An ideal sound control room should have no characteristics. It should add nothing and take away nothing from the pure sound delivered by the loudspeakers. The control room should be a creative space where all who work there are able to hear the sound as pure as it can be.

In order to make the necessary creative decisions the whole production staff need the best information possible, all the detail and information must remain intact, free from coloration, differences, and sweet spots. There needs to be an environment that can be trusted, where everybody knows that the decision they have made is the intended decision and is not based on bad information.

Any artist is only ever as good as their equipment will allow, and while some are able to do surprising things with terrible equipment, the incredible only ever really happens when a great artist masters truly great equipment.

At Newell Acoustic Engineering our aim is to put great equipment in the hands of great artists. Good enough just simply is not good enough for us. Every job we do we aim to deliver the best possible results for the circumstances, without undue compromise. Our acoustic spaces are painstakingly engineered over decades of R&D to deliver the best possible results for the listener.

We also use our own products, as professional sound engineers and musicians our teams have worked in our own spaces as much as in other manufacturers spaces, we know what we need to develop further and we know what we need to deliver to the end user.

Our rooms have worked excellently in many different industries. We have delivered critical listening rooms, music studios, film dubbing theatres, TV mixing rooms, film and TV editing suites, test chambers, research rooms, voiceover studios, project studios, mobile recording vehicles, and one or two other unusual purpose facilities. Our concepts and methods are tried and tested across many industries around the globe.

Over the last few decades we have spent years in universities and out in the field testing our concepts in scientific studies. We have even built rooms for study in universities.

The basis of our current philosophies was encountered in the beginnings of a study into characteristic bass sounds of high end professional control room acoustics, we carried out a series of subjective listening tests with various control pieces of music in some high end commercial recording studios and we were noting which characteristics each room exhibited in the rooms own characteristic bass sound seemed favourable and popular.

During this process, we tested an early non-environment room in which each example of subject listening material was noted to have its own characteristic bass sound free from any colouration from the room, unusually the room seemed to have no bass sound at all and exposed characteristics in the music that were not evident in other rooms.

At this point all the test subjects noted that unlike all the other rooms, here, they were listening to the characteristic bass sounds of each individual recording.

After this studio visit, research to find the ideal control room bass sound was abandoned, it was obvious that only the non-environment room had exposed the detailed tonal differences in all the recordings and that having no bass characteristics was the most precise listening environment.

Our non-environment philosophy in room acoustics delivers incredible transparency and positional imaging.

A lack of distracting reflections, resonances and diffusive effects allows an environment that cannot detract from the source image position, there can be no phantom images created by the room or distraction from time critical positional information. Nothing can mask where the sound came from and when.

The total lack of room effects produces a perfectly even sound field. So long as the loudspeakers have no severe directivity problems every position in the room will render a great representation of the source material. Everyone is free to work where they need to work, whether that is right in the ideal stereo mix position, at one end of a long console, over at the effects rack, or just sat on the sofa, everyone will be talking about the same sonic balance, they won’t be talking at cross purposes.

At Newell Acoustic Engineering we only deliver no-compromise, pristine, high resolution working spaces for audio production. Every one of our rooms delivers faithfully accurate production environments where everyone concerned can simply concentrate on the creative decisions they need to take. This provides a fast efficient production that can show the true ability of all concerned, there will be no surprises, mistakes, or compromise in the creative process.

The electro-acoustic delivery system should neither be seen nor heard!

From a perspective of systems engineering the audio system should be a transparent conduit between the artist and the listener. It should not get in the way of the production process, it should not alter the sound in any way that is not intended and it should be free from noise, distortion and noticeable characteristics.

Audio systems are immensely complex creatures. From the point of artistic creation to the ears of the end listener there are immense numbers of incredibly sensitive and complex devices. Every single one must work flawlessly when called upon and do as is intended time and time again without fail. Items must all be immediately at hand and ready to go at a moment’s notice.

Often it is essential to capture a one-off moment of inspiration as it happens, a moment that can pass in the blink of an eye, never to pass again. That moment would be forever lost if the equipment were not ready for use right there and then, there is no waiting to go and get a power cord, there can be no waiting to calibrate or check something. In a professional production environment, the technical systems have to be robustly engineered to work flawlessly, every time, right when they are needed. There cannot be half an hour of chasing ground loops while the artist waits, the perfect take cannot be ruined with noise from a bad connection, and equipment behaving unpredictably cannot be an option.

It takes immense systems engineering skills to deliver the kind of system that woks flawlessly first time every time right when it is needed. There is an immense amount of experience required to design systems that do not impose themselves on the workflow, that can be configured in any way imaginable and will do this without fault or error.

It is incredibly easy to tie a system in knots by over-complicating it or over thinking the possible configurations, it can be difficult to engineer the simplicity into a system that will allow it to do the most complex tasks. The last thing anyone wants is layers of complexity.

Proper systems engineering is not just plugging bits of audio together, just like building an incredible house is not just arranging the bricks in the right order. A system needs a solid foundation, robust interconnection, easy interface to other equipment, future-proof expansion capability, critical item redundancy, security, great human interface, tolerance of misuse, simple operation, fast learning curve, and a whole host of aspects that allow for transparent simple efficent operation.

Here at Newell Acoustic Engineering we have been working with high-end professional audio systems for decades, we have delivered thousands of installations, both permanent and temporary. We deal with every single related aspect of an audio system right from building power systems design through to ventilation systems, data networks, racks and cabinets, and everything in-between. We have had our systems independently audited and tested by regulatory authorities, from whole building networked life safety audio systems, to Dolby Premier Certified film production complexes.

We are Highly experienced expert audio systems engineers with decades of experience capable of delivering any system concept  that can be imagined to deliver a reliable, solid seamless operation that can provide immense flexibility behind the most simple of user interfaces.