Kreuzberg Recording Loft

The brief

• ·The room used to be a workshop floor before it became a control room - bare brick, one full wall of glass, plywood furniture the previous tenant left behind, and nothing on the surfaces to stop sound from bouncing around.
• ·The client noticed it before any measurement confirmed it: mixes done in the room sounded fine there and fell apart everywhere else, always in the same direction - too much low end, not enough definition.

Approach

The room got measured at the actual mix position - 4 by 4 metres, 2.5-metre ceiling - with a calibrated mini DSP UMIK-1 and REW, before touching anything. A waterfall plot of a room this size and shape almost always tells you more than a tape measure does.

What the measurements showed

• ·The waterfall showed a tight cluster of problem frequencies - 30Hz, 50-60Hz, 95-105Hz, 125-135Hz, 150Hz, 162Hz - all sitting in the low end and low-mid, exactly where a room this small runs out of options.
• ·RT60 at 250Hz measured 1.9 seconds against a target closer to 0.8 for a listening room - more than double what the space needed to be usable for critical mix decisions.
• ·Matching those peaks against the room's calculated modes explained the pattern rather than just describing it: 60Hz lined up with a tangential mode (1-1-0), 95Hz with another tangential mode (1-2-0), 128Hz with an axial mode (3-0-0), 150Hz with an oblique mode (1-1-2) - which is what actually tells you where to put absorption, not just how much of it to buy.

Solution

The cheapest fix came first and cost nothing: moving the listening position back about a metre measurably tightened up the 100-120Hz range before a single panel went up. The rest of the job was corner bass traps sized specifically to that tangential mode, plus broadband panel absorption on the front wall to kill the axial reflection - bringing the loft down to the same listening-room targets the rest of the studio already meets, rather than leaving it as the one room in the building nobody trusted.