Written by Kent Learned, 23 October 2023, originally posted to the Wonderland History Facebook group.
The recording studio when I got there sounded pretty strange. Things were acoustically positioned rather poorly. There was a store room up at the far end that doubled as a voice over booth, with no visual connection with the studio. It sounded very “boxy”, with several resonances in it that were hard to get rid of when mixing.
We had a CD player, but everything else was tape based. We had a four track tape recorder, a two track tape recorder, a cassette recorder, and a tape cartridge recorder for the announcement system. There was some random placement of sound absorption placed around the room, which was repositioned when we redid the studio.
The first thing we did when rebuilding the studio was to remove the store room wall, and replace it with two sliding glass doors we had made to fit the space. These were angled at about 15 degrees, to minimise strange resonances in the rooms. Being glass doors, we now could see what was happening in the voice over room.
We’d been collecting the gear we wanted in the studio and now we had to create some studio style bench work to put it all in. Rod Nielsen (Spod) and I did some brain storming over a period of a few weeks, and came up with a design to hold the 24 channel Tascam mixing console and sloping equipment racks that allowed the equipment to be tilted forward so we could get to the back of things as needed. We had a cabinet maker do all the wooden parts, and a metal shop do the steel parts that the equipment screwed into. We saved several thousand dollars, and everything fit the room perfectly.
After we had the room laid out more or less correctly, I spent some time with a few acoustics books working out the best places for all of the previously removed sound absorption and placed it where it would have the most effect. When we were done, the room sounded much more natural. This gave us the ability to know that when it sounded good in the studio, it would sound pretty good out in the park.
We bought one of the first digital sound editing systems outside of Radio and TV stations and major recording studios. This allowed us to create many of our own sound tracks for shows, background music, and announcements. We also bought a computer-based CD burner, which was a very new technology at that time. This allowed us to make our own CD’s for the park background sound system, shows, general announcements, and not have to periodically make new tapes every 4 or 6 months when they wore out.