Auralex Acoustical Treatment Solutions Integral to Construction of Russ Long's Dangerland

	Russ Long

For near 30 years, Nashville-based engineer/producer Russ Long has steadily built his reputation as a creative facilitator of artistic vision in music and film soundtrack production. A personal studio owner for decades, Long, whose credits include projects with Wilco, Dolly Parton and Sixpence None the Richer, along with films like Girl Interrupted and She's All That, said he "came to a point where I wanted to have a mix space at home," to increase productivity and family time. Long's vision required new construction, with isolation and acoustical treatments by Auralex Acoustics, Inc. integral to the successful completion of his new home mix room, Dangerland.

Long worked within codes to make his home expansion compatible with residential zoning, and, once the space was laid out, he began talking with Auralex. Long has known Auralex founder and president Eric Smith for some time, and after conversations with Smith and his team, he decided he could apply his prior studio construction experience to finishing out the space on his own.

The room's built-out interior dimensions are a bit over 13' wide by 16' deep. Walls were constructed with double drywall, hung using Auralex's RC-8 Resilient Channel system. The build-out also used Auralex SheetBlok sound isolation barrier material, studio-grade MineralFiber insulation and U-Boat Floor Floaters, all from Auralex, and deployed "just exactly how it's explained in the Acoustics 101 book that Eric put together," said Long.

Within the new isolated shell, the finish-out included cloud and wall treatments deploying Auralex ProPanel absorption panels and DST-LENRD bass traps. "Auralex designed the placement of the ProPanels and the bass trapping," Long said. After a touch of tweaking with desk placement and with the positioning of his Focal SF-9 monitors on their Auralex ProPAD-XL loudspeaker isolators, he recalled, "I ended up extremely happy with the way the whole thing has come together. Any problem or concern or question that I had was always answered immediately. There was always a clear solution laid in front of me and if I needed options they always gave me various possibilities."

Construction on Dangerland began in August of 2016, and Long has been working out of the space since March of 2017. Long's original plans -- to continue mixing in his old studio while "working out the sonic bugs and getting things to where I felt comfortable mixing in Dangerland" -- were cast aside when his new room was finished. "From the first time I worked in Dangerland," he said, "I felt like I was already monitoring better than I was at my old space. As I tweaked things, it only got better."