| Hsu, the one-time chief
engineer at Westlake Audio (his mentor was Glenn Phoenix), knew that
Shipley's final stipulation would be particularly challenging: How
would he solve the fundamental acoustical problems associated with
two sets of parallel walls, plus a parallel floor and ceiling? After
a week of endless calculations, Hsu had his “Eureka!” moment.
After checking his math and checking it again, he confirmed that
he had indeed figured out a way to make a rectangular space mimic
a polygonal room so that it was free of standing waves and resonant
frequencies.
Hsu called the apparent breakthrough ZR, for “Zero Reflection,” and
immediately applied for a patent, because, to his knowledge, the
design was unprecedented. “I was able to come up with a method
that enables us to build — within the depth of a 4-inch-stud
wall and using everyday materials — all the geometries needed
to make any rectangular room sound like a world-class recording
studio,” he asserts. “Our clients' reaction to our
work is that the rooms not only have a charismatic signature sound,
but are also quiet, with excellent isolation.
“We're a design firm — we don't just design studios,” Hsu
continues. “But studio design has been our bread-and-butter
for a long time now, and the hardest part about designing a recording
studio is, it's got to have a good vibe, a good feel and the aesthetics
have to match the client or his clientele. At the end of the day,
of course, it must sound good.
“I remembered Mike from my days at Westlake Audio,” Hsu
recalls, “and I knew that he had a really good set of ears.
I knew he wanted a certain look, and he was very specific about
the sound, the time parameters and what he didn't want to do. So
I told Mike, ‘I've got this design that works on paper; I've
run the numbers on it and done the equations. If you decide to
do this, you'll be the guinea pig, but it could turn out great.’ Mike
was incredibly supportive of the concept and willing to take the
risk for the possible benefit.”
The Delta H team built all the geometries into the walls and covered
them with flat cloth so that the room maintained its rectangular
shape. “But it basically does more than the angled walls,” says
Hsu. “The concept is so simple, but the application of it,
because of all the math and geometry involved, is enormously complicated.
We're currently testing prototype software that will predict every
angle of reflection with any speaker system. We have to calculate
each room out so that the mixer doesn't get any aberrant or negative
acoustic anomalies. Basically, ZR design extends near-field into
the entire room, so that once the sound goes past your mixing position,
it never comes back. With ZR, you hear only your content and the
transducers; the room is no longer part of the equation.”
As it turned out, Hsu's design sounded as good in Shipley's “guinea
pig” space as it looked on paper — and so did the environment
as a whole. “Mike is really vibey,” says Hsu. “As
he puts it, ‘I've been in dark caves all my life; I want
two big windows that open to let the air in. And I'm tired of flying
to London and New York; I just want to stay in one place. I want
my clients to ISDN me everything, and I'll mix it and ISDN it back.’ If
you look at Mike's room, it's like a womb with the curtains closed,
and if you pull the curtains back and open these two swivel windows,
it goes from that dark, candlelit interior to almost like being
outside.”
When the room was up and running, Shipley did a blind A/B test
on a newly done mix from his place and another he'd done at a major
studio, and the home mix was the unanimous winner.
Having proved to his own satisfaction and that of client Shipley
that ZR worked, as did the other key elements, Hsu and his three
full-time staffers — CTO Scott Waterman, project manager/designer
Christine Huynh and architect/designer Lena Kim — went about
applying the concept to the two-room studio of composer/sound designer
Neil Uchitel, who, after hearing Hsu describe ZR, decided to take
the plunge. “I told Hanson, ‘I'm a composer, not an
acoustical physicist, so I'll take your word for it,’” Uchitel
says. “It was nontraditional, but it made sense to me.”
The projected 5.1 mix room was a ballroom and onetime speakeasy
next to the main house. It dated back to the 1920s, with wood floors,
stucco walls and five antique glass windows. “I couldn't
physically change the structure at all because of the historic
nature of the home,” says Uchitel. Once again, the space
was rectangular, and Uchitel had a wrinkle of his own — he
wanted the mix room fitted with bass traps in the ceiling.
The construction was done in the space of three weeks, with Hsu
incorporating the exposed Douglas fir beams into the bass trap.
In contrast to Shipley's personal needs, Uchitel's room was designed
to accommodate high-end clients from the advertising world.
The mix room was completed just days before Uchitel's wife gave
birth to the couple's first child, and at press time, the studio
has yet to be tuned. Hsu had stopped by with a Bruel & Kjaer
2250 analyzer to measure the place's acoustical accuracy. “We
couldn't see the room on the analyzer, and we couldn't hear it,
either,” says Hsu with satisfaction. “It was as if
I'd plugged the CD player straight into the analyzer and we were
watching the graphic EQ of the CD.”
Early in 2007, the Delta H team will begin converting the garage
adjacent to the ballroom into a live room, once again employing
ZR. Current projects include the Pepperdine University Fine Arts
Division music lab, Yahoo Music Live Sets at Fox Studios Stage
17 and Chalice Studio F.
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