Fishman Transducers Production Studio

For over 40 years, Fishman Transducers has been a well-known industry leader in pickups for acoustic and electrical instruments, as well as amplification, tone shaping, and MIDI guitar technology. Founded by Larry Fishman, the firm supplies transducers and amplification products to instrument makers around the world, including Fender, C.F. Martin, Gibson and many others.

Fishman Transducers worked with PDA Inc. and Dacon on a design/build fitout for their new 58,000 sf design, testing and manufacturing headquarters in Andover, MA. For the acoustically critical production studio and test lab, Acentech worked directly for Fishman to ensure a no-compromises acoustic and audio infrastructure design.

The production studio is a classic live room/control room space, with mastering-grade listening conditions in the control room and a large live room designed with a number of acoustic sub-environments to allow recording in dry, balanced, or reflective acoustics. Both rooms have extensive HVAC noise control to ensure pristine listening and recording conditions. The studio is directly above the manufacturing floor and surrounded by office space, necessitating a fully floating box-in-box isolation envelope to protect the studio from manufacturing noise and the offices from wide-open guitar amplifiers. Because Fishman uses the live room as a soundstage for producing all of their online video content, the space needed to look as good as it sounded and includes a diffusive wood feature wall, bold geometric ceiling clouds, and a mix of absorptive, diffusive, and hybrid surface finishes. Acentech also provided a design for audio infrastructure, which included electrical boxes and conduit that would be used as pathways for wiring and connections for the audio recording equipment.

The lab spaces, while not having the aesthetic requirements of the studios, still needed extensive sound isolation and HVAC noise control, in particular for the amplifier test cell.

With this state-of-the-art studio in place, Fishman Transducers are able to keep all of their media production and testing in-house, ensuring consistent results of the highest quality both for their internal product design work and their public-facing marketing and outreach.