Project Description
Overview
Something that is immediately apparent in the control room design of Circo Beat is the concave surfaces. Another distinct feature is the color scheme throughout studio, which was a personal choice of the artist, Fito Páez. He chose the yellowish color in the live room which had the effect of making it become very relaxed and comfortable, contrasting the lively and exciting reds of the control room.
The live room employs variable acoustics and can accommodate both rock ‘n’ roll and classical music on demand. The solution was to create enormous doors along the sides of the live room that open and close. When closed, each door is skewed 5 degrees, to ensure there are no parallel surfaces. In addition to the adjustable wall panels, WSDG created rotating motorized clouds, which could flip to reveal a soft or hard surface as required. The room in its bright aspect had an 8/10th sec reverb time when bright, but when the doors were opened and the panels flipped, this would become 4/10ths of a second, a very substantial difference indeed.
The design work was not only acoustic and aesthetic, there was also a tremendous amount of infrastructure work that was required. Included in this work was an entirely new air conditioning unit with a complicated duct system and complicated lidded ceiling with springs was built on the floor and had to be pulled up.
Control Room A features a vintage SSL 4056 console and Genelec 1039 main monitors. Three custom designed hanging clouds complete the ideal acoustic conditions. The 1200 square foot (110 square meter) facility features two isolation booths, a 3M 1000 ANSI lumens LCD projector, motorized screen, variable acoustics with adjustable side panels and motorized ceiling panels that can reconfigure the room’s RT60 ratio from 0.4 seconds to 0.8 seconds.