Greg Penny’s cavernous warehouse studio building has a car inside it – a beautiful vintage convertible VW Beetle. And two Vespas. Plus a dining table that could easily seat 20 people. And a three-piece suite.
Most importantly, there’s a big porcelain model of a dog’s skeleton. Because of course there is.
Welcome to California.
When you meet Penny, you stop being surprised by any (well, most) of the weirdness in his workspace. He’s California, personified: a laid-back, generous, slightly-wacky-in-a-good-way music fanatic. He loves everything about it – playing it, producing it, mixing it, listening to it…
And that shows in his back-catalogue. He’s produced albums for k.d. lang (including Absolute Torch and Twang and Ingénue), eponymous albums by Paul Young and Eddi Reader, a great many Sparks and Rickie Lee Jones records, Cher’s It’s a Man’s World… and Elton John’s Made in England.
He got on so well with Sir Elton (their friendship and work goes back decades) that he’s now painstakingly working through the artist’s back-catalogue to transform it from regular stereo to fully immersive Dolby Atmos and Sony 360 Reality Audio formats.
And, for that, he needs a very specialised studio.
“The space was available, where we wanted it to be, next to a smaller room. And the solution we found to keep the sound controlled was this crazy structure,” Penny says, gesturing around the assorted triangular steel trusses, weird acoustic panels… and large gaps in the control room walls.
It looks absolutely nothing like the image that comes to mind when someone tells you to picture a mixing/mastering suite.
Penny explains that it was born out of necessity; of not having the time or inclination to build a room-within-a-room-within-a-warehouse that would eventually have to be torn down anyway. This construction is modular – it’s made entirely of discrete parts – and can be disassembled and moved for specific projects as a pop-up if need be.
“So far, so good, fingers crossed. We’ve been really lucky with the results,” he adds.
He also stresses how much careful thinking went into how they could build the room like this and still maintain acoustic control: “I’d seen some Atmos set ups using a lighting truss as a large speaker stand. They're not the most cost-effective things in the world to buy, but because you can make a room out of them that's virtually indestructible, and because it comes together like a Lego set, it has a pretty small footprint when you break it down.
“I decided to go for a pretty standard I-beam lighting truss, and then powder-coated it black. The cotton panels were inspired by my very close friend, Bruce Botnick, who has a similar version in his studio here in Ojai. They're basically shredded T-shirts, dyed and then compressed at six pounds per square inch. They came in huge boxes and we bought, I don't know, like, four cases of them. We bought a grommet punch and literally set up a factory to be able to make these this way.
“I’d found a photographer on YouTube who uses these ball bungee cables, and he's like, you know, 'I'm an incredible photographer, I travel all over the world, and this is the most important thing in my bag.' And I thought, ‘Well, that's interesting’.”
The bungees don’t rattle, they don’t make any noise, and they’re super-strong, Penny says. So he bought a bunch of them and hung the panels. Job done.
“We could enclose it, but we felt that as we were using it, there wasn't any point because it was really comfortable. You don't feel that compression that you feel out of a small room,” he points out.
And you’d be surprised at how well it works, too. Once you’re sitting in the sweet-spot it’s as if the rest of the huge space disappears. But that could be something to do with the sheer amount of loudspeakers pointed at your head…
In fact, Penny works with two immersive formats: Dolby Atmos and Sony 360 Reality Audio – so there are two speaker configurations in play here, simultaneously.
The studio contains a full 7.1.4 Atmos set-up (which, of course also covers you if you’re mixing in ‘flat’ 5.1, 7.1 and so on). Then there are extra speakers in an LCR formation at the top-front, plus three-way side speakers for the Sony 360 work.
“The front of the room is all three-way Core 47s, because we were need real clarity and definition out of vocals, and things that are generally in the front of you in that immersive mix,” Penny says. “So the front of the room is 47s – three-ways – and for the Atmos portion of it, you have this medium, kind of, level, hemisphere down here. And then you've got these four speakers overhead in addition to the sub there. These are all compatible power-wise right out of the box, you can set them with the toggle switch on the back. It was interesting because the big experiment for us was, if we put three-ways in the front, what will happen if there are two-ways, you know, around the back and above us? But they're super harmonious. It works great.”
The Sony system would normally be nine matched monitors in the front, he says, but this set-up essentially gives a stacked 5.1 configuration.
”In this case, we cheated it because of the real-estate in the room; we didn't want to have to move our Dynaudio Core Sub every time we switch over to listen to something in the 360 system. So our front end of the room has a phantom centre. And it works fine.“
There’s a special speaker too, Penny adds (“I would call it ‘profile’”), for when he opens up the Sony tools: that profile is specifically designed for his speaker setup.
“The Sony 360 system it ends with the high speakers; the room ends here, so all we have to do when we need double-duty is to move our side Atmos speakers to be exactly even with the pitch of the rear of the Sony speakers. The Sony speaker's room stops at this point, so it's only the Atmos system that uses the speakers back in the corner.”
That makes a total of 18 speakers. “Not nearly enough, but it gets the job done!”, he grins.
Penny stresses the importance of accuracy once more, telling us how they were very particular about getting the height right. “The specs are super-good,” he adds.