Recording Studio Infrastructure

So you should now have a detailed plan forming, your room ratio and your soundproofing requirements are all sorted, and your acoustic treatment and studio layout are in the bag, so what about your recording studio infrastructure? Recording studio infrastructure what?

Let me put it this way, you have moved in your busy unpacking and setting up your Mac and go to find a mains socket but realise there isn’t one on that side of the room. What are you going to do? Usually, this means buying some trunking and running a 4Way extension block around the room. It doesn’t have to be this way.

So you get the idea, that your recording studio infrastructure is very important and should be planned for before you even start construction. You should plan for lighting, electrics, and ethernet points (CAT6 shielded). If you are going to have more than one room it’s always a good idea to install SDI points between the rooms and even some coax for Madi just in case you change one of the rooms into a video suite or live mix-down area.

It’s important to also think wifi and network switch gear at this point as well. The last thing you want in your nice new control room is to have a network hub flashing away on the control surface. Or that the wifi signal is too low making your transfers up and down from dropbox to cause you extra stress.

You also need to think about mood lighting and the position of any spotlights above your head. Things like screen glare can soon cause your eyes to get strained. So the best bet is to actually buy the lighting tracks and spots before you start construction and get some of your musical friends to hold the track above your head (with a temporary supply) in your current studio location and see what it looks like during the day and in the evening, then you can tweak your studio layout and rest knowing its one less thing to think about.

If you have the space, one of the best things you can do for your recording studio infrastructure is to have a rack cupboard or service room where you can store your network kit and UPS if you have one and all your tie lines for your ever-growing studio. Although this will eat into your precious space, it will tidy things up and give your studio more reliability as it’s out of access to the other musicians reducing the risk of someone unplugging something or damaging something and not letting you know.

One final thought on recording studio infrastructure. If you are going to have soundproofing with a room within a room-type setup, consider making provision for access to this space once the studio has been built. This simply means if you need to run more tie lines or change over fault cables or even reposition some kit, you can do most of the work from within the soundproofing crawl space leaving your internal room uninterrupted. Having run several studios, this has always been so valuable especially as technology progresses.