Main monitors were huge Tannoys mounted in 26mm blockboard which was the front of a brick housing of about 2 cu metres.
I put my control room into service with a pair of Tannoy Gold Belveders. I had an octagonal speaker loft with 8 trapezoidal positions tapering inwards at the top. When I did the design I did not know which direction sound reproduction was going to take. Remember quad? The center position was filled with 3/4" ply covered with a decorative cloth. The Tannoys were in the adjoining spaces. The spaces on the sides were finished identically to the center space. The three rear spaces were covered only with cloth, with the loft stuffed with fiberglass. The mixer sat 7 feet on axis from the center of each Tannoy. I love the point source clarity of the Tannoy dual concentric design. I could achieve levels well in excess of 110 dBSpl at the mix position. With a continuous baffle between and beside each speaker the snare and mid-range instruments sounded real and solid. A back reflection and cancellation pattern can make them sound hollow.
The console sat on a one foot high platform covered with 3/4" ply over 2x12s I had a hole pattern drilled in the ply to create a highly adsorptive Helmholz resonator centered on about 125Hz, but we stuffed the spaces between the joists with fiberglass to broaden the Q, covered it with a thick jute pad and plush carpet. The result was an almost totally absorptive floor. I made the floor disappear, acoustically.
The studio owner had an excellent aesthetic sense and we collaborated on the finish of the room. He bought a ton of solid 3/4" walnut and we finished everything below the loft with 2" rounded walnut slats on about 2" centers, sculpted all around the room, including doors over storage spaces. Any parallel surfaces were close to 100% absorptive. The back of the slats was covered with charcoal colored felt with fiberglass behind.
The console was articulated, with the output assigns and Vu Meters above the hinge and with the Echo Return and Monitor sections seperate sections that could be either arranged in a line that continued the line of the input section or could be swung around up to 60 degrees. The rearmost section of each section could be raised up about 45 degrees for mixing. In that configuration, the mixer could reach and adjust every control without moving the center of his/her head except in pivot.
The chief problem was the fact that I lost the argument over how wide to make the room. Too late he realized that I had been right. It was quite a ride. At one point he had over $80,000.00 cash money invested in the console and it was all in bags and boxes of parts in my second bedroom "office" in West L.A. One of the more dramatic moments was when I inserted one of 72 10 position Switchcraft push button switch assemblies into one of 72 ~8"x10" double sided printed circuit boards with plated through holes and it fit. There was one such assembly on each side of each of 36 output assign modules.
As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Frank Delaney ~ Ireland
And I did actually edit 2 inch tape on occasion. The idea of the physical splice in sound, video or movies is long forgotten - though not the small of film cement. You can't be me, I'm taken
We had an MCI 24 track. I had used an Ampex 440 two track for mixdown. I loved the isoloop drive of the 3M. Later, when they were developing the Digital Recorder, I was the project manager for the development of the editor, which synched two machines together with SMPTE time codes and executed up to 32 digital crossfades simultaneously.
The problem was that the technology, which they were given by the BBC, utilized a Hamming code for dropout protection. You could loose up to .2" of media off of the tape and not loose any sound. The Hamming code took a 16 bit digital word, waited for approximately 200ms, took another word, added them together and formed a check sum word. The original could be extracted from any two of these words. But if you tried to do a razor blade edit, you got a giant pop.
My editor took a word from one track, multiplied it by a coefficient from the start of my cross fade PROM table, pop the result into a TRW TDC1010J which would multiply two words in 110ns and put them into an accumulator, do the same thing for the destination track, except starting from the other end of the PROM, and then step through the PROM in opposite directions. It could do this 32 times in less than 20 micro seconds. I spotted the chip from an ad in Electronic Design Magazine, hired an MIT EE to design the logic and three Motorola 6800 programmers to program the four seperate microprocessors which had to work together in my design. I knew the application. They could do the work.
Without ever signing away my patent rights, I never-the -less became the not so proud author and assignee of a basic patent in digital assembly editing. That is another story. I also ended up in debt, naturally. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
