Sonic-Space ˖ Work

“I’m surprised at how great the stereo image is.” - Burt Price, Berklee College of Music

Challenge:

Owner, Jason Hearst, commissioned Sonic-Space to design a ‘Moulton Room’ style control room within a basement space of only 200 square feet. This is a six sided room; one end is the shape of a speaker horn - Yikes!

Requirements:

Room treatments are to be movable and usable in a different space in the future; room must be convertible to a traditional style design for when monitoring through other speakers; maintain use of existing window to outdoors; noise floor of the room must be kept low; optimize for critical listening.

Solution:

After spending some time with David Moulton in his home studio, which is always a pleasure (Thanks Dave), a solution was designed into this basement to work with the Bang & Olufsen Beolab speakers which Mr. Moulton also designed. The front of this room has tree layers of heavy theater curtain which covers a large window to the outdoors allowing for views when not doing critical listening.

The side wall traps have removable reflective panels with broadband absorption behind them. These panels are for the ‘Moulton Room’ and when removed the room works better with the NS10’s. The rear of this room was in the shape of a speaker ‘horn’ which created a bass build up issue. Fortunately there was a door at the end of this horn that was removed and replaced with a curtain thus the room adjacent became a bass trap. Cylindrical diffusers were hung on the other two walls of this ‘horn’.

All treatments are stand alone modular units hung on the wall. All the noisy equipment was put into isolation boxes in another room. The monitor system includes Bang & Olufsen Beolab 3’s with a Beolab 2 sub-system. This room also includes a pair of Yamaha NS10’s for referencing.