John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum

Hi all,

I''ve been recording for a few years now, but have never had a good setup.
Im finally pulling my finger out and getting a proper desk and studio monitors.

Im after advice on room treatment for a room that is 2.4m wide x 3.4m long x 2.4m high

Ive added a google sketchup of my room https://www.dropbox.com/s/jkqthivretasfsa/music%20room.skp
The desk im getting is similar in size to the one in the sketchup (seen here at http://www.swamp.net.au/swamp-ws-03-studio-workstation.html)
and the electronic drum kit is the rough size of mine
Its going to be a little crowded so im going to rip the shelves out of the cupboard to store all my instruments (hopefully the double bass fits in )
Ive tried to do the room to scale as possible.



I still have not received my desk yet but the next 2 pictures give an idea of the room





Any help would be much appreciated

Cheers
Kim

Ok i'll be the first to reply to my OWN post.

Cheers

So ive decided to just buy the primacoustic london 12 kit.

The question now is, should i enclose the window to help with the sound?
Ive tried a couple of layouts and that seams to be the best.

as ive said before;

any help would be much appreciated

thanks again

Hi Kim, and welcome!

My advice on that room would be: DON'T! It has a square section, being 2.4m wide and also 2.4 m high, so you are going to have terrible modal issues in there. About the only possible way to make that room worse would be to also make it 2.4m long.

No amount of treatment can fix that.

So before you even think of treating the room, you should first think about how to change one of those dimensions enough that the modal issue can be minimized. Maybe a large, hard-backed cloud would do the trick.

The file is HUGE! It's over 35 MB! Please purge your SketchUp files before uploading them. After purging it is only 14 MB, which is still very large, so it's probably that the objects that you have imported are way too detailed.

The window seems to be at a first reflection, so yes, you will need to have some absorption in front of that. You don't need to cover the entire window, though. You could just put a large absorber on stand in front of the window.

I would also suggest getting a different desk, if you want to do serious mixing. That one has flimsy little light-weight shelves for the speakers, which is a bad idea. Speakers should never be on the desk itself, nor on shelves attached to the desk: the speakers make the entire desk vibrate, thus transmitting sound indirectly. Your speakers should be on heavy, massive stands behind the desk, and even then they should be decoupled form the stands with something like Sorbothane, Neoprene, or EPDM pads.

You should also fix the speaker / mix position geometry. Right now, your ears are at exactly 50% of the depth of the room (exactly half way between the front and back walls). That's the worst possible position, especially considering that the room has a square section. Your ears are right in the maximum nulls and peaks for all modes. Theoretically, the best position is to have your ears at 38% of the room depth, which means about 129 cm from the front wall. Your speakers are also show a bit too low: the acoustic axis should be at 1.2 m above the floor, but yours seem to be about 5cm too low. Not a big deal, but still worth fixing.

So those would be my suggestions. Then, once you have all that sorted out, measure the acoustic response of the room with REW and post the data file here, so we can analyze it and suggest what type of treatment you should be looking at.


- Stuart -

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

Firstly, thanks for your suggestions.


Unfortunately that's the biggest room in the house that is not being used (the missus doesn't like the idea of being kicked out of the master bedroom)

Eventually I want to build a studio in the back yard, but until then i have to deal with what i got.


Sorry, thats my first attempt at sketchup so i was not aware of purging the file.


The desk got ordered before i saw your post. It is an ideal size for the future studio. I looked at smaller ones but i don't want to have to buy 2 desks. I had already decided not to attach the speaker stands to save room. Also I'm going to have to deal with the speakers on the desk for now (an improvement from inside the cupboard im currently working in)

I think my best bet is to wait for the desk and take it from there keeping in mind your suggestions

Until then its back to my cupboard

Cheers