Sound House Finland, Studio build

Hi, So I'm getting somewhere with my construction finally!!! Three years of reading, searching and studying and now the control room is almost finished. A little history: About three years ago I started building my studio in an ex-barn on my brothers property. The plan was to build a completely floating three-room studio with two iso rooms, a slightly bigger live room and a CR. I got to building and actually finished the floor for all the rooms when I realized it would be too huge task for one man to do(with limited funds and time). So I found another space in the same building with two smaller rooms that I thought would work as a CR and a small booth. Both rooms are under a ramp that leads to the second floor and are made of concrete blocks and cement. In july I started tearing the finished floor to get supplies for the new space. I started building the CR first because I have an ongoing project that needs to be mixed before anything else. My first impressions of the CR when I brought my computer and monitors in was a complete disaster. The CR sounded just plain awful!!! You can imagine a small 3m x 3m concrete room without any treatment. I almost lost all hope at that time but decided to go on with the build. I figured I'd use as much damping as possible and just see how it works. By the day 3 I had myself a new floor(1x4 joists, 3 layers of chip board and glasswool underneath), all the walls had their shapes and already some insulation. Time to do a new listening test... Much better!! At this time I was starting to feel a little better about the room although there still was a substantial amount of bass canceling/buildup going on. I also got the electrical and audio wiring through from the iso room. Some weeks later I had time to do some building again. I'm a freelance sound engineer currently working in Big Brother Finland, so I really don't have a lot of free time to do anything else but BB... Anyways, I returned to the studio and started working on the walls, CR audio wiring(inside the walls) and ceiling. The ceiling is just polyurethane sheets so it was really difficult to decide what to do with that since I couldn't nail or put screws in it. I decided to hang a felt cloth from the walls just to cover the uglyness and not so much an acoustic treatment. I got it pretty tight so it wasn't hanging a lot but there was a seam in the middle of the ceiling that needed to be covered with something. So I took a length of wood and attached that to the walls with L-brackets. Now that piece of wood is slightly hanging... Time to move on and think about that later. I did some more stuffing with insulation so that all the walls were covered with thick layers of glass wool(anything from 10cm-40cm). Time to do another sound check. And the results were even more convincing. The stereo image was very focused and the frequency response and RT were almost there. I have no measuring mike but I think that the ears are anyways the best measuring devices. So I was a happy camper once again, time to go home. Later I had another 3 days off work so on to the studio I went... I bought some more insulation for the walls and some wood for the resonator slats. I stuffed the walls some more and covered them with a cool wine-red cloth. I only had a regular paper stapler so you can imagine the work that I put to fastening the cloth. Then it was time to cut the slats and srcew them to walls. Last week I went to the studio again. I bought the laminate for the floor and installed that. It really starts to look a lot different from what it was in the beginning. Now that the room is almost finished I can say that the sound is very accurate indeed. No more boomy lows and chaotic image and reverb. There is(at lest) one mistake I made during construction: The left monitor soffit is a few cm wider than the right one and I noticed that the "phantom center" is actually a little off to the right. I had to turn down the input sensitivity of my left genelec by about 3dB to get the image to center. Can that kind of mistake(only a few cm) really have such a dramatic effect on the image? I'll upload some pictures for you to see and comment while I finish the control room. Thanks

Here are pictures of the first stage of the build. You can see how the room was in the beginning. Then the floor and walls started forming...

Heres the second set of photos. I'm missing some photos so theres a big gap in time here. I'll try and locate the misiing photos so I can post them as well.

The descriptions were lost from the last set of photos but I think you understand what it is about.. Heres the third setof photos(hopefully with descriptions).

looking great Tomi :)

Hi John! Thank you very much. Very nice to hear from you and hope you are feeling better. I realised that I didn't post the original design at all so it could be hard to imagine the actual space and so I'll post it now. This about how it should look like once everything is done.

malfunction wrote:

There is(at lest) one mistake I made during construction: The left monitor soffit is a few cm wider than the right one and I noticed that the "phantom center" is actually a little off to the right. I had to turn down the input sensitivity of my left genelec by about 3dB to get the image to center. Can that kind of mistake(only a few cm) really have such a dramatic effect on the image?

Do you guys have an oppinion on this one? All the meters read that the same volume is going out to left and right and the monitors both are setup the same way(no cuts or boosts). Can a couple if centimeters(an inch or two) have such a dramatic effect on the center imaging? Heres another view of the control room once it's done.

So some progress again. Here are the latest pictures. I built 2 racks for my equipment and covered the monitor soffit with the same fabric that I have on the walls. Next I need to stain the racks and add all the connectors to the multicore. Then its about time to connect the gear and fire it up!!! Does anyone have an answer to the question I made in the previous post? BTW: sorry about the picture quality, I forgot the camera and only had my cell phone...

Cool looking gear cabinets already, looking forward to the "finished" product.

Looking good. I don't have an answer to the stereo imaging question you presented, but guessing, if it's a couple of cm's at the monitor, by the time the sound reaches you I guess it will get wider :shock: ??? Not sure. One question I have for you, is I was wondering why you put the monitors on their side? Shouldn't they be upright or if you have to put them on their side, the tweeters should be on the outside? Does it make any difference if you turn both monitors through 180? Hope my comments help.

The genelecs can be used on their sides but the HF waveguides must be rotated 90degrees for them to work properly. The reason I mounted the monitors sideways is because I made the soffits 110cm high at the monitor position- meaning that they are a bit too high so another option would have been to mount the monitors 180degrees rotated with the bass driver on top. Actually I can still rotate the monitors if I want since I constructed the soffits so that they can accommodate different size monitors, just need a new faceplate.

Hi y'all! It's been a very busy winter for me and I really haven't had time to post here due to the studio construction(I'm building everything alone...). Anyways, I had the first band in this weekend!!! :yahoo: The studio is not complitely done yet but I got it to where I could start making recordings. And let me tell you, the last week has been hell! I've literally lived in the studio trying to get it done before the band arrives, working day and night. I quess it payed off since the band left today with a great sounding demo in their hands. They recorded all three songs during saturday so we got the whole sunday just for mixing. I'm not going to go into it here since this is a studio building forum so instead I will tell you what I've been doing these past weeks... During christmas I got the isoroom floor done and reinforced the side walls with two layers of chip board. The exsisting concrete floor was very uneven so I had to put small blocks of different sizes of wood under neath the chip board I was laying down to make it somewhat even. I put the "cellfoam"(or whaterever the stuff is you put under the laminate) underneath on top of that and then put the laminate. So the floor was about done. The following happened around and after new year. I had already taken down the large metal doors that separated the studio from the rest of the building and now had just an opening where the doors used to be. So I built walls around the opening and got about 3m2 more space for the booth. The frame is 2x4 with chip board on the outside and 100mm wool inside the wall. I have 4 acoustic doors just standing by so I used one here to connect the studio to the building. Currently there are 2 layers of chip board on the wall and it works pretty well but I plan on adding another layer or two just to compensate for what the door can handle. I tested the walls with a line6 spider half stack. The amp was in the studio pretty crancked up and I was outside the studio playing with the cord going through a cable opening I had made just for these types of situations. I could hear the amp but it was quiet enough that you could talk outside the studio without really raising your voice too much. I don't have a picture of the hatch yet but I'll get one soon. I then made the floor for the extra 3m2 I had gotten. The concrete was pretty even so I just put "cellfoam" under the parquet. That's right, I had just enough laminate flooring for the booth but not the expansion so I took some unused parquet from my brother and used that. Then it was already thursday the 8th and the band would be coming in two days and place didn't look too promising... :roll: . I started the day by painting the iso booth side walls and kept painting as the walls were dry along the day. Next I finished the booth mic patch. I have 32ch running between CR and booth but I made the patch for 16 mic lines and 4st cues so I still have 12ch unused. I also have amp level cable running between the rooms but I didn't set that up yet(too little time). I also didn't have enough cables so I spent the rest of thursday making them and patching the control room and configuring the computer and mixer for recording. So came friday. The last day to make any improvements to the place. Since I now had the cables I was going to need and the CR ready for recording I decided to focus on the booth acoustic treatment. I made one element of 50mm rockwool covered with fabric and another with two rockwool slabs side by side. This was the first time I had ever used spray glue and man I was impressed!!! It glued the elements to the wall like nothing. Cool! Once I had the elements where I wanted them I started covering the uncovered walls of the "new extra space" with grey fabric. When that was done the room actually looked so good I decided it was time for the last clean up before tomorrow. So I vacumed and washed all the studio floors and dusted everything and made the place look as good as it could. Still none of the finishing touches were done but it looked good enough and most importantly everything worked!!!! I still have a lot to do but this was a mile stone I have been waiting for the last three years. I will keep on updating my post but I want to thank everybody here for your support and the wealth of information you guys share. As you can see I have mostly been reading other peoples threads and trying to learn from other peoples mistakes so I wouldn't have to make them myself. And I encourage all the newcomers to read as much as you can also. All the info is here, just read!!!! Thanks again everybody!!! And now the latest pictures:

Congratulations, Tomi! It's looking pretty good! And I can almost sense that ear-to-ear smile lighting up your face, just from reading your words!! It's always an encouragement to me, at least, when someone gets their studio to a place where they can actually use it decently! It gives me that little extra urge to get working on mine... Thanks for the encouragement, and keep those photos coming! - Stuart -

Great looking space Tomi. COngratulations and all the best :) CHeers