Queen Mary's "Media and Arts Technology Studios" Audio System Design
Martin J. Morrell, Christopher A. Harte, Joshua D. Reiss · Journal of the Audio Engineering Society · 2011
The ‘Media and Arts Technology Studios’ is a new multimedia facility at Queen Mary University of London comprising three spaces: an acoustically isolated ‘listening room’, a studio control room and a large performance lab. This engineering report discusses our design philosophy for our given brief to create a world-class audio recording/playback facility for a space that is a ‘blank canvas’ for researchers. We detail considerations for making an audio system that is simple to use for standard recording and playback whilst at the same time having a tremendous amount of routing options between the connected spaces for users to create unique projects. The system features two separate spatial audio reproduction systems. The result is a 96kHz/24bit MADI based system using a multimode fibre optic network and dedicated wordclock throughout. 1. THE STUDIOS Queen Mary’s Media & Arts Technology Studios are a new dedicated multimedia facility comprising three separate rooms in the Engineering building at the university’s Mile End campus. The Listening Room is an acoustically isolated space that originally housed an anechoic chamber when the building was first built. The chamber fell into disuse in the ninties and was converted to a quiet room with a short reverberation time in 2007 for experiments and recordings. The Performance Lab and Control Room have recently been built next to the listening room in a space that used to be a large open plan computing lab area. The performance lab is a black box space for qMedia research groups. In the context of this brief, it can be used as a larger recording space and also and has a Multi-Channel Arbitrary Reproduction System (MARS). The control room is provides facilities to record and monitor audio from the other rooms. All the cabling that connects the spaces is patched to a small plant room located in between the Control Room and Performance Lab (a floor plan of the new facility is shown in figure 1). This engineering brief deals only with the audio system connectivity and related uses of the studios. Other uses include lighting, motion capture and other arts research but that is not the authors’ focus. 1.1. Brief & Design Considerations The brief given for the audio system design was to provide a ‘world class audio recording/playback facility’. Given this brief, a set of use cases were decided upon and offered for review to members of the Centre for Digital Music research group and other research groups of qMedia who will use the studios. The use cases related to audio are: 1. Multitrack Audio Recording of a Band Musicians perform in the Listening Room and are recorded by engineers in the Control Room. This will require high quality multichannel audio recording from Listening Room to Control Room and return channels from Control Room to Listening Room for musicians’ headphones and playback across monitors. Bidirectional MIDI connections may be required where electronic instruments are used. Twoway audio/video communication for talk-back purposes is also required. 2. Multitrack Recording of a Large Ensemble (e.g. Classical Chamber Group) If the Listening Room is not big enough or the AES 130 Convention, London, UK, 2011 May 13–16