Why recording studios are built as rooms within rooms, with windows
A recording studio has to keep sound apart while keeping people together. Drums go in one sealed booth, a singer in another, engineers behind double glass, yet everyone needs to see a nod from the bandleader. The soundproof booth behind all this dates to 1877, when Thomas Watson built one to demonstrate the telephone.
Most studios have at least three spaces. Musicians play in the live room, surrounded by microphones. Loud sources such as drum kits and guitar amplifiers, or singers who need a drier sound, go into isolation booths so they do not bleed into other microphones. In the control room, engineers and producers blend the signals on a mixing console and listen back. Some studios add a machine room to hide noisy fan-cooled computers, tape machines and amplifiers. Windows connect every room because performers constantly trade visual cues.
The walls do serious work. Designers treat surfaces with absorbing and diffusing materials, sometimes with reconfigurable reflective panels to tune reverberation, and soundproof using layered plasterboard with offset seams, double walls separated by an air gap, and paired thick glass panes. Where a full booth is overkill, see-through acrylic gobo panels around a loud drum kit deflect enough sound to give engineers separate control of each instrument.
Big studios keep instruments too heavy or impractical to hire for one session, like a grand piano or a Hammond organ, which means paying for tuning and upkeep. Smaller rooms expect bands to bring their own gear. Electric guitars and synthesizers can skip the microphone altogether, plugged straight into the console through direct input boxes, so the player can sit beside the engineer.
Computers upended the business. A digital audio workstation can stand in for the consoles, multitrack recorders, synthesizers and effects units studios needed in the 1980s and 1990s, and mixing entirely with keyboard and mouse is called working in the box. Home project studios appeared in the mid-1980s as recorders and microphones became affordable, and the ADAT digital recorder, launched at $3995, drove their spread in the 1990s.
Source: Recording studio
