Hello everybody,
I wrote a thread here a couple of months ago (http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=77819) about our studio build in London. Looking back, I probably included way too much information in one post, which probably explains the few number of replies. All those questions we had back then has now been answered (mostly by this forum, and Rod Gervais' book), and I have to say that everything seems to be working really, really well. Wall isolation, even without the door seals, is much better than expected, and it looks like we will have a good looking studio once we're done. Still, there's a few questions that needs answering, mainly regarding acoustics.
Like I wrote in the previous post, the control room is 6.3m (~21ft) wide, 3.7m (~12ft) deep, and around 2.5m (~8ft) high. The two side walls and back wall are made of bricks and concrete, while the front wall between the control room and live room is made out of two layers of plasterboard (20.5mm or 0.8inches thick), a 70 cm (2ft, 4in) airgap, and then another two layers of plasterboard (25mm or 1 inch thick). The wall is completely filled with 16kg/m3 (~1pcf) insulation and has got a 1.5m x 1m window in the middle. 10.8mm (0.4 inches) thick glass on one side, and 16.8mm (about 0.7 inches) thick glass on the other side. Both sides are laminated glass. We know that this is a very wide control room, but being able to face the live room window is quite an important feature for us.
Picture 1 is of the left hand side of the control room. Picture 2 is of the middle of the control room, and picture 3 is of the right hand side of the control room. It might be a bit difficult to tell from the pictures, but the door you see in the first picture is angled at 30 degrees before it cuts off and goes 90 degrees to the main wall, creating a corner. The right side of the wall is straight, so we were wondering if we should try to make the room more symmetrical, and how we would go about doing that. One idea we had was to build a cupboard out of plasterboard in the right hand corner, identical to the size of the door and plasterboard in the left hand corner. We were thinking that this could solve the symmetry problem, and provide needed storage space. One potential problem this could create I guess would be the effect of a third leaf. Would this be a problem, or is there a way of avoiding this third leaf effect? Low end isolation is really good at the moment, so it would be a shame to ruin that now! The cupboard would be handy, but the main reason for building it would be the acoustics, so if anyone has another suggestion that doesn't involve storage, it would still be very appreciated.
The other questions we have are about the general treatment. The plan at the moment is to install 1.5 m wide corner broadband traps in the two back corners going all the way up to the ceiling. We were also planning to take out as much as we can in the two front corners (next to the door on the left side, and the cupboard on the right side if we decide to build it). For the wall to ceiling corners on the side walls, we were thinking about building 1.8m x 1m (~6ft x 3.25ft) panels and straddle them, and perhaps use two of these panels on the wide back wall/ceiling corners. Apart from that, we will use a mirror to find the reflection points, and build 1.2 m (~4ft) x 1m (~3ft 3in) panels to treat them. All of this treatment would be 10 cm (4in) thick 45kg/m3 (~2.8pcf) rockwool except for directly behind the speakers, where we would probably use 15cm (6in) of the same material. All the corners would obviously have quite big airgaps behind them, and everything hung directly from the wall would have an airgap of 5-10 cm (2-4in) between it and the wall.
Does this sound like a good solution for our room, or should we go in a different direction? We have yet to order the wood and material for the treatment yet, so we are definitely open to suggestions! I hope I've given enough information in this post. If not please ask, or check out the link at the top of this post. Like I mentioned earlier, the studio's come a long way since the old post, so I'm probably going to post some more pictures in the construction forum pretty soon.
Cheers,
Daniel
Control room treatment in London
Originally posted at johnlsayers.com, topic 11332.