Sumsound build

So this topic may be a bit long due to photographic evidence, but if you’re interested read on!

The room at Trackdown that I put my name on was a fairly large sized room, the problem though was its irregularity – there was only one right angle in the place and everything else was rather dali-esque. The solution to this was to firstly build a false wall at the front of the room to turn it into an even sided trapezium within the mix area – that was, after deciding where the front of the room would actually be!

So first I had to put up that false wall (red bit in the drawing above), by building a frame and to make it totally effective, fill the void behind it with as much insulation as possible…

Then came speaker stands, and being on a budget, but needing them fairly high to put the speaker throw into the middle of the screen and above my console monitors, I went for PVC tubing, sand and threaded rod construction. Each tube took a bag of sand (about 20kgs) so each stand is about 60kgs (120lbs) and is coupled with the floor and speaker using dome bolts on the threaded rod, which is pulling the top and bottom plates together.

Speaker stand construction

Finished Stands with my DSMs on it – lined up the acoustic centre of the speakers

Then the acoustically transparent projection screen – the flagship from Oz theatre screens with their top of the line fabric. This was mounted on another floor to ceiling frame…

The frame from floor to ceiling

The 3.5m wide 16:9 screen in place

You can also see my beautiful custom made desk in that shot. Scott from Zellers Furniture in Sydney made this gorgeous piece, with two brass style plates on either side of the main D-Command. These plates are removable and a precise width, so a second 24 fader configured D-Command can be placed into the desk for dual operator mixes, if ever the need arises!

The desk prior to “brassing” and french polishing

The Desk in place with the DCommand dropped in

Next came a second false wall for a machine room at the back. I held off on putting that wall in place until after the desk was in, to get a better feel for the dimensions of the room. The desk is 3m wide!

More to come soon! Hopefully this is an interesting pictorial diary of the construction…