If this blog posting appears to be a little bit late, it’s because last week was a long week. Nevertheless, the preparations were successful, and so here are the construction photos for the last bit of work before installing the console.
To finish the Music Room, we had to install our swining “bifusor” panels. These panels are diffusive on one side and absorptive on the other. Here you can see the diffusive side:
The fit, finish, and operation of the panels is, like everything else in the studio, a delight to the eye and a joy to touch. And it was good exercise lifting them into position…
The installation began with the setting of the steel brackets:
Each large bifusor weighs 150 lbs, and with 5 on each of the East walls, that’s 750 lbs that must be held firmly in place. We used nine steel bolts, each of which can carry 1500 lbs, to secure the steel brackets to the wall. Opposite the large panels are smaller panels that express the number five as 3+2 (or 2+3). Here you can see the brackets resting as the epoxy cures around the bolts that have been tapped into the walls:
The small panels are put into place:
Then it is time to lift the large bifusors into place:
One panel turned to show its absorptive side:
And done:
Finally, the wall that was started in 2009:
and finalized six months later:
Is now starting to look finished!
Speaking of finishing, the Control Room credenzas were finished and we began to fill them:
Through the first bay in the photo above you can see the pedals of our 9′ Yamaha CF-9 Concert Grand Piano. Here it is in full view:
I’m very excited to have such a wonderful piano for the studio!
The wiring process continued right up to the wire…Here’s Thom Canova doing what he’s been doing the past few months: pinning ELCOs:
Outside the building, for the first time in nearly 90 days, we have weather that’s favorable for concrete, so we get to work on that. A truckload of gravel has been settled adjacent to the Annex Lounge:
Concrete is poured and stained outside the Loggia:
Meanwhile, at a factory in Durham, a new kind of diffusor is being fabricated. They begin life as whole boards, rough sawn:
The advantage of starting from whole boards is that pieces made from the same wood tend to match each other far better than pieces that come from many different trees or many different forests. Here are some boards that were milled at the factory being turned into the puzzle pieces that will become our Control Room diffusors:
Here the dado is checked for uniformity:
Two of the many piles of inputs to the puzzle pieces, one 1″ thick and one 1-1/16″ thick to make the “slices”:
Here’s a small pile of slices that have been made, plus our glass:
And here is the schematic showing everything that needs to be built, glass and all:
Finally, a look at the studio the night before the API come to commission the console:
Good night!