design
Studio furniture design
The Northward Systems professional studio furniture line is the result of 6 years of intensive R&D, prototyping and field testing. It builds on years of experience designing high-end facilities worldwide, discussing workflow with industry leading mixing and mastering engineers and, above all, on a deep understanding of how professionally designed control rooms or mastering suites behave acoustically.
Each desk and racking unit is the result of a no-compromise design approach, aimed at fulfilling specific needs from In-The-Box and Hybrid setups to studios equipped with Large Frame Analog/Digital Consoles and dedicated mastering suites.
We engineered a scalable core module with optimized acoustic and structural properties, called the Acoustically Transparent Structural module (ATS module®) which has several key advantages:
- exceptional acoustic transparency over the typical 20Hz–20kHz bandwidth
- exceptionally strong, lightweight and fully non-resonant structure
- no sensitive fabric-covered surfaces or weak assemblies
From this core design we developed various desks, consoles and rack housing units following strict ergonomic criteria. We built and tested multiple prototypes, looked at various manufacturing processes, made countless adjustments, built new prototypes and then tested again. The results are technically unrivaled and aesthetically unique designs which are in line with modern studio design principles and audio processing technologies.
Two specific tools were used to achieve the maximum acoustic transparency for each module: wave diffraction and geometric redirection of reflections.
Diffraction is when a sound wraps around an obstacle or passes through an opening. For a sound wave to wrap around an obstacle, the wavelength (“λ”) must be larger than the size of the obstacle (“d”).
Diffraction becomes increasingly pronounced as the size of the wavelength gets larger relative to the width of the obstacle (mathematically, as the ratio λ/d gets larger). For wavelengths much larger than the obstacle, the wave wraps around the obstacle and the wave’s frequency and phase are unchanged. This phenomenon is why you can hear sound emitted from the other side of a barrier even though you cannot see through it.
Similarly, when a wave passes through a slot opening of dimension “d”, if the wavelength is larger than the slot opening (if λ>d ) then it passes through the slot and continues forward in the form of a hemispherical wave emanating from the slot. On the other hand, if the wavelength is smaller than the slot opening then the portion of the wave that encounters the slot opening passes straight through it without being disturbed, while the portion that encounters the hard surface surrounding the slot is reflected. In both cases, the frequency and phase of the wave are unaffected. (At frequencies with a wavelength of similar size to the slot openings, there is some constructive and destructive interference which we can safely ignore as it’s limited in both bandwidth and amplitude.)
Utilizing this principle, low frequencies diffract around the outside of the desk and go through the slots a bit like water flows through a mesh strainer. The desk is transparent at these frequencies.
As we gradually shift to mid frequencies, a similar but scaled phenomenon occurs, with the sound waves diffracting around the furniture’s smaller structural edges and passing through the slots, making the desk transparent at these frequencies as well.
At high frequencies, from approximately 8kHz for the wider furniture’s structural edges and 12kHz for the slotted areas, the design transitions to a purely geometrical method of eliminating undesirable reflections.
One portion of the high frequencies goes straight through the slots, while the rest of the high frequencies that reflect off the hard surfaces between the slots are reflected away from the listening position due to the specific geometry of each unit.
This geometry has been further optimized by taking into account typical speaker directivity at high frequencies.
Working in collaboration with established music industry professionals and artists, a great deal of attention has been given to make sure our desks allow the engineer to sit properly and reach the equipment without creating needless strain on the body or requiring movement out of the sweet spot.
Specific shapes, curvatures and location of rack bays help create a comfortable working environment, allowing easy access to knobs and faders from the sweet spot, while keeping graduations, VU and peak meters easily readable.
All this while keeping your gear properly ventilated.
All our standard and custom designs are fully registered at the EUIPO, protecting both our investment in R&D and our customers from unauthorized copies.
Loudspeakers stands design
Designed for free standing near-field and mid-field loudspeakers, the Northward Systems loudspeaker stands are based on our RMCD technique (Rocking Modes Control Design) using a series of custom pre-constrained decouplers based on SylomerⓇ and neoprene based CLD assemblies (constrained layer damping) for further vibration control.
After many years of R&D, we were able to come up with a design technique (RMCD) that prevents rocking modes in the stand’s decoupled plates while still achieving a very low natural frequency even under lighter loads: we solved the long time issue of speaker decoupling stands introducing high and mid frequency distorsion.
In competing systems, because the decouplers are often too soft, and/or not well balanced and/or not sufficiently loaded, the woofer’s excursion can trigger the decouplers in their X axis, generating micro-oscillations on that axis in the decoupled plates and hence speaker cabinet. As a rule of thumb, the taller the speaker cabinet the worse the problem is.
These micro-oscillations are interfering with the tweeter’s motion: because the cabinet is slightly oscillating back and forth (a few thenth of a millimeter) the tweeter’s excursion (that is of typically +/- 1mm) does not happen from a single stable plane but rather from a moving plane – creating phase distorsion that in turn shows up as higher distorsion levels in the speaker’s response.
Some choose to stiffen the decouplers to reduce the micro-oscillations – which greatly reduces the system’s ability to effectively decouple the speakers from the stands, re-introducing parasite vibrations in the stands and studio floor – degrading the original aim of the stands.
To achieve high decoupling performances without negative side effects, the design and geometry of the top plates and location and type of decouplers were optimized and a specific amount of pre-loading integrated to the system: within the decouplers themselves thanks to a pre-constraint push-pull configuration and by using heavy steel plates in a CLD assembly as a dummy load.
Creating stands with a well defined and optimized load range further helped control unwanted micro-oscillations.
With a system achieving a natural frequency as low as 8Hz without the usual side effects of HF and MF distorsion, these stands are simply unique on the market.
Decoupling is a vibration control method creating a separation of vibrational motion and transmission (decoupling) between two structures such that they operate in an independant way within a given frequency range. This is typically achived using decouplers (typically a form of spring) whose behaviour will vary depending on their stiffness, damping factor and the load applied to them.
One of the most important number to look at is what the natural frequency in Hertz of a decoupler is within a given load range. Damping is also a very important factor.
Natural frequency is defined as the frequency at which a body will vibrate if excited by an external force.
Effective decoupling only starts a sqrt(2)*f(n) – f(n) being the natural frequency in Hertz. If the spring has a natural frequency of 10Hz under load, it will start to decouple only from 14Hz ( 10Hz*sqrt(2) ) and start to be truly efficient at only over twice the f(n) – 20Hz.
In our example, under 14Hz, the transmission of vibrations is >1: more vibrations are transmitted through to the stands, they are amplified. Hence the importance of the natural frequency of the decouplers being much lower than the lowest frequency that a given loudspeaker can reproduce.
Over 14Hz, the transmission of vibration is <1, the vibrations are quickly blocked from passing as the frequency increases. A well optimized system can reduce vibrations by -30dB (-99.9%) up to -40dB (-99,99%).
Damping is the restraining of vibratory motion, such as mechanical oscillations or noise by converting vibration energy into heat.
The more effective the vibration damping, the lower the vibration transmission rate at the resonance point will be. However, with this technique vibration insulation will decrease at higher frequencies.
CLD (for Constrained-Layer Damping) is a vibration control method commonly used in the aerospace, transportation, automation and military industries.
CLD can be described as a shear-related energy dissipation method achieved by inserting a visco-elastic layer between various layers of structural materials.
One of the goals of such treatment is to achieve a high loss factors – that is to reduce the ability of vibrations from spreading within a given structure.
The loss factor is a measure of the inherent damping in a material or assembly when it is dynamically loaded. It is defined as the ratio of energy dissipated in unit volume per radian of oscillation to the maximum strain energy per unit volume. A high loss factor means a lot of the vibratory motion is lost to heat, e.g. thanks to the visco-elastic layer within a CLD assembly.
Using this technique to build our stand’s main structure allows further reduction of residual parasite vibrations in the stand and hence a reduction of signal re-emissions and distorsion.