Klangfaktur Studios (Aarau, Switzerland), a 5.1-ready recording facility designed by the Walters-Storyk Design Group Europe, has opened as an independent company within the KIFF Entertainment Complex. A full multimedia venue, situated in a small town near Zurich, KIFF is one of Switzerland’s most successful clubs, hosting such diverse events as concerts, club dates, live theater, parties and art exhibitions.
WSDG-E general manager Dirk Noy said that Klangfaktur principals Christoph Flueler and Rainer Ruetimann envisioned a multipurpose studio that would be linked to KIFF for live recording and to the stage to record concert events. The studio is also available to independent recording projects. In addition to staging and recording jazz and rock music productions, Flueler, an accomplished composer, musician and producer, and Ruetimann, the sound engineer/technical expert, also produce, record and mix music for feature films.
“This was an international project that drew on the expertise of the full WSDG organization,” Noy explained. “My associate Gabriel Hauser and I collaborated closely with our U.S. design team, architect John Storyk and company VP/designer Scott Yates to develop a studio that would meet a wider set of requirements than most traditional facilities.”
The Klangfaktur control room is a completely isolated room-within-a-room designed to provide extremely accurate monitoring while tracking. The studio also features dedicated low-frequency treatments that are hidden behind the large RPG Diffractal at the rear of the room, as well as in the front wall and behind the ceiling cloud. To maintain the room’s symmetrical quality, the WSDG-E team recommended that an original pre-existing column be duplicated with an artificial column.
The 430-square-foot studio (including control room and iso booth) is linked to the large 540-square-foot stage located one floor above by an active splitter box on the stage. Additional signal connections for microphones to capture audience response for live recording sessions and talkback aux lines for monitor mixes have been prewired through the complex.
Klangfaktur Studio is equipped with Genelec 1037 mains, Auratone small reference monitors, a 32-channel inline Soundtracs Jade console, three ADAT machines with BRC control, Emagic Logic Platinum 6 and Tascam analog 16-track machine 85-16B, with plans to acquire an MCI, Studer or Otari analog multitrack recorder in the near future.
For more on WSDG, visit www.wsdg.com.
