A Word From Martin Pilchner

A mastering room is a special type of acoustic environment; it can be neither a control room, nor a typical home environment. It must be an acoustic space that mediates between production spaces and a wide variety of reproduction spaces. To allow a mastering room to follow production space protocol would be to obscure anomalies inherent to these environments, and thereby limit its usefulness in the arbitration between spaces. This implies that a mastering room stems from a very unique morphology, providing a bridge between the dichotomy of production and reproduction.

The departure point is to provide an acoustically neutral space, which clearly reveals any reproduction issues not apodictic during production. This is exceptionally challenging in the development of a surround environment.

João Carvalho Mastering represents the result of a unique opportunity to adhere to known acoustic principles, without the need of compromise common in less ideal settings. This enables a room topography based upon a series of elemental systems each purposed to a given task. These systems combined with a simple palette of rich and organic materials leads to a tectonic approach uncommon in formal acoustic environments. The strength of the design lies in the combination of all the given elements, of which to remove one, would render it unstable.

The space started with a very rigid shell to minimize modal coupling, and of a given dimensional relationship aimed at providing linearly distributed fundamental room frequencies. Low frequency damping was then developed to provide a uniform LF decay in the space. This damping consisted of several traps specifically located within the room of various sizes and densities.

Within the context of room and trapping, speaker and listening positions where established. With this geometry in place, systems were developed to control unwanted specular energy. This involved placement of specular absorbers and strategic floor trapping two feet deep, based upon speaker directivity.

Strict attention was paid to ensuring uniform energy decay characteristics by balancing surface applications. Special mathematically sequenced diffusers were designed to provide back-scattering in specific locations in the room and work in conjunction with the other surface types to establish a wide and uniform sound stage at the listening position.

LF baffles, specular absorbers, and diffusors were situated so as to ensure that all loudspeaker coupling and loading with the room are uniform on all established surround axis, so that all channels are capable of matched reproduction.

The result has been a space with very uniform decay characteristics, pinpoint imaging, and broad soundstage. The full potential of the speaker system is realized at the mix position with no correction allowing a simple and pure electro-acoustic path. All errant unwanted reflections are eliminated leaving a well damped diffusive sound field without the proclivity to be anechoic.

(We gotcha Martin….. Sound Excellence)