Chris’s studio, affectionately dubbed “Studio Spumoni” for the color scheme leading to it when viewed from the living room, is unlike the vast majority of home-based voice over studios today. In fact, it is a throwback to the days when such a permanent installation taking into account acoustics and outside sound was a rarity not often seen. These days when most talent are recording between coats in closets or in corners treated with egg crates, hoping that the dog won’t bark or the neighbor won’t start the leaf blower, you can rest assured Chris has it covered.

Studio Spumoni is an isolated room-in-room project studio designed by Mark ‘Monk’ Schane-Lydon. It is built of double-thickness ¾” drywall on 2×4 construction over a floor set in rubber U-boats, surrounded on all sides by air mass and acoustically decoupled from all other surfaces so that no sound can travel into the room. The entire room is inside a garage sealed with closed-cell foam insulation. Air flow to the room is via extended 12” ducting to maintain temperatures with no sound of air movement. Three 20A electrical circuits supply all the electricity that might ever be needed, and a jack panel with four Ethernet jacks brings direct connections to the router which is in another room.

The studio has an Argosy studio desk, 2 Windows computers, Focusrite Saffire Pro40 and Tascam US16x08 audio inter faces, KRK Rokit 8 studio monitors, Samsung and Acer computer monitors, and Sennheiser MKH-416, Neumann TLM-103 and Audio-Technica AT4040 microphones.

There are both ‘live’ and ‘dead’ areas in the studio as both voiceover and music are recorded at various times. The floor is a floating bamboo tongue-in-groove floor with an area rug, there are acoustic panels on the walls and acoustic clouds on the ceiling constructed of 1×2 and filled variously with Roxul Rockboard and Safe & Sound. One wall contains a specially-constructed QRD (quadratic-residue diffuser) to assist in breaking up reflected sound and clarifying the recorded sound. Lights are LED to keep the studio cool.

For more information on Studio Spumoni, feel free to write Chris at chris@voiceatile.com