The Most Important Pieces of Audio Equipment Furniture for a Digital Audio Mixing Suite

The Most Important Pieces of Audio Equipment Furniture for a Digital Audio Mixing Suite
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Audio Mixing Suite

An audio mixing suite is much different today than it has been in the past. Analogue audio mixing equipment has been replaced by digital audio workstations built around computers and their peripherals. The home recording studio furniture that you will have in a location like this is going to support your actual audio mixing equipment, and has more in line with a home office at its very core. Here is a look at the basics you’ll need to put together a full audio mixing station.

Large Desk Area

You audio mixing suite is going to be centered on a computer system, but will have a lot of other audio recording equipment surrounding it and integrated. This may mean audio boards, instruments, samplers, and other digital audio equipment that are going to be plugging in to your centralized system. What this means for your collection of furniture is that surface space needs to be plenitful and consistent, which is to say it needs to be in a single and continuous unit. This means that a regular desk is out of the question, and instead an extended desk space that is long from one side to the other is going to be preferable. It should be sufficiently wide as well, but it is really going to have to support quite a number of constant audio recording peripherals.

Speaker Boxes and Mounts

Audio playback is key to digital audio mixing and you have to support this in your audio mixing suite. Make sure that you are supporting both nearfield and farfield speakers by providing adequate speakerboxes near the primary audio mixing desk and then ceiling mounted speakers further away. If the room you are using is designed for audio post-production on film work then you will want to position them closer to the monitor or viewing screen. These speaker boxes are going to have to be insulated and designed to support the audio playback in a way that will not rattle or interfere with the audio quality.

Chair

You are going to be working in this area for extended periods of time, and the chair that you bring into the center of this can be one of the most important pieces of home recording studio furniture. Most people just use a simple computer chair, but this is not necessarily going to be sufficient. Instead, you are going to need one that is going to be able to be mobile along the parallel in front of your audio mixing desk. Since you will need to go back and forth in between your different audio recording devices and the central computer system for your digital audio workstation, you will have to have a chair that moves quickly and smoothly. Comfort is always going to be important, but since you cannot work on audio post-production for as long as you do video editing in a single session this is going to have to come second to movement.

Variable Lighting

Most people think that you will just need enough light to see the equipment properly, but in reality it is important to have a variety of available lighting. What this does is allow you to light the specific areas that you need to focus on without lighting the entire room, which can be counterinuitive to the creative audio mixing process. This is going to be especially important if there is actual sound recording going on in there, such as for foley work or music performance.