Finding a Room for the Compression Suite

The first step in building a compression suite is to locate an appropriate space to house the equipment and operator. The room must first provide a good environment for sound. If you encode only video, you could locate encoding computers in a busy cubicle. A separate room allows you to isolate the sound so extraneous background noise from air conditioners, group chatter, and traffic don’t interfere with the sound from the video. Conversely, the suite should provide some isolation of the video sound from people working in offices and meeting rooms.

In addition to isolating sound, the room should be sonically “dead,” which means there are no excessive standing waves. Basically, standing waves occur in a room when sounds at certain frequencies get trapped between hard walls and start resonating, creating a very fast echo or delay. You can eliminate most standing waves in the upper frequency range with soft and irregular surfaces, such as carpeting and acoustic tile.

To soften the hard walls, you can apply sound absorption panels, such as those from Markertek and the Sonex panels from Illbruck. Figure 15.2 shows an example. Sound absorption panels consist of a flexible foam material that is fairly inexpensive and easy to apply. You can use an adhesive or simply nail it up.

Figure 15.2: Sound absorption panels are used in the compression suite.

Fabrikam decided to locate the suite in one of the rooms previously used for off-line video editing. The room has all the features they are looking for, with enough space for one operator and the equipment, which takes up about as much space as the VCRs and edit controller did previously. Figure 15.3 shows the layout of the room and the location of the furniture and equipment.

Figure 15.3: Layout of equipment in the compression suite.

The room is the size of a small office, 8 by 12 feet. They apply sound panels to the walls behind the technician and adjacent to the door. They also apply small sections of paneling above the desk.

The compression suite uses standard, adjustable-height office tables. A 44-inch high equipment rack sits on the floor to the right of the technician, and the encoding computers are housed in a wheeled enclosure located under the desk on the left.

The video equipment fits into a standard equipment rack that accepts 19-inch rack-mountable components. To reduce equipment noise, detachable doors are added to the front and back of the unit, and the inside of the rack is lined with sound panels. Fabrikam also creates an enclosure for the computers to reduce the noise from the fans and drives. The enclosure has front and back doors and sound treatment on the inside walls.