And the Award goes to...

In a short span of 3 years, Genelec in India has an installed base to reckon with. It has been a task of educating the end user about speaker placements.

It is no doubt the unstinting and joint efforts of Clifford Pereira, Customer Support Engineer, Genelec, and the Technical and Marketing team of Modi Digital Audio Pvt. Ltd, trained by Genelec Oy.

The stock holding policy of Modi Digital Audio also helps the impulsive buyers of the industry. Regardless of the prohibitive investment levels called for in setting up high-end audio facilities, globalization has prompted local entrepreneurs to engage even foreign consultants, to design facilities from ground up. One of them, based now in India is Acoustic Consultant, Didier Weiss who was sent to visit the Genelec factory at Iisa1mi to gain an insight into the Genelec way of working.

Didier Weiss is a French professional sound engineer with 20 years of experience in the field of recording and sound reinforcement. He has designed and set up some prestigious recording studios in Paris, France. Didier has been based in Auroville since 1994 and involved since then in the Indian professional audio field.

The combination of Vijay Modi and Didier Weiss as a team has resulted in Mahati Recording Studio a high-end recording Studio in Chennai, India.

Mahati Recording Studio: Let’s welcome Mahati studio, the brand new music recording/mixing facility of a leading Telugu music director, Mani Sharma, to the small club of high-end studios in India. The design and implementation of this unique facility is a successful joint effort of two Tamil Nadu based companies. Sound Wizard provided a turnkey solution to the building itself by providing the acoustic and architectural designs as well as craftsmanship. And Modi Digital supplied expertise, equipment and cabling.

Control Room: From the early stages, Mahati studio has been designed as a tool committed to excellence in the domain of stereo and surround mixing. A decision about the choice of monitoring system, before even the first stage of the design allowed a complete match between all elements needed to achieve the best results. The room is literally built around three Genelec 1039A as front speakers and two Genelec 1038A as surround speakers. The usable surface area of the control room, after acoustical treatment, is 50 m2 (538 sq.ft) out of a 76-m2 room (818 sq.ft). The average ceiling height is 4.3 meters (14 feet) with a central and circular soundproofed skylight window.

The acoustical design has followed the Genelec “Controlled Image Design” (CID) room specifications. The main characteristics are as follow:

• Front speakers flush wall mounted on a hard surface to keep the front wave coherence.
• Reflection free zone for a wide listening area to avoid any comb filtering.
• The half back of the room is absorbent and extremely diffusing for the mid and high frequencies, thanks to an impressive array of quadratic diffusors.
• The bass trapping is a major implemented feature taking up 70 m3 (2470 cu.ft) of space. It allows an extremely flat low frequency extended to 26 Hz at -3dB.
• The max SPL before clipping is 122 dB at listening position.

The result shown on acoustical measurements (WinMLS) is an extended and very flat frequency response of the whole system, unaffected by early reflections (except from the ones coming from the compulsory mixing board!). The listening tests reveal a sense of total transparency; the sound doesn’t seem to come from the speakers but rather through the walls with a wide and precise stereo picture.

The very strong diffusion on the back wall gives the room a surprisingly high RT60 of 0.45 sec. It creates a nice feeling of air and liveness that does not disturb the sound picture as there is no coherent relationship between the direct and reflected signals.

The equipment list ranges from Protools HD3, Soundscape Red 32, Tascam DA- 98HR, Fostex RD-8, Akai DD-8, Apogee convertors, with a Yamaha DM2000 mixer used as stand alone mixer and control surface. A complete range of outboard gear is also available in sloped racks immediately behind the sound engineer.

Recording space: A sizeable recording area of 46 m2 (500 sq.ft) and a 3.6 m2 voice booth (40 sq.ft) was later added to this mixing place.

The recording area is also very diffusing and clear sounding, thanks to arrays of quadratic diffusors on the ceiling and a mix of aluminium and glass paneling on the walls. The bass trapping has also been properly sized with a volume of 65 m3 (2300 cu.ft) of acoustical treatment and eight layers of successive absorption materials. The result shows an RT60 of about one second, with no over-emphasis in the low range spectrum. The sound is clear, extremely rich from early reflections, with- out any “boominess” often found in insufficiently treated professional studios.

The voice booth is neutral, and allows a recording with a minimum of coloration from the room.

The range of microphones is impressive, from B&K to most of Neumann’s very well known models.

General considerations: Being located in the center of the bustling city of Chennai, the studio was designed to achieve maximum soundproofing from outside to inside. In this regard, the massive outer shell hosts an inner heavy floating structure which itself hosts a lighter floating shell. All windows are made of a triple layer of heavy glass.

A particular care was given to the air- conditioned design in order to provide an extremely low level of sound disturbance in all areas.

In the year 2002, the joint efforts of the Indian dealers and consultants from abroad resulted in a success story for Genelec and Modi Digital.

- Courtesy Studio Systems -