The New Mastering Rooms

Paul Stubblebine Mastering has recently moved and expanded. There were three main reasons for the move.

First, we wanted to offer all of our music clients mastering studios that are really dialed in, good places to really dial in the recordings.

Second, we thought that surround for music had progressed to the point that it made sense to have purpose-built surround rooms to do the best possible work for the new surround-capable music formats (see the SACD and DVD sections of the site.)

Third, and perhaps surprisingly, in light of the music industry's well publicized struggles, we have been feeling an increased vitality in the grass-roots music scene, especially here in Northern California. For all these reasons we felt that a new facility was the best way to be ready for the coming changes.

We have two new mastering rooms, designed and built specifically for our requirements/needs/preferences. We had several goals in the designs. We wanted the two rooms to be able to share a common machine room, for the sake of workflow as well as noise control. We wanted the rooms to be comfortable (certainly for our clients, but for ourselves as well - we spend lots of hours in them!) And the acoustical performance was a prime concern.

In a mastering room we are looking for a sort of idealized version of a home living room. Since we are preparing the music for public release, we want to be in a room of the same scale as the rooms the home listener might be listening in. We just want the acoustics to be a very neutral version of what a living room might be.

With the help of Nancy Irish Designs we came up with a scheme of colors, texture, and trim that results in a very comfortable working environment. We had the lighting spec'd by Kim Cladas Lighting Design.

We worked with Bob Hodas Acoustic Analysis throughout the design and construction to make sure that the acoustical performance would meet our needs. There are a few well-known measures of acoustical performance, such as noise level and reverberation time, that would of course be part of project like this. We also had some other goals for the rooms that don1t reduce so easily to a single measurement. For instance, we wanted the rooms to be lively, and at the same time articulate. Certainly we hoped that the performance would be even throughout the low frequency range, and consistent over a wide listening area. In short we want to be able to hear into the recording easily, with the room acoustics in a supporting role and offering no distractions. We took the approach, common in monitoring rooms today, of assuring that early reflections were under control. At the same time we wanted a lively environment with a smooth diffuse reverb field. With good room dimensions, a little absorption in the right places (using the cotton acoustical bats from Bonded Logic and a lot of diffusors from RPG Diffusor Systems Inc. we have come up with rooms whose performance is very pleasing to us.