Four rooms, and the numbers that describe them
A live room that can be bright or dead in four minutes, a booth with a sightline, an honest control room, and a mastering room that never changes. Below is what each one measures - not what it looks like on a Tuesday.
4 rooms - RT60 0.94 s to 0.18 s
four rooms
Every room, drawn as its own decay
The strips below are not illustrations. Each one is a clap in that room, falling sixty decibels over the room's measured reverberation time, read across the same 1.2 second window. A long tail is a live room. A spike and a straight line is a room that will not colour anything.
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Live room
11.0 x 7.2 m, 4.1 m to the trusses
A hall, not a box. Concrete floor under 40 mm oak on sprung battens, brick to the long wall, a bank of twenty-two movable panels down both sides. One face of each panel is absorptive, the other slatted and diffusive, and they roll on track, so the room goes from ringing to close in about four minutes.
That range is the whole point of the room. Drums get the bright end, where the ceiling gives them their tail. Acoustic guitar and voice get the panels turned in, at which point the room stops arguing with the microphone.
Holds eight players, comfortably. Ten if the horns stand.
live room - RT60 0.94 s, panels open
live room - RT60 0.31 s, panels closed
- RT60 500 Hz: 0.94 s open, 0.31 s closed
- noise floor NC-18, plant off the slab
- 32 tie lines to the control room, 8 to the booth
- drum riser 2.4 x 2.4 m, removable
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Iso booth
2.6 x 2.2 m, 2.7 m ceiling
Off the live room, with a full sightline to both the floor and the desk. Deliberately dry and deliberately small: this is where the guide vocal goes so the band can play loud around it, and where the amp goes when the drummer is in the room.
It is glazed on two sides. Nobody in this building has to play to a wall.
Holds one player, an amp, or a singer who wants a door shut.
iso booth - RT60 0.18 s
- RT60 500 Hz: 0.18 s
- sightline to floor and control room
- 55 dB isolation from the live room
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Control room
6.6 x 5.4 m, 3.2 m ceiling
A 32-channel analog desk, discrete and Class-A, built in 1974 and recapped in 2019, into midfield monitors on stands that touch nothing else in the building. Near-fields and one mono cube for the check that actually matters.
The room is treated front to back and measured yearly. It is not a flattering room. What you hear at the desk is what you take home, which is the only useful property a control room has.
Holds the desk, two producers and a sofa for five.
control room - RT60 0.22 s
- RT60 500 Hz: 0.22 s
- 32-channel analog desk, full recall
- midfield, near-field and mono monitoring
- summing in analog, capture at 24-bit/96 kHz
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Mastering room
5.2 x 4.4 m, 3.0 m ceiling
A separate room and a separate pair of ears, on purpose. The mix engineer does not master their own work here, because after eleven days on a record nobody can hear it any more.
The deadest room in the building and the only one that never changes. It is the reference the other three are checked against - if a mix falls apart in here, it will fall apart everywhere.
Holds a second engineer and the record you already finished.
mastering room - RT60 0.19 s
- RT60 500 Hz: 0.19 s, flattest response in the building
- analog chain, digital delivery
- streaming and vinyl masters cut from separate passes
the cabinet
What is in the racks and on the shelf
A working set, not a museum. Everything listed is patched, powered and used most weeks - if a piece sits unused for a year it goes, because a rack full of things nobody reaches for is just furniture with a fan in it.
The plate is the exception we make for ourselves. It is a real sheet of steel hanging in the stairwell, it is affected by the weather, and no plug-in has ever sounded like it on a snare.
- 4 large-diaphragm condensers two tube, two solid state
- 2 ribbons one figure-of-eight pair for the room
- 2 small-diaphragm matched pairs overheads, acoustic, strings
- 9 dynamics kick, snare, toms, cabs
- 1 bass drum microphone the low one, kept for the low one
- 8 channels of tube preamp the ones the desk cannot do
- 4 optical compressors two for voice, two for bus
- 2 valve equalisers broad, musical, not surgical
- 1 steel plate reverb 1.2 x 2.4 m, hung in the stairwell
- 1 tape echo serviced, temperamental, worth it
Backline - kit, amps, keys - is on the rate card as a day hire. Bring your own snare anyway. Everybody does.
the house
Four things that are not on the tour
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The building is quiet
Plant, air handling and the compressor sit off the slab on their own foundation. The live room measures NC-18 with everything running, which is quieter than most people expect a room to be, and it is why a ribbon two metres back from a voice is usable here.
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Power is clean and separate
Audio runs on its own three-phase leg with an isolating transformer, lighting and kettles on another. No hum to chase at 22:00 with six people waiting.
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Load-in is flat
Roller door straight off the yard into the live room, no steps and no lift. Two vehicles park inside the gate. A five-piece with a Hammond gets in without a conversation about the stairs.
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Nothing is billed until you play
Setup and teardown are not on the clock. Mic placement, line check and coffee are ours; the hours you are charged for are the hours the machine is running.
Come and clap in it
The only way to choose a room is to stand in it. Visits take twenty minutes, cost nothing, and we will happily open and close the panels while you listen.
Book a visit or a session