In order to achieve this, we need a team of immense ability, a system cannot be built as one unless there is seamless integration of services and structures, we can only have such seamless integration if everyone has understanding of how it all has to go together. Everything must be done in the right order, at the right time, under the right conditions, by the right people. If each service is delivered by a fragmented group of independent separate workers we don’t have the ability to fully integrate all the services as required. Worse still, if each service is installed by people who have never installed their services in such a tightly integrated package before, such as a local subcontractor, we find that they have no time to learn how things should be done and simply default to their every day methods which are more often than not, inadequate for our needs.

To achieve the best results we have a team with many decades of training and experience in all of the fields required to construct a fully integrated recording studio.

One significant advantage in this is related to the time it takes to build such a studio. Overall construction times can almost be halved in comparison to that with a team of good professional subcontractors, and if we compare to lesser experienced subcontractors we have seen examples ourselves where our teams have completed similar results, of higher standard, in less than one fifth the time of an independently contracted team of local workers.

Let us take the example of fitting a simple studio door in a floated acoustic wooden stud wall. Every common builder has fitted a door in a partition wall, they will all approach fitting one of our doors in the same way as they always do. What will happen each time is that door will not open properly, they will then go back and spend up to five times as much time as they took to fit the door in fine-tuning the door to work properly. The door will continue to fail to work properly in the future, and in a final attempt to fix the door they will destroy the acoustic properties of the room.

WHY?

Well first of all, the room is commonly floated on a flexible isolating layer in the floor. Yes, the floor is flexible. Then the wall that the door has to be installed in is also purposely flexible so as to absorb sound and have the correct resonances, and finally the door itself is going to weigh about 100kg for isolation purposes. In any terms this is a challenge to correctly engineer, but to properly engineer this issue, we have to know first how we need to do things, there can be no general instruction as each application has minor differences. Only having experience of this issue in many circumstances allows us to properly engineer the situation. The process often starts in how we lay the floor in the first place, how we arrange the studs in the wall and how we apply strategic bracing in the room as a whole. If the door is in the middle of a wall, in a corner, in a tall wall, in a bass trap, or near an internal wall all have profound effects on the way we approach fitting that door. Our experience allows us to evaluate all the on-site conditions that will affect the installation of the door that are not known to anyone at the design stage, or would be often overlooked by general contractors. With our team, our doors are only ever installed once, and always work as planned. Many times, it can be too late to properly resolve the issues once they become obvious as it would require going back and re-building floors and walls to add correct support. Sadly, some general contractors frequently resort to destroying the acoustic isolation by fixing the door frame to the building structure for strength and therefore ruin all the isolation work they did.

The reality of the situation is that we have expert specialist teams who have a vast amount of experience in what we do. It is a serious mistake to look at what we are doing and think “oh they are builders” or “oh they are carpenters” and that a carpenter or builder could do what we do. A carpenter or builder could make something that looks like what we build, but in almost every subtle way it would fail to achieve what we achieve.

Our team are incredibly multi-disciplined people. Some of our carpenters are also able to professionally re-construct the insides of mixing consoles at component levels, beautifully paint the furniture, set-up and program studio automation systems, accurately calculate the electrical loads, calculate grounding path impedances, test the data networks, and do the stonework of the feature walls. These are not “builders” they are exceptionally talented multi-function studio building experts of the highest calibre. This is how we deliver a fully integrated, world class, studio facility that just simply works without problems in record time, on budget, every time.