ISS Acoustics

Pianist Nguyen The Vinh’s Studio

The Context

The first meeting with the family of young pianist Nguyen The Vinh of ISS Acoustics at Lac Long Quan with the aim of renovating and upgrading the current soundproofing and sound absorption capacity of the living room to the “enough” level quickly led to to the conclusion: “Must move to a more suitable place”.

The room was then located right next to the main road, connecting with all other spaces in the house, the apartment’s air conditioning system was located in the same building with the building’s pipeline, low ceiling. Every factor hinders its intended use as a professional studio. Fortunately, the family has another option, which is a mini apartment building for rent. Immediately, we and artist Vinh’s family surveyed and finalized the location, laying the foundation for one of the best studios specializing in recording classical music, the best landmark instrument in Vietnam to date (2020).

“Nguyen The Vinh Pianist” studio is a mid-sized studio with 01 control room of 20 m2, 01 live room (40 m2), total usable area of ​​100 m2 with full facilities, modern equipment carefully selected for the purpose of recording classical music, acoustic instruments, acoustic or unplugged bands. The size of the live room is enough to record solos, quartets, orchestras from 8-10 musicians, small and medium-sized choirs with excellent quality.

Design Process

With a passion for music, great sound, and experience recording at many high-end studios around the world through touring, artist Nguyen The Vinh places a lot of expectations on the sound quality of a professional studio. the first in his life. Sound needs maximum fidelity, with natural reverb for the recording to come alive. This natural reverb is not allowed to distort the timbre of the instrument. The room must ensure stable, uniform sound in many different positions. The background noise level needs to be low enough to capture small sound details, reverb in the room without being confused by environmental or outside noise. All of these are strict requirements, especially given the limited size of the studio.

The design process of Nguyen The Vinh Pianist studio for that reason also took much longer than expected. To ensure a natural reverb in a small studio, and the reverb needs to be uniform and honest, not pressed into a certain narrow frequency range like poor quality studios, concert halls, the entire sound absorption system from the strain. The type and design of the wideband acoustic walls, the diffusers are calculated and simulated extremely meticulously. All angles, positions, effective frequency ranges, and absorption capacity of each diffuser have a clear purpose to ensure design goals, not just spam indiscriminately “beautify” the room like other designers.

Media

Control Room

Live Room

Result

After nearly 3 months of hard work in design and construction, we could not be more proud of the results of quantitative measurement, qualitative listening, and objective evaluations from the studio’s customers and the artist’s family. Vinh. The acoustics of both the control room and the live room is far above European standards.

Live Room has a short but extremely smooth reverb time with a very wide response range. The instrument sounds natural, honest, and sharp, showing very good dynamics but the sound is not dry. The sound obtained from the room mic has high detail, not cloudy and blurry. Control Room sounds very accurate, low-frequency flat +-1.5dB, reverb time uniform from low-high frequency. The mix from the control room translates very well to other environments.

Control Room 15 degrees Off-Axis measurement

Live Room measurement

Comments of artist Nguyen The Vinh

“Control room is a place for me to post-production, production, and can record for small purposes such as vocals or solo instruments. Getting a decent room, then working on Dynamik’s high-end flush-mounted monitor and TPS mid-range speaker is a whole different level from anything I’ve been exposed to before. This room + the Dynamik speaker system makes me feel that it’s really exploiting what the recording, mixing, and everything is “excessively” (like you’re playing the piano, up to the running part). fast and super difficult, you were going to hide and hide but were caught alive by everyone around 🤣) . The fact that the room produces such gross things, I have to force myself to work more carefully and carefully, no such thing… The last sentence conclusion is that I am fascinated by this room forever, The sound is the best on earth, really good. However, one detail that the designer (Nguyen Thai Ha) “forgot” is the bed for the sound engineer to sleep with Dynamik 🤣. Anw, thanks to the iSS Acoustics team for designing such a perfect room, beyond expectations!” – Nguyen The Vinh

Basic information