Jim Corrigan’s Heartlight Studio: State-of-the-Art Surround

A fan of M-Audio's Tampa (rack-mounted at left), Jim Corrigan sits surrounded by M-Audio BX8s in Heartlight's control room.

Drawing from his years of professional experience, synthesis pioneer Jim Corrigan recently built an extraordinary new recording facility in the Greenhills area of Nashville. Corrigan’s Heartlight Studio is optimized to facilitate audiophile-quality soundware production, surround sound plug-in development, and MIDI Mode 4 advanced pitch control R&D and demonstration. One of the key features of this unique studio is a large control room equipped with a 16-channel surround speaker array powered by M-Audio’s BX8s, which is used as a test system for surround sound plug-in development work.

A surround sound visionary

To understand the man is to understand his passion. Corrigan began composing and arranging music when he was only nine years old. The child prodigy has since become fluent in eleven computer programming languages in addition to mastering the guitar, bass, trombone, organ, dobro, steel guitar, banjo, mandolin, and synthesizer. The logical intersection of both his interests was a career in MI product design, which he has been pursuing with great success for over a decade.

A major design focus for Corrigan's Heartlight Studio was surround sound development work. His software plug-ins are scalable from 3 channels to 36 and even beyond, and this facility provides the ideal test environment. “I expect our soundfield database front-end program to become an industry standard for describing soundfields ranging from a PC-based gaming system to coliseums, stadiums, theme park attractions, and planetariums, as well as the already defined Hollywood formats,” says Corrigan. “Our goal is to provide new creative sound positioning and effects processing tools to the larger audio industry including sound contractors and special venue program producers.”

“The goal is to provide the creative tools sound engineers and producers need to artfully utilize large format surround sound in public venues,” Corrigan continues. “We feel that this approach will open the public's ears to what can be done within this audio frontier and that there will subsequently be a positive trickle down effect on the producers of consumer surround content. Given creative production tools, I believe the surround market will eventually flourish at the consumer level and become the preferred listening environment.”

In order to test the large-scale surround sound projects created at the studio, Corrigan chose to install M-Audio’s BX8 studio reference monitors. “Thank you M-Audio for producing the BX8 speakers we use,” declares Corrigan. “We have sixteen of them in a 16-foot radius circular array in our control room and they sound awesome! We run them on Equi=Tech balanced AC and they are perfectly quiet with no signal present.”

Anatomy of a studio

From left to right, Heartlight Studio's Jesse Kreger (studio installation, production assistant), Rob McClain (engineer, wave editor, installation specialist), and Tony Gerber (composer, recording artist, multi-media artist) surround Corrigan. (Donna Michael (aesthetic design consultant, on-site logistics coordinator) is not pictured.)

Heartlight Studio is comprised of a series of rooms, including a specially designed, acoustically isolated, separately air-conditioned equipment room for computers, networking and rack-mount gear, a large main recording room housing a 9-foot Baldwin SD-10B artist series concert grand (originally owned by Bruce Hornsby), two isolation rooms, and a WhisperRoom™. The facility also boasts an array of specialized features—like remote control artist workstations—that make it stand head and shoulders above the rest.

All the computers’ keyboards (K), monitors (V), and mice (M) are fed from the equipment room to a command center in the control room. A system of two 8X1 KVM switches, an 8X2 KVM switch, a 4X1 reverse-KVM and two video splitters are used to route dual-monitor video from up to eight computers to the control room, four additional remote control stations in the main recording room, isolation rooms, and the equipment room. All of the workstations are absolutely silent, allowing any artist to manually start and stop the recording process.

“This system is tremendously advantageous to sound sampling projects,” says Corrigan. “When recording thousands of samples, the talent is much better able to control the starting and stopping of a recording than the engineer. The engineer is thereby enabled to concentrate solely on sonic quality, consistency and compliance with the philosophy of the instrument design.”

The Heartlight Studio also features computer room-style access flooring in the control room to provide flexible wiring. “In an ever-changing digital world, it is difficult to anticipate what future devices we will use, or what kind of cabling to expect,” explains Corrigan. “Access flooring allows us to run new cables anytime we want, simply by removing 2' x 2' panels and pulling new runs under the floor with a cable fish. At anytime we can run new cables or rewire existing ones without the hassle of traditional wiring in raceways.”

Corrigan’s studio also boasts fiber-optic MIDI and audio networks to eliminate manual patching. MIDITEMP equipment provides the backbone network for routing MIDI streams between computers, effects processors, and poly-mode and Mode 4 instruments. All audio from the recording rooms is digital and terminates in the control room. Two optical patch units route the audio to computer sound cards and effects processors. Corrigan uses the M-Audio DigiPatch to perform format conversion between optical and coaxial inputs and outputs.

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