FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
Bad Acoustics Ignored with the PhantomFocus™ System
— Turnkey
Monitor Tuning Protocol Provides World Class Performance Even in Nightmare
Acoustic Environments —
Nashville,
TN: Continuing the trend of the engineer / producer / musician
/ songwriter needing his or her own studio, Nashville’s Kyle Lee
(Michael W. Smith, TobyMac) accepted an invitation to become part of
a larger studio complex that housed several other artists, engineers
and producers. The space he was given was a former overdub booth that
would be his control room. The list of egregious acoustic anomalies
included a small lopsided cone-shaped room; a commercial dropped ceiling;
and only high frequency absorption with a little foam in two corners.
“No matter what positioning I tried with the speakers, the center
imaging was vague and I just couldn’t find any low end,”
says Lee, “even though my monitors were spec’ed to go down
to 45Hz. I used a small subwoofer and that just confused the issue,
adding a one-note bass quality to the sound.”
Enter
Carl Tatz Design (CTD) and the PhantomFocus™ System monitor tuning
enhancement protocol that was able to essentially ignore the room problems.
“I love tough rooms like this because the transformation is so
dramatic,” explains Tatz. “Dropped ceilings are always a
wild card for low frequency performance, either working for you or against
you and sometimes both. Because of the asymmetricality of the room,
the left and right speakers had very different low frequency responses.
Luckily, there was some symmetry to the side walls next to the monitors,
and they had enough absorption to kill any flutter echo. The PhantomFocus
System implementation was easily able to tame and correct all these
issues and provided Kyle with a stunningly accurate sweet spot.”
Lee
says that he was at the end of his rope when he called Tatz and frankly
was a bit skeptical after all he had tried to make the room work. “I
basically hung on Carl’s reputation to deliver the room, and when
it was done I realized everything he said would happen did happen. Like,
the speakers would ‘go away’ and I would be listening to
music and not speakers anymore; the center imaging was holographic and
the low end was really solid and tight. I was a little afraid at first
that because all the reference cuts we were listening to sounded so
amazing now on the Focal Twin 6Bs, I was concerned that everything would
sound that way, and I would feel like I wouldn’t have to do anything
to my mixes.” Those fears were quickly allayed when Lee threw
up some older mixes and then put up the tracks of his current project.
“I realized that if a mix is good it will sound really good on
the PFS and if it’s bad, it sounds really bad – that’s
how revealing it is. Now if I could just get some work done because
everyone in the complex wants to come in and hear my monitors now.”
About
the PhantomFocus™ System
Once the basic acoustic treatment has been accomplished, Carl Tatz Design’s
proprietary PhantomFocus™ System offers clients a unique opportunity
to have a truly world class monitoring experience in their room, no
matter how modest they may perceive their room to be. The PhantomFocus
System enhances their monitors of choice to perform accurately at a
full 20Hz to 20KHz frequency response with pinpoint imaging in an almost
holographic sweet spot — this enables their mixes to travel anywhere
with a new level of sonic accuracy. There are approximately fifty steps
in the proprietary PhantomFocus System implementation protocol, some
of which may include phase and laser alignment, damping, isolation mounts,
careful assessment of engineer/speaker placement relative to their room’s
primary axial modes, proprietary speaker distance and angle, crossover
points for pass filtering, and finally parametric equalization. Hardware
can include monitor stands, concrete, granite, Sorbothane, closed cell
foam, and other isolation and decoupling materials, custom floating
plenum mounts, subwoofer system, custom crossover, parametric equalizers
and the monitors themselves (passive or active). The evaluation and
implementation is a full two-day process and can be applied to nearfields,
midfields, and large soffit mounted monitors, regardless of manufacturer.
Carl Tatz Design can install the PhantomFocus System in existing control
rooms or in studios that are designed and built from the ground up by
CTD. The result is like the aural equivalent of HD TV. Once you experience
a PhantomFocus Monitor System, you can’t go back.
For more information
about the PhantomFocus System, please contact Carl Tatz Design, 6666
Brookmont Terrace, Suite #1109, Nashville, TN 37205 Office: 615.354.6242,
Direct: 615.400.5479 Email: carl@carltatzdesign.com
Web: www.carltatzdesign.com