! (And Rod too). Yep, you are right: I guess I should add some comments for those graphs, so folks can understand what they are seeing, and why John's design concepts are so excellent. Most of the acoustic devices in there are John Sayers inspired. The top graph is the "waterfall plot" for the lower end of the spectrum, from 17 Hz up to 500 Hz. That covers all of the lows, and a good chunk of the mid range as well. It shows how the sound energy in the room decays over time for each frequency, in a 3D representation, with the time axis running towards you (coming out of the screen, so to speak), frequency increasing to the right (X-axis), and intensity increasing upwards (Y axis). This graph shows that all frequencies are decaying at similar rates in Rod's room, except for the very lowest part of the bottom end, below about 28 Hz, where there's still some modal activity. Unfortunately, due to the shape of Rod's room (which was already fixed before I came on board), there was no way of dealing with that. Fortunately, it doesn't matter that much, since there's not too many instruments that go down that low anyway, and we'll probably just end up rolling off a bit more under 28 Hz. to clean that up. But the big point of that graph is how smooth the frequency response is in the low end, and how all of the frequencies decay at similar rates: That's not easy to accomplish. There's no uncontrolled modal stuff going on there, no SBIR, and no other bad stuff at all. Not many rooms get anywhere close to that smooth in the low-end energy decay. You can see the same thing from a different point of view in the second graph, the "Spectrogram", which shows pressure level contours for the same frequency range 17 Hz up to 500 Hz. Here too you can see how very clean and smooth the low end response is. Everything is even, clean, smooth, and controlled to within one or two dB. The next graph is RT60, which shows the reverberation time for each 1/3 octave frequency band across the entire spectrum, from 60 Hz to 12 kHz. Here too, you can see how smooth that is, with no major variations in decay rates between adjacent bands. The specs for "high quality critical listening rooms" call for no more than 0.05s difference between adjacent bands, and Rod's room easily meets that, exceeding it by far in most bands. the horizontal blue line shows the original target for the overall RT60 time for that room, at 265 ms, and how the actual results stack up against that. It's a little lower than I wanted in the lower mid range, but well within spec. And very smooth, I think. The series of graphs below that show the full-spectrum frequency response curve for the room, with different levels of smoothing. It's easy to make bad room response look good by smoothing the curves, so I did a full series, showing the real curve at each level of curve-smoothing, and hiding nothing. The top graphs is the highest resolution, with only very slight smoothing, at 1/48 octave. That's all the data, in all its ugly glory. At the very right edge of the graph. you can see the range of deviation. In this case it is 15.6 dB, which implies that every single frequency present in the spectrum is within +/- 7.8 dB of the reference level (80 dB). Even if I say it myself, that's pretty impressive for what is basically an un-smoothed curve! Nothing is more than 7.8 dB from flat. The next graph down shows higher smoothing at 1/24 octave, and we are within +/- 5.8 dB of flat. Next is smoothing to 1/12 octave, and we are within +/- 3.4 dB of flat response. That's what most control rooms get, but only when you smooth the data a lot more. We get that, with high resolution. Next, smoothing to 1/6th octave, and frequency response is within +/- 2.3 dB. That already exceeds international specs for control rooms, and we are still at one level of resolution higher than what the specs call for. It's the last graph that really matters most: That shows the frequency response curve smoothed to 1/3 octave, which is what all international specs call for (AES, ITU, EBU. etc.) Most of those specify that the frequency response should be within +/- 3dB from 100 Hz to 8 kHz, and with permitted deviations above and below that. As you can see, we meet that, easily, and beat it hands-down. Response is pretty much ruler flat (within +/- 1.6 dB) from 23.5 Hz to 12 kHz. In other words, the graph here shows that Rod's room is flat all the way down to two entire octaves lower than the specs call for, and one octave higher than it calls for. There's not too many control rooms on this planet that can boast response as flat as this. In fact, most studios don't ever publish their acoustic test results at all, because they really aren't that good. But when you have results like this, it's worthwhile taking the risk of showing them to the world. One word of caution: some people don't like ruler flat response in a control room, as it sounds a bit dull, lifeless, and, well, "flat"! (pardon the redundancy). That can be disconcerting to some people who aren't used to it, since it isn't very common, and hearing the exact, clean, clear perfect truth of what your mix really sounds like, can be a bit annoying! So over the next few days Rod and I will be working on some slight adjustments, to make the final curve closer to the B&K recommended curve, which slightly favors around 80 Hz, then gently rolls off all the way to the top end, and also a bit to the bottom end. That will be the final curve for his room. The above graphs are more of a "proof of concept" that it is possible to get impressively flat response out of a room that is well designed, well built, and well tuned, and has excellent speakers. I do have to mention that one of the main reasons we were able to accomplish this, is because those speakers are pretty darn amazing. Those are Eve Audio SC-407's, and they are absolutely top notch. Their chief engineer kindly helped us out with some advice, since those are rear-ported speakers, which supposedly cannot be soffit mounted, but we did it anyway, with their blessing and a bit of technical help. Those speakers are also more commonly oriented horizontally, but I felt they would be a better match for the room if we mounted them vertically, and the very helpful engineers at Eve Audio concurred. So there you have it: Speakers that are supposed to be horizontal, and are not supposed to be soffit mounted, breaking all the rules, mounted vertically in a John Sayers inspired soffit, and producing spectacular sound. If anyone is considering what high-end studio reference monitors they should buy, you'd be hard pressed to find something better than these beasts. Not cheap, large, heavy, and cumbersome, but very impressive. As you can see from the graphs. Of course, squiggly lines on a computer screen don't tell the full story of how the room and the speakers really sound to human ears, but so far Rod seems happy with that too! But we'll be doing some real listening tests with real human ears and real music in a few days, after we get the final tuning done, then we'll report back on how that goes. By the way, basic inspiration for the overall room design, is an eagle in flight... not sure if you can see that. One other things I wanted to mention: many, many features of the room are inspired by John Sayers techniques, ideas, and concepts. I merely adapted them to this specific room. If you want proof that John's studio designs and skills are unequaled, then here you have it. That's the other major reason this room works so well: because John knows what he's talking about, and the proof is right here. We'll probably be posting a bit more about this room and the rest of the studio over the next few weeks, as there's still some tweaking to be done in the treatment of the large live room, the medium live room, and smaller "variable-acoustic" room, which Rod might want to talk about at some point (He can swing some movable panels that I designed, to fine-tune the room acoustics as needed for different scenarios). Those three rooms are already working well, but with a control room this good, Rod feels it's worth the effort to upgrade them to match it. Anyway, if anyone reading this needs to record in a world-class studio in or around Missouri (or the entire USA for that matter), you'd have to go a long, long, long way to find something that can even get close to this level of precision here. Stay tuned for updates! And feel free to PM Rod or myself if you'd like to know any specifics of how we did this. We won't be revealing all of the secrets out in public, of course, but there might be some things that we can share in private. Congratulations, Rod! Your place looks great, and sounds better than great. - Stuart -

Sorry guys I guess I should have let Stuart put up the graphs and explain them as he went. I guess I was just so excited to finally be nearly complete with the tuning I mighta jumped the gun a little. As Stuart said we are very excited at the results that are coming, and had I not started from scratch with him who knows how accurate and flat it would be. I'm excited to offer the studio to anyone, if you have a producer or a favorite engineer then we are more than willing and welcome to unlock the doors and turn the lights on for ya. My vision and goal when my wife and I started this adventure was to build a world class studio that we could run and offer it to anyone no matter what status level they hold nor the amount of money they have. The less fortunate artist with a tattered guitar and a torn shirt with a message to the nations as well as the seasoned A list artist looking for a hideaway to record that next platinum record. We believe that everyone deserves the best we have to offer and the use of any of our new and vintage gear. We don't believe anyone is more special than the next. Please share our studio with friends and family, you could be a part of someone's journey to greatness or the message someone needs to hear through music. Blessings.

Rod just sent me an updated photo with the Eve speakers visible, as well as a few other changes that happened to the room during the tuning process. (Rod, you need a better camera! ...)

To put all those graphs above into perspective, here are the graphs for the original, untreated, empty room: First, the ORIGINAL full-spectrum frequency response, in the untreated room: Then the ORIGINAL waterfall plot for the low end of the spectrum, in the untreated room: And the ORIGINAL decay times for the full spectrum, in the untreated room. So if you are building a room right now (or planning to) and wondering if it will be any good, there is hope for your room! If you follow the techniques and procedures developed by John Sayers for designing and building and treating your room, it can be very, very good. It takes time and effort, and attention to detail, but if you want assurance that all the advice you see on the forum really can produce good results, here it is. This thread is proof positive that John's methods works. I'll testify to that, first hand. Pretty much everything I did in this room is based on concepts developed by John. - Stuart -

That's an amazing achievement Stuart!! Did your designs include also the construction part? Or just acoustic treatment after the walls and all were built? It must sound great!! :wink:

Thanks, BlackStorm!

Did your designs include also the construction part? Or just acoustic treatment after the walls and all were built?

A bit of both. When I came on board, the room was already built, with all the walls in place and no longer modifiable, so I had to design around that. The result of that is the entire front end (soffits) plus the raised floor, plus the cloud, plus the treatment, and plus some of the HVAC design too. There's a huge amount of treatment in there that you can't see, as it is above the clouds and visible ceiling (several feet of bass trapping), or hidden in the walls (there are superchunks on both side walls where they meet the rear, and also on both side walls where they meet the ceiling), as well as the visible stuff, such as the three large panels on each side (some of which contain one or more tuned device), the inverted QRD diffusers high up on the rear walls, the large poly-cylindrical diffuser on the back wall below the window, and the combined bass-traps / HVAC silencers above the rear window, etc. Parts of the front wall are slot resonators, which I don't normally do at the front of the room but had no choice here (and the room is big enough to get away with it!). The two "wings" out to the sides of the soffits actually include doors to a small machine room on one side and a storage room on the other, and even those doors are tuned slot resonators. Maybe we can persuade Rod to take some photos of the room with those doors open (once he gets a better camera, of course! :) ) so you can see some of the hidden bits. So from one point of view, I didn't design the actual original room shape: it was already in place and could not be changed. But from another point of view, I redesigned pretty much everything within that shell, to modify the original shape the way I needed it to be, by means of the soffits, floor, and cloud, then I designed the treatment for it all. The floor is tuned, for example, but deliberately not floated. (!) The soffits, for example, bring the front of the room in by about 3 to 6 feet, and re-shape it RFZ-style, but they also raise the speakers slightly and tilt them down just a little (at 4.3°, to be exact), which we did partly because of the large desk and high dog box on the console with the video screen on it, and partly for other reasons. There are acoustic hangers inside the lower portion of the soffits, all the way across the front. The cloud is in several sections at two different angles, some parts are hard-backed some are not, also for dual purposes: helping to control reflections, and also helping to control modes. Etc. There's a lot more to it than meets the eye, and Rod did a superb job of building it all and disguising it, so you can't even see a lot of it. The room is also designed for a future upgrade to 5.1, if Rod ever decides to go that way.... There are already provisions for the center speaker and rear surround speakers, which also go in soffit modules. So when the time comes to do that, the room is ready. It was quite a challenge, but Rod wanted it to be as good as we could get it, within the limitations of the original room, but I think the goal has been achieved. And once again, credit where it is due: pretty much all of the principles I used in designing and treating this room are the same ones John Sayers has been using for years, and openly promotes for everyone else here on the forum. I think this very much validates that what John does in his rooms, and also generously shares in public, really does work exceptionally well. In fact, the final response is even flatter than the curves above show. There is less than 1 dB difference between the left and right channels across the entire spectrum, now. I should probably update the thread with new graphs at some point, but I'm rather busy at present. with other projects! I'm also hoping Rod will share some photos of the three live rooms in the facility, when we finish treating those over the next few weeks. One of his rooms has a set of variable-acoustic devices I designed for him, that allow him to change the acoustic response of the room slightly, as needed for different situations. . . . - Stuart -

Yes Stuart, you should show some nearly tuned out graphs so we can all see them. Stuart has been an amazing designer, friend and mentor in this process. this forum is blessed to have such an amazing mind and intuitive person. He is always thinking outside the box and his loyalty to the forum is unmatched anywhere. we still have a few miles to travel together and a couple of more rooms to treat with the degree of accuracy the control room is but we will get there in His timing. Thank you all for showing interest in our buildout and the steps involved. More to follow as Stuart can come up for air and post some things.

Wonderful work guys - both of you - the studio and the charts look wonderful. A credit to you Stuart :thu: Cheers john

Thank you John for the kind words, Stuart is an amazing designer, artistic mind and a great friend. You have a real powerhouse of knowledge and loyalty in Him. I hope to speak to you soon.

Thanks for the kind words, John! Very much appreciated. Coming from you, that means a LOT! - Stuart -

Just wanted to say this looks great! I wish I was still in KC, I'd love to come scope it out.

Also just wanted to express my admiration - amazing room, would love to hear it! Massive congratulations to you both (albeit very belated :))

This is inspiring...

This is impressive! Congrats!

gabrielaudio wrote:

This is impressive! Congrats!

Thanks, Gabriel, and welcome to the forum! I do plan to update this thread with the final graphs, which are even better, as soon as I have some time. I'm hoping Rod will also update with some new photos! :) If you are ever in that part of the world, be sure to give Rod a call, and ask if you can drop in. I'm sure he'd love to give you a tour! - Stuart -

Looks amazing! Any chance you guys would be willing to share the MDAT? I'm curious to dive into it a bit, specifically I'd love to see/play with sliced ETCs or the spectrogram for what the first ~20ms looks like through the mids and highs. I'm always interested in what people are able to achieve there in a 'practical' scenario with a desk etc. Also I was kicking around on the website (not too many studios there in Lone Jack), out of curiousity were some of the rooms pre-existing? The demensions on the website seem like unusual dimensions (16x17x8, 12x14x12, etc) for a purpose built studio. Not trying to be critical at all, just curious about the philosophy and the project overall.

Also I was kicking around on the website (not too many studios there in Lone Jack), out of curiousity were some of the rooms pre-existing? The demensions on the website seem like unusual dimensions (16x17x8, 12x14x12, etc) for a purpose built studio. Not trying to be critical at all, just curious about the philosophy and the project overall.

I'm not sure how the rooms ended up at those dimensions. When I came on board the project, all of the rooms were already fully built, with the walls all in place and not able to be moved. I did the best I could with what I was given. I probably would have arranged the rooms differently, with different dimensions, if I would have been called in from the absolute beginning, but the final outcome is certainly pretty darn good, I think, regardless of the room dimensions! I honestly don't think that it could have been substantially better with different dimensions. The treatment deals with that rather well, I reckon. I'm a bit hesitant to publish the actual raw MDAT files, firstly because they are not mine: they really belong to the studio owner, who has not authorized me to do that (although he doesn't mind at all showing off the graphs of what he achieved in his room!), and secondly because of the numerous incorrect ways of setting the parameters for creating graphs and viewing the data in REW. I'm not questioning that you know how to set them correctly, Ryan, but most people don't! However, I have been meaning to update this thread with the final data for a while now, and I've never been able to get around to it. But now you have prompted me to go through the data files and do a final set of graphs, showing how things ended up after we completely finished tweaking everything as far as it would go. So here's how the room acoustics actually ended up: the way it is today. The main difference you'll see in the graphs is that, instead of being ruler flat, we "tilted" the response a bit. We wanted to "tilt" things a little like that, slightly enhancing the bass, to match the tried-and-trusted B&K curve, from many years back. The B&K curve favors the low end with a slight rise, and gently rolls off the high end, which most engineers find to be the best environment for mixing accurately. So we did that, and we also tweaked a few other things, as you can see in these final graphs. First, the final frequency response graph: I'm putting that one first, since most people erroneously think that it's the most important indicator of the "quality" of a room (it isn't). The graph above is smoothed using a "psycho acoustic" filter, to closely emulate how a normal person actually perceives the sound. For people who don't agree that psych-acoustic smoothing is the most accurate way of representing frequency response data, and prefer the older "standard" of one-third octave smoothing, here's how the same data looks with 1/3 octave smoothing: And for purist that think one third octave smoothing goes too far and can hide details, here's the same data with 50% less smoothing: 1/6 octave. And for those freaky perfectionists who are really, really, beyond all hope, there's even a graph of the frequency response smoothed even less, to another 50% lower than above, at 1/12 octave: Still pretty darn impressive, even at this high resolution. Note that all of the above graphs show the entire audible spectrum and beyond: form 18Hz to 22 kHz. The normal hearing range for most humans (young ones, with undamaged hearing) is 20 Hz to 20 kHz. I ran all the tests from 10% lower than the lowest limit, to 10% higher than the highest limit, to ensure that we got more than the complete picture. And even at those extremes (which actually reach the limits of the test gear we were using), things are clean and sharp. For those who are questioning the slight "roughness" in the mid range of many of these graphs, at around 500 Hz, that's due to the presence of the console and desk, and there's not much that can be done about that. (We did a couple of tests with the mic forward of the console, and that roughness disappears). But it's rather low level, and not audible anyway, so it's not really relevant. OK, so the above is frequency domain data. Now for the time-domain stuff, which is actually more important than the pure frequency response. Waterfall for the low end of the spectrum, from 18 Hz to 500 Hz, completely raw data (smoothed at the absolute minimum level of 1/48 octave, which is basicallyu no smoothing at all!): Most experts recommend only looking at the data up to 200 Hz, since that really defines the overall room sound, and above that it tends to get rougher anyway, but I'm showing all the way up to 500 Hz (more than an octave higher) to show just how smooth we managed to get the entire low end, even at this very high resolution, without smoothing! Not many rooms can boast that type of precision. Here's the same data as above, smoothed to a more realistic 1/6 octave (much more like human hearing really perceives it): Plus also smoothed to the "standard" level of 1/3 octave: And in case you think there might be something hidden in the rest of the spectrum (above 500 Hz), here's the waterfall for the entire audible spectrum, 18 Hz to 22 kHz, smoothed to 1/6 octave (realistic perception) and also 1/3 octave ("standard"). Ahh, what the hell... just in case there's someone who actually thinks that even 1/6 is still too much smoothing, here's the entire waterfall, full spectrum (and more), 18 Hz to 22 kHz, unsmoothed (1/48 octave): Enough of waterfalls already! Of course, everyone wants to see the ubiquitous RT-60 graph, showing the actual decay decay times for each 1/3 octave band across the entire spectrum: Perhaps not a hugely useful graph, but many people expect to see that, to base their opinion on the smoothness of the decay times in adjacent frequency bands. Next up, the spectrograms, completely unsmoothed. First just for the low end of the spectrum (always the most important, by far): Then for the entire spectrum, also completely unsmoothed: Once again, those are for 18 Hz to 22 kHz. Beyond the audible spectrum at both ends. Hiding nothing, even at the extremes. For more sophisticated folks who want the actual impulse response, here it is in the form of an ETC graph (Energy Time Curve), very lightly smoothed by just 0.1ms, to make it more readable: That's probably one of the most useful graphs, actually! You can clearly see how there are no reflections at all above -25 dB, ever. (There's a true reflection free zone around the mix position, without any doubt! Mission accomplished.). You can also see that the level drops very fast to around -35 dB, where it stays constant for about 50 ms to provide some nice ambiance (reduces fatigue, makes it pleasant to mix in the room for long periods of time), then the level gradually declines smoothly all the way down to nothing. (Yes, the noise floor in that room really does allow measuring that amount of detail, down to -90 dB with REW). And finally, some more esoteric graphs that are a bit harder to explain, but rather impressive for those who understand them: Excess group delay: First, the full spectrum (smoothed 1/6 octave): And then just the low end: It's not easy to describe what group delay really is, in understandable terms, but you can think of it as showing how much each frequency has been delayed by the entire signal chain, by the time it gets to your ears. It's related to phase, of course. It's sort of showing you how faithfully the system gets the sound to your ears without changing the timing or phase relationship between the various parts of the signal. And one more for the real connoisseur: minimum phase. If you don't know what that is, then google it, as its really hard to explain. If you do know what it is, then please note that it's pretty much flat across the entire spectrum (roughly 80 Hz to 15 kHz), except for the two extremes. The total rotation is from -180° at 30 Hz to about -480° at 20 kHz, so roughly 300° across the full spectrum, end to end. Not even one full cycle. So that's it. That's the final outcome of this room design, construction, and tuning process. There's more on the Studio 3 website itself, if you are interested. One final tidbit of info: Rod and I have never met, never spoken on the phone, and I have never even been to this studio! All of that you see was accomplished over the internet, remotely, through e-mail, photos, videos, SketchUp, and REW. I mention that, because some people who are looking for studio designers think that it is essential to have the designer on-site, "doing stuff" in person. It isn't necessary at all! I think that's abundantly clear from this project... Hope that's useful, for everyone interested in how this exceptional control room actually turned out. Rod DeMoss (the studio owner) did a fantastic job of building this place, with excellent attention to detail, exactly the way I designed it, even when he thought I was certifiably crazy, or overdosed on caffeine, with some weird treatment device that I wanted him to build.... He does justice to my signature (see below)! There's not even the slightest hint of "that'll do" in his build. Of course, the REAL test is to actually go there and record something, then mix it! Feel free to contact Rod and book some studio time with him. Hopefully, you'll be just as impressed in real life, as the graphs show. - Stuart -

Wow, I am sold. That studio looks amazing, like studios should look... inviting and warm, and accurate, and professional, and starting from a set of dimensions and geometry that is or would lead most acoustical folks to tell you to run away from. Which says a lot about my years of lurking here and what I have seen, solutions that actually work, are sound, use math and all the principles and has forged a near DIY ethic into a realm that so many say is just beyond most folks comprehension. Primarily, that studio is beautiful. And the intent behind it should be the model for all modern facilities, giving access to anyone, regardless of status or financial ability to pay for time. Amazing work to the owners, Stuart and John for giving this platform to all of us to be inspired by in our temples of sound spaces we love! Best, David @ Revival

Thanks for the kind words, David. And welcome to the forum! :) Yes, the original geometry was not very "acoustic friendly", but we did manage to tame it quiet well. Starting with a blank slate would have made it easier, for sure, but as you pointed out, even with the not-ideal geometry, with careful design and tweaking it is possible to get pretty darn good results. There's additional details of how we did it, on Rod's website. At his request, I wrote up a sort of "the making of" story of the design and construction of the studio, and he posted that on the website. You might find it interesting. - Stuart -

Hey Stuart, Yea, thanks for pointing that out, I just read that on his website... very telling of the connection as to why this place and you all came together. Rod’s whole facility which has even more over the top’ness frankly outside the studio, this is what is needed for artists today. Yes, maybe Blackbird’s mic closet is what impresses people. But, truth can be had in $500-$1000 microphones. Where you cannot attain truth is in a room that has had merely $500 of value tossed into via foam or bad advice. In reading your write up, the final eq treatment applied to the neutral room is interesting. I guess most major rooms have this, and I admit that I believe still rooms do have to be both able to be used to hear absolute truth, as you say as harsh as that is to hear for the first time. But, also present something to clients that is exciting and hyped. If a room can throw a switch for that, that to me is where it’s at. But, eq treatment in control rooms is something I would like to understand more about... or at what point do you say, we are flat enough, or we can’t get any flatter without eq’ing the room now? I enjoyed that write up though, for these are spiritual and divine creations, and given sound and music transcends without it ever really being able to be seen ;-) makes all the sense in the world. Best, David

I never thought I would have said this when I was studying in the university, but these graphs look so sexy... WOW, really... Kudos to you, Stuart :) And John, obviously :)