Paul Evans' studio is located in a couple of upstairs rooms in a building adjacent to his parents' house in Weston Super Mare — a town from which you can reputedly see the sea on a clear day! The studio comprises a control room, which is shared with Paul's dad's home office, and a second live room, in which Paul keeps his Tama drum kit set up. The windows and an unwanted doorway in the live room have been blocked up using Rockwool infill with a rubber mat taped over the top, and this actually provides some useful low-frequency absorption. Paul has covered the rubber sheet with blankets, but we noticed that there was still some mid-range reflection from it, due to the limited thickness of the blankets.

The control room had no acoustic treatment at all when we arrived, although bookshelves to one side and other furniture provided some natural absorption and scattering. Considering the lack of treatment, music played back over Paul's Yamaha HS80M monitors (which were correctly set up along the centre of the shortest wall) sounded reasonably well balanced, displaying fewer bass-end issues than we'd anticipated. Still, some room coloration was evident and the stereo imaging was quite restricted because of the unwanted reflections from the side walls. Paul had set up his monitors on metal stands, but as these weren't quite tall enough he had extended them with a stack of ceramic tiles beneath each speaker, to get them to the right height and to provide more mass. This seemed to work fine, though we recommended some non-slip matting under the speakers to keep them in place.

The studio system is actually fairly simple being based around an early Mac G5 (2GHz), a Digi 002 Rack interface and Pro Tools LE software, along with a modest amount of outboard gear, which includes a Behringer ADA8000 to provide eight additional mic inputs via the ADAT optical link. A multicore snake through the closed-off doorway links the live room to the control room and Paul has various Audix, Sennheiser and Shure mics set up around his kit, as well as a home-made 'speaker mic' in front of the kick drum to add more...