Los Angeles, CA (February 20, 2024)—“It was a spare-no-expense project. I didn’t want to cut any corners; I wanted the best of the best,” says Jaycen Joshua of his new Canton House Studios. The graffiti-print wall finish is just one example: “I’m a big fan of Jean-Paul Gaulthier so I used his curtain fabric, which costs way too much money, instead of regular studio fabric because I’ve got to look at it every day.”
Joshua engaged Dave Malekpour, president of Professional Audio Design in Hanover, Mass., and David Anthony, West Coast Director, to handle the design, acoustics, equipment sourcing and integration. “I know that Dave’s great with speakers, but I didn’t know he also built studios,” he admits.
Malekpour, who has built rooms for Coldplay, The Weeknd, Snoop Dogg and many others, leveraged his proprietary brands and relationships to build out the two-room facility, envisioned by architect Michael Bashkhangy, Malekpour’s partner in Malekpour Design Partners, to have Studio-Float isolation products, Jocavi acoustic treatment and Augspurger main monitors. This being a residential neighborhood, Malekpour notes, “The isolation had to be the very best.”
PAD’s design called for an initial shell of QuietRock and plywood isolated from the building using Studio-Float’s Isoraft product. The studio walls were then built atop a four-layer floor floating on Isorafts. Once completed, Malekpour reports, “We couldn’t measure anything outside other than ambient air noise until we hit 114 dB in the control room. In the house, we measured 112 dB isolation.”
Joshua’s ATC SCM45 mid-field monitors are integrated with the subs in the Augspurger Duo12/Sub18 main system. “It’s not a big jump when you go from one to the other, and the new horn that Dave has on the Augspurger top end is so clean,” Joshua says.
Cover Story: Inside Jaycen Joshua’s Canton House Studios
Mix engineer Mike Seaberg, who initially started working as Joshua’s assistant about four years before they left Larrabee, works out of the second room, the Guesthouse. He says with a laugh, “When I’m in L.A., I’m in there probably more than I’m in my own apartment.”
Seaberg, who has a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, took point on many of the build’s technical aspects. He monitors through ATC SCM25 nearfields, “but when I’m mixing a song, I’m on the Augspurgers probably 75 percent of the time.”
Immersive mixing is supported by four modular Syng Cell Alpha units with Triphonic audio, designed by former Apple industrial designer Christopher Stringer. “They mesh together in a network, can be moved anywhere and can be configured for 7.1.4 at a fraction of the cost” of a more conventional speaker setup, Seaberg explains.
Both rooms feature a modified Grace Audio m905 monitor controller. “Jaycen wanted us to design a monitoring panel,” Malekpour comments. “He wanted it to be rack-mounted in the center of the desk with VU meters, so it felt like he was at a console. Grace Audio were kind enough to give us all the details so we could make some changes.” For example, “When you open the door, it’ll dim the monitors.”
After spotting a closet with hundreds of hard drives holding projects, files and samples, Malekpour recommended a Studio Network Solutions shared media system. “We use it as a very stable, rugged, networked drive,” Seaberg explains. “We have the SNS VPN; being able to access files from any place in the world is amazing. We got it two years ago with 24TB of storage and we’ve almost filled it up.” Everything is backed up to three locations, including the cloud, he adds.
Both rooms are so busy that Joshua is now planning a third room on the upper floor for his personal use. “It will basically be the same setup,” he says, “with exactly the same desk and Augspurger Duo 12s. It just won’t have the BCM10.”
