The history of Traditional Studio Design focuses room reflections toward one small sweet spot with a handful of large reflective planar surfaces resulting in trapezoidal shaped spaces. The challenges were how to control Low Frequency Buildup in corners and how to create a tiny one cubic foot sweet spot, allowing only one person at a time to accurately hear mixes and audio files. Using absorption and diffusion rooms focused on the well understood and defined metrics of frequency and amplitude. As with all design, it was constrained by the technology and science of it’s time.
The concept of ZR Acoustics is a radical departure, in fact a complete inversion of the concepts of traditional studio design. Instead of focusing the room back to the the mix position or listener, ZR or Zero Reflection Acoustics removes all reflections from a room, so only direct sound from the speakers or source is heard.
Conceptually, all audio engineers have three basic elements in their work.
- Content (the most important element)
- Electronics (from microphone to DSP to speakers)
- Acoustics (the room both during recording/capture and during playback: at the beginning and at the end)
When the room is removed from the equation, at least one-third of the challenges of audio production cease to exist, making everything significantly easier. Most career professionals say that acoustical issues amount for between 60 – 85% of their challenges. Imagine running an obstacle course every day and then one day, having 85% less obstacles to avoid. Everything gets easier. Everything gets better. Fewer obstacles means being able to focus on the things that matter: Content.
Quantum Acoustics is tool, a design paradigm, created to make everything sound better by making all negative anomalies disappear. In simple terms, ZR is a tool which creates environments where the only thing you hear is the Content. It’s all about the content. The same content everywhere in the room, the same content in any medium or format, the same content regardless of speakers/transducers. The same content for everyone in the theatre. The music, story, film score, game or audio book should sound Life-Like anywhere, anytime on any speakers. Everything is about the Story, the content, the Sound and how it fluidly and organically translates to the audience. The more Life-Like, the better the willing suspension of disbelief. Then all the audience remembers is the sound and the Story. Nothing more, nothing less.
Once the first ZR Studio was complete, Mike Shipley and his protege’s were stunned and consequently, commenting constantly on the unusual and positive things there were hearing and experiencing. There was steady stream of information about how the LF was smooth and even everywhere, about the Wall-to-Wall Sweet Spot, about the lack of bass buildup anywhere, about how much easier it was to translate recordings and mixes now that everything was so clearly audible and how much more was audible which wasn’t before. We listened and made notes. We tuned the room with Mike and began to see how tiny movements made huge changes in imaging in a spherical, polar pattern, just like microphones and speakers. Width of course, but suddenly Height and Depth became achievable with recordings 20, 30 – 40 and 50 years old. The more we watched and listened, the more obvious it became that acoustics has been the single-most significant bottleneck in audio production for nearly a century. Moore’s Law and the trickle down effect into audio technology far outdistanced the advances in material sciences, building materials and innovative design concepts applied to room acoustics.
Now all that remained was to understand why ZR was doing what is was. How it was controlling LF energy in a way that disobeyed quarter wave theory and all of classical mechanics. How it created massive sweet spots. How it created spherical imaging in recordings which never seemed to have them before.
It wasn’t until 6 years later that we began to truly correlate the repeatable effects of ZR to an existing infrastructure of science and technology.