Welcome to Studio Crash
Studio Crash has been a top recording studio serving the Philadelphia area for over 25 years.
Originally created by musicians Ed Hamilton and Dave Falciani in the mid 90’s as a high-end studio for their personal recording needs, they opened the studio to other musicians. In 2000, Michael Harmon, freelance engineer with multi-platinum selling and multi-Grammy winning album credits, joined Studio Crash as chief engineer and later purchased the studio in 2003. Fast forward to 2011, Studio Crash moved from its humble 2nd floor space and purchased a 3,700 square foot commercial property and designed and constructed a new recording studio.
Studio Crash is a beautiful recording studio built from the ground up to be world class in the field. With a nice large control room, a huge 840 square foot live room with 14 foot slanted ceilings, an isolation room, a vocal booth, and two separate amp closets, we have plenty of isolated spaces to get great sounds without the need to overdub everything. This makes it possible to record very large groups live and still have plenty of elbow room and acoustic separation.
Many studios may be beautiful on the surface, ours included, but what is truly important is the stuff you do not see. So what is inside the walls and below the floor? Let us tell you about some of the features in our construction…
Construction
Our studio features room-within-a-room construction. This means the walls you see are actually the inner of two walls; each of which have two layers of ⅝” drywall and special acoustic insulation for sound absorption and a 6” air-space between them. These walls are floating on a layer of neoprene for even more sound isolation.
The eight-foot window separating the control and live rooms are two pieces of ½” thick glass adding to the sound control. Under our “floating” eco-sustainable strand woven bamboo flooring in each room is a concrete slab which is physically decoupled from the other rooms’ floors’ concrete slabs. Our HVAC system has every single send and return given it’s own heavily insulated flex duct to prevent sound transmission between rooms, and the HVAC unit is located in a separate building from the studio to keep mechanical noise far away from any recording spaces. This means your recordings are free of any noise from the AC unit or sound from the other rooms.
The studio’s room acoustics are wonderful. Careful consideration in the design was spent on choosing room ratios as mathematically non-correlated as possible, in order to achieve evenly distributed axial, tangential, and oblique room modes. This lends itself to our ability to get a smooth and accurate frequency response in the control room. This accuracy is practically impossible to achieve without building from scratch like we did at Studio Crash.
Inside these amazing spaces, we have a plentiful assortment of top end microphones and world class outboard mic preamps. We have ProTools Ultimate software with HDX hardware acceleration and loads of professional dsp-powered plug-ins. This gives us the ability to record and overdub with full-on mix level plugin counts (for amazing headphone mixes) and never have to worry about latency. And perhaps most importantly, we have the engineering experience, skill and expertise to get the most out of it. And we do it in an efficient, professional, comfortable, and friendly environment.
You owe it to yourself to shop around for the right studio for your project. We are confident you won’t find a better studio in the Philadelphia area for your sound. Don’t just take our word for it, read the reviews and listen for yourself.
We look forward to working with you.