## How we built Flightcore Studios

From F-Light to Flightcore

In 2020 I joined F-Light Studio in the Capitol Theatre on Marszałkowska Street. It was my first serious studio environment in Warsaw - proper gear, good acoustics, clients from the top tier of Polish music. But we quickly started hitting the limits of a single room: scheduling conflicts, no separation between recording sessions and mixing, zero flexibility.

By the end of 2020 we made the decision - we’d build our own facility. Not one studio, but three plus a mastering room. From scratch, in Żoliborz.

Acoustics - the hardest part

Designing acoustics for three studios simultaneously is a completely different scale than treating a single room. Each studio had a different profile: a large control room for mixing, a smaller one for vocal and instrument recording, and a third optimized for electronic production.

The foundation was isolating the rooms from each other - double walls with an air gap, floating floors, independent ceilings. Each control room has its own ventilation system with acoustic silencers so that HVAC noise doesn’t affect measurements and monitoring.

Materials and construction

Interior walls are a combination of absorptive panels and diffusers - placement based on RT60 reverberation time simulations. We didn’t go with off-the-shelf solutions - most panels were custom-made because the room dimensions didn’t fit standard modules.

Floating floors on a neoprene layer - this adds a few centimeters to the height but eliminates vibration transfer between rooms. In the vocal studio we added an extra isolation layer under the floor because proximity to the mixing control room required an STC above 60 dB.

IT and audio networking

This was the element that consumed a disproportionate amount of time relative to how “invisible” it is to clients. But a well-designed network is the foundation everything else stands on.

Dante as the backbone

We chose a Dante-based audio network - connecting all three studios and control rooms through a single infrastructure. Each workstation has a minimum of two Dante ports (primary and secondary), switches operate in redundancy mode, and the entire configuration is managed through Dante Controller from one location.

Why Dante over Ravenna or MADI? Pragmatism. Dante has the largest device ecosystem, the best manufacturer support, and the lowest barrier to entry for technicians who come to work at the studio. Ravenna is technically comparable (and we use it with Merging Horus converters at the Philharmonic), but in the context of a commercial recording studio, Dante simply makes more sense.

Network infrastructure

Physically - Cat6A cabling to every point, dedicated VLANs for audio (Dante) and IT (internet, management), managed switches with QoS configured for multicast traffic. A separate Wi-Fi network for clients, isolated from the production infrastructure.

# Simplified VLAN structure
vlans:
  10: dante-primary
  20: dante-secondary
  30: management
  40: client-wifi
  50: monitoring

Every switch has IGMP snooping configured - without it, Dante multicast can flood the network and introduce jitter that ends up as clicks in the audio.

Physical construction

Construction work ran from spring 2021 to fall 2022. Anyone who has built a recording studio knows it’s a completely different world from a standard renovation - you add acoustic requirements, specialized materials, non-standard electrical installations (separate circuits for audio equipment, UPS units, star grounding).

Power

Separate circuits for each studio, dedicated lines for converters and monitors, star grounding from a single central point. This eliminates ground loops - the most common cause of hum in studio installations.

Monitoring

After opening in 2023 we added an environmental monitoring system - temperature and humidity sensors in every room, connected to Home Assistant via ESP32 and MQTT. Instruments (especially pianos) and electronic equipment don’t handle climate swings well, so automatic alerts aren’t a luxury - they’re investment protection.

Lessons after two years

Flightcore has been running stable since 2023. What would I do differently?

• More network drops - you always need more than you planned for. Adding a new port after the walls are finished is a nightmare.
• Documentation from day one - wiring diagrams, IP addresses, switch configurations. Everything written down before the first cable goes into the wall.
• Test acoustics in stages - don’t wait until the build is done to take measurements. Measure after each layer of isolation to catch problems earlier.

Three recording studios, a mastering room, a Dante network tying it all together - and zero clicks in the audio. That’s probably the best review I can give this project.