April 1999

Seventeenth Grand Recording, Nashville
Ready for the future with their new Euphonix-equipped surround sound room

Although in the past, Nashville studios have always waited for the trends of New York or LA to establish themselves before following suit, Seventeenth Grand Recording is proving that Nashville can be equally on the cutting edge thanks to their dedicated surround room. The fact that the studio was built primarily for 5.1 music demonstrates that owners Jake Niceley and Dave Cline are as forward thinking as their contemporaries in the major media centers.

"That's what we do best," states Niceley. "My partner and I are music guys, and we're interested in DVD-Audio. Of the seven surround projects that we've done since we've been open, four have been music-only projects for DTS or their subsidiary, some were commercial work for Lotus software, and one was music for an IMAX film. Since we really don't have a lot of post-type work in Nashville to begin with, we don't even concentrate on that type of session, although we do have video capability in the room."

Now that the surround room has been online for a year, Niceley remembers that it took considerable thought before the decision was finally made to build for surround. "It was kind of a gamble at the time. About two years ago, we wanted to build an additional studio here at our facility. We had some office space that was not really making a lot of money rent-wise, so we decided to convert that into a recording revenue center. As we were doing our research to see exactly what we should do, we came to the conclusion that we were going to have to do something different from the normal recording business. With DVD on the horizon, we thought that it would be a reasonable gamble with a minimal additional outlay up front to build surround. Since we were building from the ground up, it wouldn't cost a great deal of additional money, and, if we had to, we could always remove the rear speakers and still call it good if the surround part didn't work out. About the only additional equipment that we bought besides the speakers was a DTS decoder and a DVD player."

There was one major equipment purchase that was influenced by the decision to go surround though. "We might have bought a different console had we not been targeting the DVD and 5.1 market, states Niceley. "When we first started talking about building the room, we thought we'd do an overdub room that we could sell less expensively than our main room. That evolved into a surround room, so our needs for a console changed as well. We ended up going with a Euphonix CS3000 primarily because of the surround sound matrix that it has."

Even though there wasn't a lot of extra hardware to deal with when building the surround room, there was the matter of the extra speakers. " We had to take into regard the placement of the rear speaker, which was our main consideration," Niceley recounts. "The center speaker was also a little bit of a concern since we also had a window to contend with because of the overdub space in the studio. We had Dynaudio specially design a center speaker with the midrange and high-frequency array in the right vertical position to match the left and right and then did the same thing for the rear speakers. I actually drew the design on a cocktail napkin for the guys at Dynaudio at the New York AES the year before we built the room."

As with many facilities, Seventeenth Grand chose an M&K subwoofer, which is fast becoming an industry standard. "We tried others, but the result wasn't the same," states Niceley. "The Dynaudio system that we have (M4's for the left and right, M3's for the center and rears) is flat down to 20 Hz, so we don't really need any bass management either. The sub is just for the LFE channel.

Because some of the required monitor control was not available from the console, Seventeenth Grand had to do some customer modifications to control the monitors as needed. "We built an external switcher box that allows us to switch between two surround monitor systems and gives us individual speaker solos as well. We use the same M&K as a subwoofer for the nearfields, since we have a switch that matches the level of the sub to either the mains or nearfields. For a nearfield system, we use either NS10's and Dynaudio BM15's, but, basically, it's up to the engineer. The mains are really accurate, so the engineers don't even mess with the nearfields most of the time."

Even though the ever-popular Genex 8000 and omnipresent TASCAM DA-88's are available to mix to at Seventeenth Grand, Niceley again shows that he's a forward thinker. "We've talked about investing in a 2-inch 8-track if surround mixing gets really popular," he says with a laugh. It's hard to believe that a return to analog is cutting edge, but, in this day and age, that's as on the edge as you can get.