August 2000

...Through their foresight, Seventeen Grand owners Jake Niceley and David Cline... distinguished as the first on the Nashville Scene to build from scratch, a facility primarily for 5.1 music mixing... There had not been much known about setting up a control room environment for 5.1 music mixing as it relates to acoustic design and monitor placement.

Jake elaborates on this process: "In a traditional (stereo) control room the sound emanates from only one end of the room and you design the room to handle it in that way. Usually there's one end of the room that's more lively than the other. The other end acts as a trap or diffusion and with surround it's coming from both ends of the room so you can't really have two hard ends and you can't have two soft ends. You have to come up with some way to handle that sound emanating from virtually everywhere and a athere's also a sub woofer involved, which is usually not the case in a stereo room. So there were a lot of acoustic things to keep in mind and basically what I did was using CAD programs and room simulations...

I worked for months coming up with designs for tracking and dimension and speaker placement that was the optmum situation given the space we have to work with... to sound the best it can and the most accurate... knowing that it is going to be played back in somebody's living room... Now that we're going to be mixing movies, made-for-TV movies, music, audio, DVDs and concerts that will only be played in people's living rooms... it's a different way of thinking about acoustics, and thinking about the delivery formats for multichannel work..." When choosing to mixdown to 5.1, Jake Niceley takes an alternative approach. "The reason I print everything to analog is so it can be transferred to any digital format without going though sampling rate conversion and it's also an easily archived format that will still be on the shelf in 30 years and you could still play it.

Projects the room has booked include:

• Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, High Grass Dogs Live at the Fillmore
• Bela fleck, the Bluegrass Sessions
• Alalbama, 41 Number 1 Hits Live for DVD-video release
• Take 6, a compilation for DVD-audio
• Releases for DTS label/format by Orleans
• The Mavericks
• Diverse TV & Film projects such as Elvis Meets Nixon (the entire score recorded at Seventeen Grand); music for the film Twister and TV series Touched by an Angel and ADR work for Waterboy (with Adam Sadler) and the animated comedy King of the Hill
• The room was even used to mix an IMAX project which is now played at the Ford Museum in Detroit.