PARIS, FRANCE, September 19, 2023 — For more than a decade, Mix with the Masters (MwtM) has been one of the leading lights in educating the world on the art of studio recording. Their ongoing master classes with major producers and engineers such as Jack Antonoff, Chris Lord-Alge, Marcella Araica, and Timbaland have connected aspiring studio engineers with a nearly endless source of expert knowledge. When co-founders Maxime Le Guil and Victor Lévy-Lasne began planning for their new flagship location in Paris with world renowned studio designers WSDG (Walters-Storyk Design Group), one of the requirements was a full-featured studio control room that could function equally well as a teaching studio and as a convertible live room. Realizing that forward-thinking studio design techniques were required, the group brought on the REDIacoustics team who utilized their AI-powered NIROTM [Non-Cuboid Iterative Room Optimization] software to ensure that the space excelled in all three categories.
Making the most of an inspiring space
Rue Boyer is located in a vintage two-story residential building and as such its designers needed to make the most of a tightly packed space. Unable to alter the room’s basic shape for acoustic purposes, the REDIacoustics design team had to explore other options. “Many recording studios are built within preexisting spaces, so much of what we do often requires us to work around the geometry of the room to create the desired acoustic conditions,” said REDIacoustics Senior Acoustic Engineer Rinaldi Petrolli. “Rue Boyer was a very special project because in addition to this we had to treat it like three different rooms based on how Mix with the Masters uses it.”
Control Room A’s 48m2 was designed to serve multiple purposes. In addition to meeting the typical requirements of a high-end studio control room, the space also needed to be adaptable as a workshop space that can fit up to twenty Master Class attendees, or — with its vintage SSL 400 console safely dropped into the floor via an elevator system — a live room that can fit a full band. “The acoustic requirements of any one of these types of spaces are quite demanding,” explained Petrolli. “In order to maximize it for all three uses, we needed a way to quickly test every available acoustic treatment possibility to control the low end frequencies of the room with all of these variables taken into account. These kinds of situations are exactly what our team designed NIROTM for.”
“The strength of NIROTM is that because it is an iterative predictive software, it can test these endless possibilities far faster than any of us could and present us with the most optimized approaches to work from. No other tool on the market can do this, and it gives us an edge to solving problems that no one else can.”
Optimizing a world-class studio with a subwoofer solution
Informed by the information gleaned from NIROTM, the REDIacoustics design team came upon a novel solution that would give the space a versatile but adaptable acoustic profile to suit the different configurations and uses of the control room. The team devised an array of subwoofers — designed & built by loudspeaker manufacturers Symphonic Acoustics — placed strategically around the room to balance its low-end frequency response and optimize a larger listening area. In addition to the sub array, the REDIacoustics team also utilized a 1.3m deep Helmholtz resonator below the SSL console that can be removed from the equation when it is dropped for the live room configuration. “The final design consisted of 17 acoustical treatments, including various configurations of Helmholtz resonators, porous absorption, porous absorption over resonators, high-frequency diffusers and broad bandwidth modulated diffusers,” explained Petrolli. “We used five strategically placed subwoofers to flatten the low-frequency response across the room, enabling the students sitting at the back of the room to have a pristine bass reproduction in all seating areas. It was a creative solution that was would have been difficult to test without NIROTM.”
“One could go onsite with actual speakers and physically test a lot of different positions — but given that this is a complex room with complex treatments, you could never try everything easily or quickly. With NIROTM, we were able to save time and budget by simulating all of this beforehand and thus come up with a more innovative solution that suited the client’s needs perfectly. What we simulated and measured matched perfectly with how the room sounded when it was completed.”
Now operating at full capacity, Rue Boyer has seen a busy schedule of Master Classes as well as recording dates from major luminaries like Taylor Swift, Justice, Little Simz, and Pharrell Williams. “We’re confident that our new facility and MwtM’s educational format will introduce many opportunities to exchange world-class production concepts and encourage collaborative experience-sharing,” said MwTM’s Victor Lévy-Lasne. “We’ve been particularly pleased with the reactions of early clients like producer/engineer Eddie Kramer and producer Jack Antonoff.”
Upon finishing his initial sessions at the newly opened studio, Grammy-winning producer/engineer Antonoff remarked, “I wrote and recorded some of my favorite things of all time while looking out that big window. It was an honor to work at Rue Boyer.”
Dr. Peter D’Antonio, Director of Research at REDI Acoustics, commented: “It is very gratifying that a scientifically designed software can yield results that agree favorably with experimental measurements and user preference. The goal of a control room is to be neutral, so that its acoustic signature is not convolved into the mix and the musical product produced can translate to other listening environments, we call this transferability. In other words: If you can’t take the room out of the mix, you can’t take the mix out of the room.”
For more information about REDIacoustics, please visit: http://www.rediacoustics.com/
REDIacoustics is now offering an introductory service for clients including an entry-level room analysis starting at $199. For more information and to book your NIROTM report, click here.
ABOUT REDIacoustics, LLC
REDIacoustics, LLC is an acoustic research and software development firm founded by Dr. Peter D’Antonio founder of RPG Diffusor Systems, Inc., John Storyk of WSDG, and PK Pandy of AVN | SYS. REDIacoustics is dedicated to designing software tools that aid in the acoustical optimization of critical listening environments, beginning with their groundbreaking service, NIRO™ (Non-Cuboid Iterative Room Optimizer).
