loft style condo editing suite

Hello, I'm going to be moving into a newly renovated, open-concept, loft style condo in the next few months. I am wanting to build a decent enclosure to work from when I'm at home. The work I do consists largely of electronic composition, editing, mixing and mastering. I do recording as well but at home this is usually for my own projects, if it's for clients I book a proper room. My primary goal for this project is to have a reasonably flat listening position frequency wise and minimal reflections. Basically I would like as good of a critical listening room for mixing and mastering as I can manage. A secondary goal would be lessening the spill over from my speakers into other areas of the condo. My budget is between $2000 and $3000 CAD with most of the labor being done gratis by myself and willing volunteers. My normal working volume level is between 76-87 dB, rarely going over that. The room is approximately 60 feet long, just under 15 feet wide, 16 feet from the concrete floor to the concrete beams that support the floor above and 18 feet from floor to ceiling. There is a mezzanine level that starts 20 feet from the doorway and extends another 26 feet towards the end of the room. The full height of the ceiling is available on both the front and the back sides of the mezzanine, unlike the more common loft design that has the mezzanine begin flush with the front wall of the unit. The wall construction of the unit itself is separate studs for each wall with an airspace between units, acoustic batting and drywall hung on resilient channel. As mentioned above, the floor and ceiling are concrete and being on the 4th floor of 5 we have neighbours above and below. The heating and electrical for the unit comes up a single conduit between the 1/2 bath and the kitchen. The hot-water for heating is pumped into a coil in the mezzanine level floor and then distributed using a per unit controlled fan that blows air through ducts in that same floor. All pipes for the kitchen and bathrooms are run through a false wall to isolate them from neighbouring units and preserve the integrity of the demising walls. All things considered I'm expecting it will be a fairly quiet place. The available space for edit suite construction is the area immediately to the left of the front entrance to the unit. The mock-up I have created is not from strategically selected components but rather items that fit the dimensions I was hoping to build with. My thinking was, barring any outside advice, to build broadband absorbers for the side wall panels and super-chunk for the corner absorbers all using Roxul safe-n-sound. I am not at all familiar with how a larger room like this might behave with a partitioned area of this type. I have no ceiling on the enclosure currently and was planning to simply hang some clouds at obvious reflection points for the listening position. My reasons for this are firstly that AFAIK building fire-codes require a sprinkler for an enclosed room. This would be a costly and complicated thing to accomplish. Second, I want to make use of some of the advantage of a tall ceiling if possible. Third is that I hope to potentially move this enclosure out to a commercial location and to build a properly isolated room to put it in at a later date. What pitfalls are there with a design like this? Is it possible to achieve my goals with what are essentially free-standing gobo walls and clouds? If it can't be done this way, what options might I have? loft condo sketchup model Thanks for your time and consideration. Daryl Pierce www.darylpierce.com about the building - it's an old poured concrete department store (Hudson Bay Company) that is being renovated into 134 condo units with commercial space on the main floor. If you can't tell I'm very excited about it.

I'm starting to think that I might build my partitions to initially be broadband absorbers. If I can manage a functional setup without burning any bridges this would allow me to set up the enclosure inside the room and do some actual testing to see what specific problems remain. All absorbers would be in sealed boxes so I could potentially cap them with the specified slats from Mr. Sayers' Wall Units http://www.johnlsayers.com/HR/index1.htm to further tune things. Any thoughts on this strategy?