Featured
Archive
Interlochen - Public Radio Studio A
All of the control rooms and production rooms are built to be acoustically isolated and acoustically proper. Each control room has audio connections to every other control room in the building, and microphone lines to selected studios. They are shaped so that parallel surfaces are kept to a minimum, they each have wooden (maple) Helmholz Reasonators and fabric panels, and the ceilings have a special baffle built into the construction of the room. Each space has double and triple wall construction and a separately poured concrete floor for sound isolation. In addition, Studios A, B, and C have "floating" floors—wood built on 4" of foam material. As an IPR intern (technicalities of what we were is a little tricky), we had use of all the studios as well as worked in most.
The heart of the building is Studio A. It is 550 square feet of acoustically fine space. It has double and triple wall construction and a "floating" floor for sound isolation. The oak floor helps the acoustic properties of the room. The HVAC system changes the air in the room every 8 minutes, but one cannot hear it working. Special foam-lined and baffled ducts silence the moving air. As the picture shows, this space is beautiful. Although, it's not quite as big as the picture shows, and does not bend at the top (side effect of how I took the photo). Also amazingly quiet, and great to just be in. Many hours were spent looking at this room for studio session, live broadcasts, and other fun events. Control Room B is the on-air control room for IPR Music Radio, and C controlling IPR News Radio. From this room, much of the broadcast operation functions, including music program delivery and recording programs from the satellite. It's attached studio, Studio B, is mainly an on-air interview room (we also pitch from there during campaigns), but it can be used for an isolation sound booth in multi-track recordings in Control A. A, B and C control rooms are the 3 of the 4 sides surrounding studio A and have windows so each control room can view another, a pleasant feature to say the least. Two other work rooms in the building are E and F. They mostly are for the on-air staff and have interview rooms and link to the other studio control rooms as well as editing and other radio production equipment.
