University of Saint Francis upped its game last year by purchasing the 90-plus-years-old, Spanish-style Scottish Rite Center in the university’s hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana. The building’s existing performance hall remains intact, but acoustician Gavin Haverstick of Haverstick Designs helped the school treat 31 other rooms in the building, including classrooms, practice rooms, ensemble rooms, edit and mastering suites, and studios.
“They had a technology program before, but it was in a building they were leasing,” says Haverstick. “Buying their building allowed them to treat the rooms as they wished. We used off-the-shelf treatments for some of the rooms, such as in the mix and edit rooms, but a lot of the rooms have brand-new, custom treatment packages.”
Several of the rooms include Acoustical Fulfillment’s Flex48 panels, which Haverstick helped develop and patent with the manufacturer to offer variable acous- tics when plastic shields are repositioned or removed. “They installed 64 of those in multiple rooms—in the Studio A live room, the iso booths, and others,” Haverstick says. “It allows them to tailor the reverb time of the room for whatever piece of music they’re performing. They’re the first university to install that product, and it helps when they teach their students about acoustics.”
Equipment in the University of Saint Francis’ new studios was purchased from Fort Wayne neighbor Sweetwater, and includes a 32-channel Neve 5088 console and ATC SCM25A monitors in Studio A, and an Avid S6 and JBL 5.1 surround monitoring in the B room.
