John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum

Hi guys!
I got referred here from the livepa.org forums when I mentioned I was taking a room in my house and turning it into a studio/workroom. I've been an electronic musician for about 13 years but always in a really cramped situation - ALWAYS having to use headphones to monitor/mix/whatever. Living in a 1 bedroom place in NYC, that's just the way it had to be. Well my wife and I just bought a much larger house in Connecticut and we're on about a third of an acre plot - no neighbors connected, and at least 50ft away from the nearest house!

So my wife and I are using one of our three bedrooms (the largest - 14'L x 10'W x 8'H) and using that as a shared workroom/studio space. Since it's a *shared* space I can't just use the whole room. Something about her needs or something, I dunno. Our plan is to have an "island" in the middle of the room with our tables pushed together and be able to work and face each other. This presents a problem, as I'm not sure if I should put my nearfield monitors (Alesis Monitor 1 Active Mk2s) on either side of me in the center of the room or if I should place them in the far corners of the room (as long as I make an equilateral triangle with my ears).

The 10' wall I will be facing has a window on it, dead center (outside wall). The 14' wall to the left has a window in the center as well (also outside wall). The 10' wall behind me has sliding doors to a closet (the bathroom is behind that wall). The 14' wall to the right has no window, but does have a door in the rear corner (master bedroom on other side of wall). Above is the attic and below is the 2 car garage. The floor of the room is hardwood and all other walls and ceiling are drywall. There's a pretty wicked reverb when I clap my hands, so there has to be some treatment to cut that down.

Basically there are a few obstacles here, but since I make electronic music and have no intention of using mics or "real" instruments, the space seems great. There's no way I can make this a great pro-grade recording studio but for music which will be playback through monitors I'm excited that it can be a huge step up from my previous setup.

So my proposed work looks something like this:
I have Roxul soundproofing insulation along with wood frames and canvas and plan on constructing my own bass traps and acoustic treatments for the room. I'm going to start with two 48"x24" bass traps for the wall behind me. I think an area rug to both conceal the ungodly amount of wires and to break up the reverb off the floor will help. Panels at the first and second points of reflection on the walls will serve to dampen the reverb there as well...but this depends on where the monitors end up. Things don't have to be perfect, they have to be functional for the two of us. I think most of all, this place has to be a great creative space for the two of us - she working on her stuff while I tool around on music. I'm really excited to get this under way.

Thanks for any advice you can give and I'll post pics ASAP!

_________________
Thanks!
-alex / DG

Hi Alex, and Welcome!

Not fantastic, from the point of modal behavior, but not terrible either. And since I imagine that moving walls is out of the question ( ), you should be able to live with those dimensions.

Not a good idea at all, acoustically, sad to say. For many reasons. I would really, really, REALLY suggest that you re-think that. You need to turn your setup around, facing a wall, and put as much distance as possible between your head and the wall behind you. If you like the companionship and being able to see each other, then hang a large mirror on the front wall. Acoustically, there's no way you can get a usable environment with the speakers in the middle of the room and your head very close to the wall behind you. Sorry.

Yes it does!

The largest modal peaks and valleys of any rectangular room are in the middle of that room. It is the worst possible place to put speakers or ears.

The next worse place to put speakers or ears, is in room corners... All room modes originate and terminate in corners, so if you put a speaker in a corner, you are absolutely guaranteeing that you will excite all possible modes to the greatest possible extent. This is not what you want to do, in a studio!

What I would do if that were my room, is to set things up facing that 10 foot wall, with my speakers on massive, heavy stands, located as close as I can get them to the window, and roughly 2'6" feet from each side wall, leaving them about 5 feet apart, and with the acoustic axis of the speakers about 47.25" above the floor. I would then set up my chair so that my ears are about 5'4" from the front wall, mid way between the speakers, and angle the speakers so that they are pointing towards my ears, with the imaginary axes intersecting a few inches behind my head. That would be the optimum geometry for your situation.

Excellent! Don't change that! That's a fantastic surface for a floor, acoustically speaking.

Not just "some": There needs to be a LOT of it, mostly in bass traps. If you are interested in the numbers, theoretically that room needs 321 Sabins of absorption, which is the equivalent of 321 square feet of "open window". You have a total of 664 square feet of surfaces around you (walls, floor, ceiling), so roughly half of that needs treatment, in order to make the room meet ITU/EBU specs. That might not be possible, and you also say that you don't expect a world-class outcome, but the numbers do give you a good idea of what is needed: lots of treatment.

If it is insulation, then it is not soundproofing! That's a common misconception. Insulation does not isolate. It is impossible to "soundproof" a room with any reasonable amount of insulation. That's not the purpose of insulation, and insulation cannot accomplish that. Insulation is used for treatment: Mass is used for isolation.

But that's splitting hairs: Your insulation is probably fine for doing what you need to do most: treating the room. Assuming that this is fiberglass insulation, check that the density is around 30 kg/m3 (2 PSF). That's what you need. If it is mineral wool, then it should be more like 50 kg/m3 (3 PSF).

Wood frames are great! Canvas... not so much. Canvas is often heavy, thick, and treated to make it water-proof. That's not what you need for your treatment. The cloth that you use for that needs to be acoustically transparent, and an easy way of checking that is to see if it is "breathable": put a piece of it up against your mouth: can you breathe through it very easily, as though it wasn't even there? If so, it is fine. But if you feel any resistance to your breathing, then it is not so fine.

That's a total of about 16 square feet, or a bit less than 5% of what you need...

What I would do if that were my room, is to start with floor-to-ceiling superchunks or corner absorbers in all of the vertical corners, diagonally across the corners and with the front face of each one measuring 36 inches. I'd also use floor-to-ceiling panels on the side walls at the first reflection points, at least 2 feet wide (preferably 4 feet wide) and at least 4" thick, and hopefully spaced away form the walls a bit. Then I'd put a couple more of those in the front wall, right behind the speakers, and cover the rest of the rear wall with 6" of absorption, side to side and floor to ceiling. Finally, I'd do a large hard-backed cloud hung above the desk, 6" thick, angled at least 12°, and maybe 6 feet wide by 4 deep.

That would give me about 150 to 180 square feet of absorption in all the right places, which is roughly half of what the room needs, but should be enough to make a decent difference, before measuring the response and deciding what else to do. I'd probably also be inclined to do some more corner absorbers across some of the other corners in the room, as additional bass trapping, since you'd still be short in that department. And I'd probably cover all the bass traps and maybe the rear absorbers with thick plastic before putting the cloth on them, to not suck out too much of the high end.

That would be my basic approach.

I wouldn't touch the floor: it should be great just like it is, if the rest of the room is treated properly. I'd leave it as a last resort, in case the room is still too live after you do everything else, but I totally doubt that would be the case. And carpets are not such a good idea anyway, as they are what I call "inverse randomly selective absorption", meaning that they do the exact opposite of what you want in a small room: They absorber highs really well, mids a bit, and lows not at all, whereas you need to absorb huge amounts of lows, some mids, and not touch the highs...

I wouldn't bother about second points: If the first reflection points are done correctly, and the rest of the room is treated properly, you should be OK. Plus, they wont solve reverb problems in your room, since your room cannot possibly have any reverb problems: it is too small to suffer from reverb. There is no such things a statistically valid reverberant field in a small room. That only happens in large rooms. What you are hearing is not reverb, but rather flutter echo, modal response, and reflections. Those are the things that will need treating.

So that would be my approach to dealing with your room. You'll probably have to modify that a bit (or a lot!) to work around furniture, doors, and your wife's work areas, but the basic plan should be something like the above.

Photos and an accurate diagram in SketchUp would help to get a better understanding of your room.


- Stuart -

_________________
I want this studio to amaze people. "That'll do" doesn't amaze people.

Stuart (et al),
First of all A THOUSAND TIMES THANK YOU for your detailed and super quick response! I had no idea I had so many preconceived notions about sound in a room and was going about setting it up all wrong. I was disappointed at first that many of my plans had to be tossed, but in the end if my work results in sounding so much better, than I can only appreciate the learning process.

I've taken your advice to heart (I've re-read this several times) and rearranged the room. I haven't begun treating yet (tough to find time since I work all week), but measuring and placing the speakers exactly where you mentioned around the window has helped. I've also gotten an SPL meter, some test tones and a notebook and hope to start working on treating this weekend after taking initial measurements.

I'll see if I can figure out Sketchup, but it kind of confuses me (even though I know photoshop like the back of my hand). I can certainly post pictures ASAP.

I've also been looking at other posts in the forum to see if there are correlations b/w suggestions you've given me and to others so I can understand sound a little better. I know this room can't be the best (my budget is around $1000) but with your advise I can certainly make it the best place I can afford.

Again, thank you so much, the advice isn't lost on me, and I plan to keep up with this forum/thread as things progress!

_________________
Thanks!
-alex / DG

Glad to be of some help!

I understand that feeling perfectly: When I first started on my quest to design a studio, I did exactly the same thing: Found out I had to un-learn a lot of stuff I thought I knew about how sound behaves, then re-learn about how it really behaves. There's an awful lot of myths, half-truths and even snake-oil about acoustics, floating around on the internet. It's not so easy at first to figure out what the good stuff is and what is garbage.

Great! There's a simple test to find out if you did it right or still need to tweak it: listening for the "phantom center". You might not be able to do this until you get some treatment in there, but it's worth a try. The "phantom center" has nothing at all to do with the middle of a ghost ( ): it's about a non-existent speaker seeming to be in your room. It works like this: If you have proper symmetry and geometry in your room, and your system is set up correctly, then you will be able to hear sound a "phantom" speaker right smack in the middle, between your left and right speakers. Things that are panned center in the mix, such as vocals, snare, kick, etc. should seem to come directly from that "phantom" speaker. So put on a good commercial CD, and listen carefully with your head in the middle of the sweet spot. Close your eyes, and you should hear some sources (instruments, vocals) seeming to come directly from in front of you, not from either of the speakers, and not even from both of the speakers. If it sounds like they are coming form both speakers at once, then you didn't get your setup right yet. If it sounds like some things are located dead ahead, then you got it right. In that case you should also hear a full sound stage running from left to right in front of you, and you should be able to point to the apparent location of each instrument.

Like I said, you might need to get some treatment in the room to get reflections under control before you hear that, but it's worth trying.

Download REW as well! It will make things much easier for you. It's really expensive, though: FREE! In fact, it's about the only thing in your entire studio build that will cost you nothing, and help hugely. REW means "Room EQ Wizard". It does a complete acoustic analysis of your room, and displays pretty much everything you could ever what to know about all acoustic aspects, and then some... So run a REW analysis with BEFORE you put any treatment in, so that you have a baseline to compare against.

Two very important points on REW. 1) Do the analysis using only one speaker at a time, first left then right, and mark those in the analysis. If you do it with both speakers then you won't know if what you are seeing is interference patterns between the speakers, or problems with the room. 2) Place the mic in the position where your head will be when you are mixing, aiming forwards and angled upwards a bit. Then MEASURE THAT POSIT CAREFULLY! You need to be able to get the mic back to that exact position for every subsequent test, as you add treatment. It needs to be accurate to within a few mm (1/4"). This is very important. If you don't get the mic back to that exact location, then you cannot compare the graphs from earlier readings. The readings are still valid, but for a different location, so comparing them is pointless.

It does take a while to do that! It's a bit quirky, and has some strange ways of doing things, but once you "get it", then you'll find that it is an extremely powerful design tool, very useful. It is worth spending the time to figure it out. Take a look at some of the tutorials.

So get REW, then if you want post the data file from your tests here, so we can take a look at it, and see if there are any obvious issues that need addressing.


- Stuart -

_________________
I want this studio to amaze people. "That'll do" doesn't amaze people.