29 November 2008

Apollo Studio Acoustics (Part 1)

Finally things are moving on a bit again. The studio is dry enough now to start working on finishing the wall and ceilings etc. We started today to work on the ceilings of both the studio and the cinema. As I told you before the whole concrete structure of these rooms make them echo a lot. We really need to put some damping materials on there to reduce this. The cinema will need a bit more then the studio in that sense. In the studio I want to keep some natural acoustic, because when that becomes to dead it will be very tiring to work in it. The human ears seem to need that. So what are we going to do? Well to start with we found a special plaster for the ceilings. You can see the buckets with the stuff standing in this picture. All quite heavy. Hard to imagine that this has to stick to the ceiling.

The stuff has to be sprayed to the ceiling. It is not something you can do yourself, we hired a specialized company that has the equipment and experience to do this. As you can see they carefully covered everything in the room to avoid the plaster to stick on places it doesn't belong. They used a lot of plastic and cardboard. They covered all the walls and also my cabling guiding system in the studio. To get the optimum result they need to spray on quite a layer. In total there will be about 1.5 centimeters of this plaster on the ceiling. They can't do that in one time. So on Friday they put on the first layer and let that dry over the weekend. On Monday they will come back and do the second layer.

Here you can see the result of the first layer. It is quite a rough structure as you can see. At first we wanted to buy the stuff in black, since that is the color I want for the walls and ceiling, but our order was to small for the supplier to mix this especially for us. They assured us though that we could just paint over it and that this would not affect the acoustic effect. But now that I see this rough texture I think we need to spray the black paint on there as well. We asked the guy who did the ceiling if he could help us with that as well. He told us that he doesn't do that himself but that he worked together with a painter who does. So he is going to put us in contact with that guy.

In the picture on the right you can also see the first inhabitant of the new studio. We moved the Eminent 310 downstairs already and I can tell you that this was not a funny job to do. It is quite heavy actually. I think only for this reason it will never leave the studio again, I can't imagine getting it back up in one piece again. As you can see it is nicely covered. I hope it won't suffer from this spray job. One other thing I can tell you that this acoustic plaster does smell very bad then it is still wet. The fumes coming from it really irritated my throat the first night after it was sprayed on. But now (a day later) the stuff is dry and that is luckily gone. We can anticipate on that now for coming Monday when they spray on the second layer.

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