ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 was rather long and convoluted, but it had to be in order to set out the groundwork for the expansion of our design concepts. I described in considerable detail rooms which, due to their limitations, cannot be the ‘all things to all people’ that they were perhaps originally intended to be. Such rooms are excellent for recording jingles, one-off radio broadcasts, and many other recordings which must be cost-effective and of good quality. They are real ‘work horses’. Do not think that I am relegating these rooms to a second division, as I am not. They are, however, not the ideal rooms for many of the ‘big production’ recordings for CD release, which will be listened to countless times, frequently by people with expensive equipment and critical ears, and from which ‘special’ sounds have come to be expected. One of the main failures of large neutral rooms is not that they do not produce good recordings, but that they frequently do not inspire the musicians or help in the production of ‘magic’ sounds. As mentioned in Chapter 1, they were originally conceived at a time when it was the ‘accepted’ view that the engineers recorded just what the musicians played. The studio rooms, themselves, had not yet been fully integrated into the creative process of music recording.
