PMC MB2S-A Monitors Crown Spirit Studio At School Of Sound Recording

Date: 2010-07

PMC MB2S-A Monitors Crown Spirit Studio At School Of Sound Recording Flagship Studio at Manchester's SSR Completes First Academic Year With PMCs

The flagship Spirit Studio at Manchester's renowned School Of Sound Recording, which occupies the top floor of the school's central Manchester premises, has completed its first academic year in use since its construction — and central to the recording and performance space is a pair of PMC's MB2S-A mid-field active monitors.

Central Manchester's School Of Sound Recording has come a long way since opening in the early 1980s as Spirit Studios, although its beginnings augured well — the first band through the doors when it opened were an obscure 60s-influenced combo called The Smiths. Since moving into audio education in the mid-80s, the School has gone from strength to strength. Now, from two buildings connected back to back near the heart of the city, it provides highly successful courses in sound, music and radio production.

For the 25th anniversary year of the school in 2009, SSR opened a new recording studio on the top floor of one of its buildings, a refurbished mill. Named the Spirit Studio in honour of SSR's beginnings, the creative team at SSR wanted it to be something special from the start, as Tom Aston, the school's Technical Director, explains. "The Spirit Studio was conceived from the beginning as our flagship studio, the place where all of our final-year recording students would be working, as well as being available for commercial use. The large, open room at the top of the old mill really is a beautiful space, with its concave roof, and quite unusual for a studio. We wanted to preserve it as much as possible.

"The concept was not to have a separate control room and live room, but to have one large space incorporating both of these facilities. We wanted to remove the typical barriers between artists, producers and engineers to aid our students in capturing the best performances from the artists. It’s a concept that we see is becoming more popular and it is this concept that is attracting a lot of interest commercially. We also have separate isolation booths and, vitally, a machine room to ensure the main space operates silently. We immediately realised the choice of speakers and treatment for the room would be very important."

A team of tutors and staff at SSR auditioned various speakers from their extensive selection throughout the school, and agreed that their finest-sounding nearfield monitors were a pair of PMC's TB2S-A Mk IIs. They contacted PMC to ask their advice, and to see whether they could help with the design. After auditioning a pair of MB2S-A active mid-fields with PMC's Ian Downs in one of their existing studios, they decided to proceed. "PMC were brilliant — we asked if they could recommend anybody to help us treat the room to make the best of the speakers, and they said there was only one person they usually recommend — Jochen Veith."

A former musician and sound engineer based just outside Munich, Veith is now one of Germany's most respected acoustic design consultants. His skills have gone into the construction of many mastering, recording and broadcast control rooms all over Europe, frequently in conjunction with PMC installations. Unlike many generalised acoustic architects and consultants, Veith, with his musical and audio engineering background, has an instinctive understanding of the requirements of a control room or studio, which may go some way towards explaining the demand for his services, although he remains modest about this. "This was a very unconventional studio: basically a control room and recording area in one, with the concave ceiling," explains Veith from his consultancy, JV Acoustics. "Because the room was going to be used to record and mix, it was fundamental to get the transfer function between the loudspeaker position and the listening position right. It was tempting to place the loudspeakers exactly in the middle of the room, when considered from front to back, but the shape of the roof would have given us a big problem. But by simulating the modal field and doing some acoustic measurements in parallel on site, we could find the best loudspeaker position and stereo image width, as well as the optimum distance for the listening position from the rear wall. And I had to put in quite a lot of acoustic treatment to control the reverb time and the modal field, because the room was so large. Again, it's a compromise — a bit of reverberation is nice for a performance and recording space, but you don't want too much because you're going to be mixing there, and that can confuse things."

The differing needs of performance/recording and mixing were tackled by treating different parts of the new studio in different ways. Tom Aston again: "Jochen's job was to find the balance between making a good mixing environment and preserving a live-sounding room for performance and recording, and he achieved that perfectly. In the finished room, there's a live-sounding area with more reflective surfaces, and the area near the console is much more absorbent, which is critical for mixing. Students can really experiment with the placement of instruments within the room to achieve a variety of sounds."

Jochen Veith explains in more detail: "We hung a large acoustic absorber over the mixing console to counteract the concave roof shape, to absorb any reflections that could confuse the sound when you're mixing, and we put more low-frequency absorbers — resonators — on the back wall behind the engineer. We treated the recording part of the room in the opposite way; we hung a convex reflective diffuser in the curve of the roof so that there was more of a live feel to that part of the room. Acoustically speaking, the room is quite varied."

The finished Spirit Studio has been a great success with SSR's commercial and student users alike — most recently with the BBC and The Doves — and Tom Aston has been particularly pleased with the performance of the speakers. "I believe we're still the only educational facility in the UK with MB2S-As, and they're brilliant; the clarity of the stereo imaging in particular blew other monitors we have out of the water when we were A/B testing. The speakers also seem very versatile: they can handle going from classical music, which we record a lot of here for the Royal Northern College of Music, to pop, rock and club music. This versatility is vital, as our 400 students work with many different styles and genres."