About Northward Acoustics

Northward Acoustics is a high-end full service acoustics engineering and consulting company specialized in the design and installation of professional studios & facilities for the Recording, Mastering and Broadcast industries as well as other branches of the Audio industry such as speaker manufacturers and test laboratories.

We provide our clients with full design and implementation services, including follow-up of their project all the way to final calibration and certification, wherever they are in the world. Our portfolio of clients includes many world class facilities, Grammy Award winning Engineers & Artists as well as leading speaker manufacturers and research labs around the world.

Our in-house Control Room and Mastering Suite design – Front-to-Back (FTB) – is at the forefront of the studio design techniques and is used by the most discerning engineers and facilities around the world.

FTB CONTROL ROOM AND MASTERING SUITES STANDARD


Between 2001 and 2005, a combination of research and in-field efforts led to the development of our FTB (Front-To-Back) Control Room and Mastering Suite standard. This unique and proprietary new approach to Control Room and Mastering Suite design was engineered from ground up to achieve the highest standards in room response & translation, providing a highly accurate yet natural listening environment. FTB designs are very controlled acoustical environments, creating a quasi anechoic response speaker-to-room and speaker-to-engineer, yet maintaining a natural environment for the engineer to be within the room, doing so without compromising the speaker-to-engineer response. Thanks to the use of self-noises (noises produced by people moving and talking in the room) to trigger room environmental feedback created by surfaces invisible to the speakers, we can fully avoid having to use speaker-to-room feedback and Haas Kicker terminations like in older designs. In short, there are two rooms in one.

This results in a particularly flat room response, extremely short and constant room decay 20Hz-20kHz, providing excellent depth & stereo imaging and a powerful, flat and detailed bass response you can trust – allowing accurate translation of your recordings, mixes or masters.

Although the FTB standard is well established within the Pro Audio industry, we keep refining the parameters and techniques used in a continual improvement process, keeping the FTB standard at the avant-garde of studio design techniques.

Thomas Jouanjean
Designer | Acoustics Engineering