London, UK (July 5, 2022)—London’s RAK Studios has completed a top-to-bottom rebuild of its Studio 4 that includes a scalable 9.1.4 monitoring solution based around Genelec’s The Ones Smart Active Monitor family.
Over its 46-year lifespan, RAK Studios has hosted a wide variety of artists, ranging from David Bowie and Pink Floyd to Adele and Arctic Monkeys. With the need for an immersive room, the facility had always eyed Studio 4 for the project, aiming to ensure that the space be flexible for a variety of artists’ needs
“In a project like this, you either do it properly, or you don’t do it at all,” states Emma Townsend, studio manager at RAK. “We just had to tear the whole thing down and start from an empty shell.”
RAK enlisted the support of Level Acoustic Design for the acoustic design and Studio Creations for the build. “From the get-go, we knew this could be more than just an Atmos room,” explains Andy Leese, RAK’s general manager. “We wanted a room that was a master of all trades, so that you could do Atmos or stereo mixing, or you could sit in there to have a writing session and collaborate. We wanted it to be a really nice place to spend time.”
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The resulting solution features nine 8361 three-way coaxial monitors in the front and surround positions, with three W371 woofer systems extending the low frequency LCR performance. Four 8351s serve as the height channels, with a pair of 7380 subwoofers handling system LF duties. GLM software was employed for the main system calibration, taking care of in-room frequency response compensation, distance delay and level alignment.
“The precision of Level Acoustic’s design and Studio Creation’s build provided the ideal foundation for the system to be calibrated,” says Andy Bensley, regional business development manager at Genelec. “From the initial GLM measurements, we were incredibly happy with the setup, and it gave us a fantastic starting point to refine the performance and ultimately deliver a Gold Standard immersive system.”
In addition to the Genelec monitors, Studio 4 runs Pro Tools via Avid MTRX and HDX 3 plus S1 control surfaces and features a Grace Design m908 immersive monitor controller.
