To complement its existing studios, London's Tape Gallery has taken over an extra floor which now houses a new 24 track audio and video post production studio with adjoining hospitality lounge.

Designed by Neil Grant of Discrete Research (with equipment supplied by ITA) the new facility will also be used for radio commercials and television sound tracks.

The heart of the studio is a spacious control room, (five metres x five and a half metres) and as with all Discrete Research designs, is built to Live End Dead End specifications and accommodates hardware, including the console, outboard equipment and three stereo recorders.

Director Lloyd Billing admitted that the work station looked bigger than he had anticipated but pointed to the ergonomic advantages for the engineer. 'The amount of voice over you do is minimal compared to laying in sound effects and music', he said.

The rear of the control room is raised and overlooks Lexington Street, while sofas and tables in front of the large double glazed windows provide comfortable seating for media clients.

To aid the creation of original music within the control room, there is a MIDI patching system with four junction boxes.

The voice-over room is separated from the control room by a large window, allowing eye contact from the engineer's working position. With five walls, the overall shape is like a 'lopped off rectangle, with one long wall having three picture windows overlooking a courtyard.

There is a custom built voiceover table with integral mic supports, designed to minimise clutter. An unusually high number of lights have been used as it was considered important that no hard shadows should interfere with script reading.

Monitoring is via Westlake BBSM12s, driven by an EAA amplifier. This combination is praised by both designer and client and is remarkably consistent throughout the control room, and is specifically arranged to make clients feel involved without distracting the engineer.

The workstation in the centre of the control room like the rest of the studio is made of beech. It comprises three sides of a square, with the middle section facing the control room window. The workstation contains an Amek Angela console, which has been adapted to the Tape Gallery's specification to incorporate Audio Kinetics' Mastermix, a unit specifically built for video post production.

The two sides of the housing contain both Otari MTR12s and a Studer B67. Above desk height there is a continuous horizontal rack space for outboard equipment and cassette machines.

The effects control needed for AV and radio work is somewhat different to a music studio. There is generally no necessity to have a different effect level on a group of tracks — for instance where voices are placed in a large hall ambience. However, speed is of the essence.

A special panel has been built into the centre of the mixer which takes the aux sends from the subgroups. There are four stereo subgroups on the Amek and the facility used here is similar to the matrixing arrangement found on some sound reinforcement consoles.

In the same way, foldback can be provided instantaneously from the subgroups and then tuned to specific requirements as needed.

The talkback microphone has been moved to the overbridge because it was previously very close to the desk Comm button and over enthusiastic pushing of this button would cause a very loud noise in the foldback headphones.

Outboard equipment will include an AMS with six and a half seconds delay, two Yamaha REV 7s and Drawmer compressors and gates. The rack will also have a Sonifex cart machine.

DISCRETE RESEARCH - LEDE AT THE GALLERY

NEIL GRANT is Technical Director of Discrete Research Ltd, an acoustic consultancy involved with the design of LEDE rooms — as found at the Tape Gallery. Live End Dead End is actually a registered trademark of Synergic Audio Concepts (United States) and a completed room must undergo stringent tests to become an accredited LEDE design.

Past Discrete Research projects include Utopia and Odyssey Two's remix rooms, a rebuild for the control room and studio at Chipping Norton (featured next month: Ed) and a 24 track studio in Ultravox member Billy Currie's house. Such is the success of the Odyssey room, the whole of the first floor, including Studio One in a complete automated complex, is to be rebuilt to Grant's design.

It is generally known that LEDE design involves a 'dead end' where the monitors are positioned and a 'live end' at the back of the room. The reasons for this and the way in which it is achieved are probably less understood.

It is obvious in a control room that it is important to hear what is happening at the microphone capsule. Much of the information will occur in the first few milliseconds and can be lost to the listener if there are nonlinearities or time delay problems.

According to Neil Grant, this is where many control rooms fall down. He pointed out that a 'conventional' control room combined a hard front wall with a heavily trapped shell structure and rigidly mounted monitor cabinets. This, he stated, resulted in low frequency transmission through the structure with the sound travelling at six or seven times faster than it did through the air.

'You have an early arrival through the structure of the room,' he said, 'you have a direct arrival from the monitor system but you have a splash off the side wall, off the front wall and off the face of the console.' In these rooms you have three arrivals paralleling the first arrival, which slurs the whole transient.

When structure borne sounds arrive at the ear before the direct sound it is known as the 'early-early effect'.

One of the most important measuring tools for Discrete Research is the Tecron TEE-10 analyser, an advanced computer system that will show the reflection characteristics of a room. Even this device, Grant claimed, will not isolate all the early reflections as they occur in a 2/3ms window.

'The result,' he maintained, 'is confusion. The room sounds louder, brighter and less defined.'

Grant is also sceptical of 'active trapping' and believed that it is ineffective. 'We have measured many rooms with the TEE-10 and we conclude that low frequencies are totally undamped. They're travelling through the acoustic shell, finding a boundary somewhere in the isolation wall and coming straight back to those traps'. In his view, the traps should be resistive-mass controlled devices and are actually too light.

One of the prime objectives of LEDE design is therefore to ensure that the initial arrival comes straight from the monitors. To do this, the monitors are decoupled as far as possible from the front wall, often with spring mounts.

Live End Dead End probably misleads as a title. Grant pointed out that it does not literally involve shutting down the front end of the room with vast amounts or rock-wool. The solutions adopted by LEDE designers often have as much to do with geometry as materials. Contrary to the wry observations of some, it is not actually necessary to purchase rubber control room glasses!

Of course, a totally dead room would not be desirable either. It is the live end that is designed to maintain the linearity and stereo perspective needed for mixing. Where appropriate, proprietary diffusers are used, such as the REG system. These consist of wooden strips, separated by aluminium to form a series of 'wells'. The well depths are calculated using quadratic residue or primitive route mathematical formulae.

REG claims that using the panels 'helps maintain a uniform stereo perspective and spectral balance across the entire width of the mixing console and in the rear of the room'.

There are no proprietary diffusers used in the Tape Gallery studio, mostly because the rear area is occupied by windows. The glazing for these was designed with particular attention to low frequencies as the traffic in Lexington Street is often at a standstill and stationary vehicles can produce continuous rumble.

The original site dimensions given to Discrete Research were eight and a half metres wide by just over 11 metres deep. This is roughly half the floor area on this particular level, leaving a future option of another studio.

Existing floor loadings were more than adequate and so steel girders were not necessary. Dry construction techniques were used throughout. This is fairly unusual but dictated by such considerations as the lack of cement mixing space. A floating structure was created with the desired mass coming from laminations of plaster board.

Other than site dimensions, there were no restrictions placed on the design, although it obviously had to reflect the intended use. The control room has a sloping ceiling extending to a maximum height of three metres. The finish is a combination of fabric and natural beech, with a slightly less live sound than may have been used for a music studio.

A corridor to the right of the site had to be taken into consideration and a small office was commandeered to house a fully ducted and sound proofed air conditioning plant.

The raised section at the back of the studio was created to add visual interest to the shape of the room and also to meet the Tape Gallery's stipulation that clients must have full line of sight to the video monitor.