In yesterday's post I wrote about the difficulty of letting go, of ignoring sunk costs and moving forward.
Perhaps an even more difficult decision is this next one. Letting Octave Studios go.
Two years ago we invested heavily in the building of Octave Studios. A passion project for sure. Our mission to keep the art of high end recording alive and well, to further those arts and to champion the superiority of DSD was the reason we made the decision to build a temple of sonic excellence. One that we adore. That passion remains, as does our commitment to the arts.
What's changed?
In yesterday's post I explained how, in the upstairs music rooms, we have inadvertently built an expensive bass trap and that the only way to fix that was to move to more solid ground. In the case of the studio, we have the opposite problem along with another few wrinkles on top of it.
Octave studios is in a leased building. To make it work without breaking the bank or enraging the landlord we repurposed what was already there: a square tracking room, an unwieldy control room, and a separate mix room. The square tracking room (where the musicians play) is a bass amplifier whose boom and low frequency bloom can wreak havoc on recordings if we're not careful.
And then there's the unwieldy control room and separate mix room. Without boring the pants off of my readers here's the short version. In a perfect audiophile world you want to mix your recording on your reference system.
Why?
At the end of the day you're going to take whatever you have mixed and have a listen on your reference high-end audio system for which you acknowledge is the entire point of all that you do. Once it sounds amazing on your reference system you're good to release it to the world.
And that's the problem. Our reference system is at the PS Audio mother ship. Where we mix is a smaller room—with the same reference speakers and electronics—but more of a near field room than what will ultimately be the end result.
Thus, when we mix at the studio we spend countless hours driving back and forth taking notes and making tweaks until we get it right.
You can see where this is going. If we could mix in the reference room…
All of a sudden we have available two acoustically wonderful reference listening rooms adjacent to each other—one can be the control room and the other the tracking room. And, we won't suffer from boomy bass taking over the recording space because…wait for it…we have a built in bass trap below!
Lastly, we will finally be able to build a control room and mix room into one reference room. Once it sounds right in the mix we're done! And that pesky loss of bass problem in that room? Piece of cake. Near field woofers will solve that problem easily (woe to anyone below us).*
*You might wonder two things: first, why we didn't just implement near-field woofers in the listening rooms before moving them and the answer's quite simple. We're a HiFi manufacturer of electronics and loudspeakers that have to have a reference listening room as perfect as possible on its own in order to properly evaluate the products we design. Your second related question might be if the new tracking room doesn't support low bass won't future Octave recordings have a lack of bass? Great question, but the answer is somewhat the same as the first question. When we record we're in the near field. Microphones are placed close to the bass and the room (hopefully) doesn't interfere. Bingo!
