BUILDING THE ROOM

“When I first visited the site, the room was an underground concrete and brick room, with concrete floor and ceiling. The reverb time (RT) was insane — I never measured it, but I’d estimate it was 5+ seconds...” says Steven Spurrier. “So a lot of time was spent designing the space. We considered a solid front wall to soffit mount the speakers — we’re talking 2.5-metre-thick concrete at the front corners, tapering back at 30 degrees towards the centre of the room. But that couldn’t be incorporated, due to the load on the slab.

“Instead we used the same speaker locations and surrounded them in absorption, with the timber frame concealing all the acoustic treatments and cables, while the frame also positions the bottom of the speakers 1.2 metres from the floor, and angles them both horizontally and vertically back to the listening position. We chose a FabriTRAK system to dress the room — fabric stretched and then tucked into tracks. With absorption on all four walls and ceiling, we tamed the RT60 [how long it takes a sound to decay by 60dB] down to 400ms.”