Rome Acoustic Design

Many people do not realize just how important acoustics are during the recording process. The size, shape, and material of a room can all drastically affect the sounds that are captured within them. Look at any world famous recording studio and you'll find high ceilings, hardwood floors, separated rooms, and acoustical treatment. At Rome we have not ignored this crucial aspect of the recording process. We have the largest and best-sounding control rooms in Columbus, as well as one of the largest tracking rooms. We can easily accommodate large choirs and bands, with many options for isolation including a large high ceiling drum booth/isolation room. We have accommodated 30-voice choirs and large musical ensembles in our main tracking room.

Sound Isolation and Treatment

Rome is one of the only studios in the Columbus area that was actually designed and built to be a recording studio from the ground up, rather than a residential home or office building converted to be a studio. This means that Rome has significant structural differences, which lay an important acoustic foundation. For instance, our building is built with the control room and main studio on separate slabs of cement providing better sound isolation. Our control room and main studio are also divided by a wall that's three feet thick with a large window (10 ft. by 4 ft.) containing three, 1/2-inch panes of glass. Finally, the outside walls are over a foot thick with 12" block and 3 layers of crossing drywall separated by acoustic insulation and a fourth layer of acoustic tile. This means that your sounds will have superior separation and no extraneous noise will leak in from outside. Having a separate control room also allows the engineer to focus on the sound being captured, separate from the loud instruments themselves.

Rome also features a wide range of acoustical treatment to further tailor and improve the sound of the room. On the inside of the tracking room we have a custom built bass trap design for this particular room. It is slanted and covers an entire wall with a sealed resonant chamber to capture a broad range of low and mid frequencies. It is hidden behind a wall of fabric-covered fiberglass panels, which smooth out the higher frequencies. These panels are suspended in a manner designed to not interfere with the bass trap.

No Parallel Walls

Another important part of the acoustic design includes avoiding parallel walls. Parallel walls cause a number of acoustic problems including standing waves and powerful modal resonances. Essential this means that some frequencies will be louder or quieter as you move around the room. This can prove detrimental to recording, as a bass amp might be placed in an area where bass frequencies are very weak. You may find a surprising amount of parallel walls in many other Columbus studios due to the fact that they were not originally designed to be studios, but not at Rome.

Natural Sounding Rooms

Some studios tend to do either too much or incorrect acoustic treatment, which can cause an un-naturally dry sound (Dryness refers to the amount of reverb decay, commonly thought of as echo, you hear in the room). If a room does not have a naturally pleasant sound, chances are your recordings will be adversely affected as well. Certain instruments, such as drums and the human voice, just do not sound right without this natural ambient sound. At Rome, our hardwood floors bring out smooth, even reverb, unlike the carpet you will find covering the walls of many studios. Once you walk into our room and hear the sweet sound it can produce, we're sure that you'll be convinced of the value of our acoustics. It would be best to avoid studios that have wall-to-wall carpet as hardwood floors are best for studios. Also avoid carpet on walls since carpet dampens some frequencies but doesn’t dampen low frequencies and causes acoustic problems. If you walk into a room and it sounds like you’re in a closet filled with clothes, the room has probably been over-treated.

Control Room Acoustics

The control room is important because it is where the critical listening takes place as your project is mixed. If the acoustics are off even a little it can drastically affect your final mix. This is the area where most studios fall short, especially in Columbus, where most control rooms are designed by amateurs. Generally smaller rooms are not favorable for control rooms, as they have more acoustical problems than large ones. At Rome you'll find the largest control room in Columbus. The large size of our Control Room gives a naturally smooth (and comfortable!) listening environment where you can hear what is really on the recording. Just like the tracking room, Rome's control room features no parallel walls and very good acoustical treatment, including a high-end diffuser behind the couch.

We recently had a visit from Gary Manuel, who has built over 1,000 studios and even trained world-renowned acoustician Russ Berger. Gary used his equipment to do a complete acoustical analysis of our room, and our room frequency response curve was one of the best he had seen. It was really cool for us to have the equipment verify what we already knew. Gary says our control room and our live room are in the top 10% of the best studios in the country. Yes, our rooms really are that good!