One of the great milestones in the construction of any recording studio is the installation of the Control Room window. We have now achieved that milestone:
The physical properties of the glass are impressive. Pictured above, the 4′ x 14′ outer plate is 1/2″ thick and weighs nearly 400 lbs. On the Control Room side, below, the 4′ x 8′ plate is 3/4″ thick and weighs more than 330 lbs. It all looks nice and clean now, but getting everything in place was not easy…
It seems that the glass industry has changed from 100 years ago, when perfectly faced and bevelled plate glass was the standard. Nowadays, one cannot expect plate glass to be perfectly flat, or even particularly scratch-free. The standard today is that there are no defects that would be “distracting” at a distance of 6′. Their idea of “not distracting” and ours do not agree, so we take the product that is available, and we finish it to our specifications:
It takes a long time, but there does not seem to be any other option. Thus we spend weeks getting early 21st century glass up to scratch with late 19th century standards.
Other aspects of the project are not quite so frustrating. We got our garage door installed:
We got the blocks laid so we can start framing the bass trap at the front of the Annex Control Room:
We got our Variac panel energized:
Booth C got its cloud frame:
And that frame got its insulation and fabric:
We challenged the weather and did a few more concrete pours for the patio:
Also completed earlier in the week were the placement (but not mortaring) of foundation blocks for our reflecting pools:
We basically finished the video and networking terminations in the QR:
And that enabled us to hook up the Harrison “stand-alone console”:
The Harrison units pictured include (near the top) a 3RU Premium I/O with 64 AES inputs and 64 AES outputs, the IKIS Master computer below it, and near the bottom an Xrouter (1536 x 1536 audio signal router) and an X-Dubber (64 audio I/O recording device).
On Monday we are going to start passing signals through the QR, and when that’s all working, we’ll move into the Control Room to demonstrate final readiness for the Console. I’m certainly ready!
Manifold Recording / The Miraverse 