Audio A Construction

We’ve been doing a lot of Facebook and Twitter posts about the construction on our stage and Audio A but it’s been a while since I wrote about it here. There has been a lot of progress. Actually, there’s something new every day. Whether it’s another layer of drywall, HVAC ducts going in, HVAC work on the roof or door framing there’s something new to look at every day. We got over a big hurdle yesterday. There has been quite a bit of back and fourth between our designer and our HVAC contractor. The concern has been whether the HVAC unit will create too much noise in Audio A or the Stage. Not just coming out of the vents but the whole until coming from the roof above the ceiling in to the room. After, literally, weeks of conversations and drawings we all came to an agreement on where we are. Now just the final execution is needed. The sound attenuators arrived this morning for the duct work so those will be installed today & tomorrow, almost a week early.

All of the framing has been up for a couple weeks now. There’s a total of 5 layers of drywall that make up the hard walls of the new Audio A. In most areas all 5 layers are up. It has been interesting to see how they do the layering so no seams match up. Making sure no seams line up is very important for the sound proofing aspect of the room. After the hard walls go in the final electric gets surface mounted on the most inside layer of drywall. It’s amazing how important it is that there are no penetrations in the walls. The acoustic integrity of the room can be ruined by one small hole the size of a nail. If there is a penetration in any of the wall structure it effects how the sound bounces off walls and how sound is let in to the room. So all penetrations need to be in the far front of the room under where the mixing console will be.

Yesterday the platform for the front and back of the room were framed out. The back step/platform is interesting because the design plans were so precise about the curvature of the step. I wasn’t out there with my protractor checking the angle but hopefully they followed.

Last week we picked the colors for the walls. All the soft walls have fabric so we had to choose the fabric colors. We’re doing with black on most of the walls in front and a light gray in the back with a decent amount of red on the back wall. Then the ceiling is dark gray. Our old Audio A was a light green so as long as we stayed away from that we were good. And it was important to us to have more than just black & gray. Knowing we needed the black & gray in front so there’s no reflection on the projection screen, we focused on the back wall for our color. We looked at a couple reds and blues and red won out. We’re excited to see it.

On the stage side, we’re learning more about how we’re going to treat that space to get it to where we want. There’s a lot of HVAC work going on in there and we have a number of acoustic treatments available to us so we’re extremely confident that the stage will be great for VO recording, ADR, Foley and shooting.