It is no secret that serious audiophiles are willing to spend serious amounts of money on personal listening equipment. The South Korean hi-fi AK240 player from Astell & Kern alone costs £2,200 – and that’s just the base model.

To fully enjoy the AK240’s capabilities, you’ll need something along the lines of Japan’s Final Audio Design FI-BA-SS – the flagship model from the company’s Heaven series – that’s £800 for earphones.

For £3000, you can have the best audio setup in world – but only in terms of single-person listening. When it comes to actually building the perfect recording studio or your dream listening room at home, the money can get much, much crazier.

Neve 88RS

Cost: $800,000 (£600,000)

There’s a reason why this mixing console costs so much. It’s the actual analogue console that was used in Studio 1 of the famous Abbey Road Studios, a place that still strictly uses the best possible mixing equipment. This is because the clientele and talent that the studio caters to still believe that even the best digital tools are still not up to the standards of top-of-the-line analogue recording.

The studio’s list of clients has included the likes of The Beatles and Pink Floyd, whose Piper At The Gates of Dawn album was finished at Abbey Road – just to give you an idea of the standards that the Neve 88RS is capable of duplicating.

Backes & Muller BM 100

Cost: £295,000

At more than a quarter of a million pounds, the BM 100 by Backes & Muller actually falls into the “reasonable” price range of high-end speaker systems. What Hi-Fi reveals that you’ll need quite a bit of room if you’re planning to purchase and install the 230cm (or 7ft 6in) behemoth. It has crisp and perfect audio by way of something that looks like an alien starship.

Smart Studio

Cost: As much as it takes

Like our readers, AMI is all too familiar with the fact that when it comes to professional recording, the recording space itself is as integral to the process as the equipment. No one knows this better than Smart Studio, who specialise not just in audio equipment, but also the modern building techniques and materials necessary to get the most out of whatever equipment is available. Their services aren’t cheap, but if you’re serious about creating a professional recording space, they’re the best money can buy.

Hart Audio D&W Aural Pleasure

Cost: £5 million

The formula for the most expensive pair of speakers in the market is simple. Take the best available speaker technology and surround it with a pair of 24-carat gold-cast 76cm cabinets. Many top-of-the-line sound systems can similarly promise the perfect sound, but only the £5 million Hart Audio D&W Aural Pleasure can do it with this much retro-futuristic swagger.

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In many areas of audio post production, confirmation on commissions are being delayed and the amount of time professionals have to do their post production work is being reduced. It’s clear to see that the industry is becoming pressurised, and while these trends look unlikely to be reversed anytime soon, companies need to come up with new methods of constructing and equipping studios that take into account these shorter deadlines.

Enter Smart Studio, a fusion of acoustic design and active acoustic technology with modern building techniques and materials. An extensive review by the Dublin-based team is what led directly to the development of this flexible and radical strategy, which includes all of the key elements necessary in a professional studio environment.

The solution has primarily been developed in response to the growing level of dissatisfaction with traditional methods of designing and building critical studio facilities, as Jim Dunne, senior acoustic consultant and the creator of Smart Studio, explains: “The concept comes from being very frustrated with the standard of your builder in terms of being able to convert your ideas or plans for a studio into a real world entity.

“Being based in Ireland with two huge marketplaces to our either side meant there had to be a modular element to it. We had to come up with something different, to replicate a fully professional studio but broken down into this modular format.”

A lot of advantages immediately became apparent to Dunne and co: “It’s made in a factory so it’s repeatable in terms of quality,” says Dunne. “It provides huge efficiencies because we’re able to make and quality control all the components in our own backyard and produce a lot less waste.”

The modular design of Smart Studio allows the opportunity for it to be demounted, meaning users get a residual amount of their investment back when they relocate to another site. This also means there’s no cost of dilapidations and from an environmental perspective, the facility does not need to be ripped out and completely rebuilt elsewhere.

Dunne’s career in the audio industry was pre-dated by a spell in construction working with his father. He ended up moving away from the building industry and going to college to do electronic engineering, eventually ending up working in a recording studio in Dublin. Having moved on, he had his own company supplying recording and broadcasting equipment to the local Irish marketplace. Garnering a broad range of knowledge from being in such environments while also developing an understanding of the equipment and installation side, Dunne then became familiar with acoustics through his conventional acoustics consultancy iAcoustics.

“Luckily, we haven’t had to actively collaborate with anyone else beyond the envelope of the company, because we share such a wide range of skills between us and can do all the manufacturing ourselves,” Dunne explains. “It’s in our nature to be somewhat more self-reliant. Smart Studio is kind of a reflection of who I am as an individual, and the experiences I’ve had in my working career as such.”

Dunne goes on to explain that the target market for Smart Studio is very much the people who work in sound for film/TV and sound for corporate purposes. The concept seems to suit post-pro professionals very well, perhaps because of the unfortunate state of the music industry, with funding hard to come by for small music producers.

While there’s still a proliferation of home studios, and there’s been a clear evolution on the electronic side, the fundamentals still exist in that audio professionals will always need an accurate monitoring environment. Dunne goes on to say that while the availability of audio DSP technology has enhanced the overall situation, and as much as a bedroom is a working environment, it is not an accurate listening environment.

Those interested in the concept can log their details on the Smart Studio website and use the online cost estimator to get a budgetary figure for their studio build. “As we see it, there’s a number of different agendas and people who would be involved in the decision-making chain; some of them will look at it from a business perspective, some from an acoustic perspective, and some from an environmental perspective,” Dunne adds. “We hope that Smart Studio will become one of these aspirational things that people might not be initially be able to afford, but will commit to it in the future.

“From an acoustic point of view, we really pride ourselves on the quality of the room acoustic environment that we create. The design is very robust in the sense that we really do address both the sound insulation requirement and the low frequency bass absorption requirement for a studio. I would suggest that virtually all of our rooms would be suitable for Dolby based applications and what we already know – having analysed the rooms that we’ve built so far for the likes of Manchester-based Flix – is that we can really achieve excellent levels of low frequency acoustic control.

“We also use a huge amount of diffusion in our rooms, albeit very carefully. It’s not quadratic diffusion but 2D diffusion, which means that you retain the acoustic energy in the space but its diffusely spread in the room. With this type of diffusion we end up with a very comfortable acoustic environment which people can work in for an extended period of time, and this is consistent from room to room. Our objective is not to make a room that has a sound, but to make a room that lets you hear the speakers which you’ve spent time, effort and energy researching and buying.”

www.smartstudioinc.com

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