Improving an existing recording space

Hi. I´m planning on improving my existing recording space (dare I call it studio?) and I´d appreciate your help on this (daunting) task. So, here are the details: General overview: This "studio" is located inside my house. It´s actually 2 rooms which were transformed into a recording space about 6 or 7 years ago. By that time I had very little knowledge on the subject of acoustics, and many decisions were made based on intuition. Today, with al the experience of the last years (and specially after reading the information posted on this site) I realize that I´ve made many mistakes, and I´d like to do something about it, in order to improve my work place. Goal: My goal is to have a decent sounding "studio" (or at least, better than what it is now), within the limitations of budget and dimensions. And also have a good looking place (which, as we all know, is 99% of what potential clients are looking for :D ) About isolation: it´s been taken care of. I mean, this place isn´t dead silent, but I´ve never had complaints from my neighbours and the sound leaking to the other rooms in the house is minimal (except when drumming). And besides, due to budget limitations, I won´t be able to build anything complicated like a room inside the existing room or anything like that. So, for the time being, I´ll have to live with my current isolation. The only thing I can do (and that is going to be done) is to seal one door that leads to the outside - I´ve found this door is the weakest point of my live room. That door is going to be replaced by a wall. And the other doors in both rooms will probably be beefed up (do sand filled doors actually work?). By the way, our homes are built with bricks. So any improvement in my rooms would have to be done by using wall absorption, clouds and bass traps (I thikn). And I want to get rid of the rugs. Budget: Not much. I want to do this job in 2 steps. First, the "control room". Then, the "live room". So for the control room, I have the equivalent to about 10 or 15 1.20m x 2.4m x 2" fiberglass panels, or in human money, about $600. (Not counting the money needed for a paint job and a pair of LCDs, so I can throw away my old CRT). For the "live room" I haven´t got the money yet, but that souldn´t stop me from dreaming, planning and asking, right? That way, once I´ve got enough $$$ I can start the improvement right away. Location: Peru, South America. The rooms dimension are all written in the attached plans. The ceiling is at 2.40m, which is the standard for our homes. I´ve attached rooms plans and photographs of the actual place, so you can see how does it look today, what have been done, where the mistakes are, and what can be done. I´d appreciate any and all feedback on this subject. My initial plans thoughts are: rotate the control room, so it faces the leftmost wall, and replace my existing desk with a smaller one. Then create a RFZ using the mirror trick and place bass traps in the front corners and clouds. And absorption on the back wall. But I am worried about the window into the live room. That would be creating reflections, right? I´d like suggestions and ideas on how to solve this. About the live room: I´ve been thinking of placing clouds covering (if possible) the entire area. Now, as you can see in the attached photos. I built something like a sub-space (vaguely inspired on Clearsonics products) in order to counter the effect of parallel walls (and provide a little bit of more isolation). Does it make sense? Or would I be better off covering the entire space with absorption (and bass traps in the corners). So, I hope I´ve covered the requirements to get my questions answered. If that´s not the case, please let me know so I can fix it. Here are the photos and plans, and, as usual, thanks for your help.

Here are some more pics.

And more pics - "Estar" is CR, "Estudio " is Live Room For some reason, the descriptions have dissappeared!

Aloha and welcome to the forum C, Here are a few bits of information for setting up the mix position that I’ve collected along the way: • Fire your monitors down the longest length of the room • Soffits angled 30 deg. in from a flat wall result in speaker baffles being perpendicular to the two legs of equilateral triangle comprised of two speaker centers and a point about 10" behind your head • The baffle extension (the face of the soffit) should be as large as you can make it, up to about 45" in each direction from the woofer in a system with a LF cutoff of around 45 Hz - There's a formula based on LF cutoff that ensures full 2 pi response for the woofer if the baffle is at least the size obtained in the formula's solution - • Monitors should NOT sit on the console but behind, placed on heavy decoupled stands - console placement causes early reflection problems in most cases, unless the console is slanted down in front a LOT. • Distance to wall behind speakers will change response drastically - there is a wall bounce calculator on the Acoustics forum that's fun to play with (needs Excel) • Moving either speakers or your head by as little as an inch or two can sometimes make drastic changes in response, due to modal peaks and dips. • Left/right room symmetry (at least within a foot or two of ear height) is important for good stereo imaging. • Roughly 38% of total room length from the front wall • Monitor angles 60 degrees • • Monitor height – tweeter at ear level (avoid mid point of floor to ceiling measurement – either sit higher or lower if necessary) If monitors are more than 3’ in height off the floor, they must be angled down. • Angled side absorption panels – left/right of mix position • Side walls 6-12 degrees • Ceiling 12 degree slope Hope this helps, Aloha 8)

Hi Kendale, thanks for your suggestions. Many of them I had already read them on the site. Let´s see: • Fire your monitors down the longest length of the room That´s the first thing I was thinking about.... But since the room is 3.15 * 3.30, would there be much difference by turning the orientation of my system? Also, by doing it, I would end up with a wall of glass to my right side (the windows that looks into the live room?). That would give me some trouble I guess. • Soffits angled 30 deg. in from a flat wall result in speaker baffles being perpendicular to the two legs of equilateral triangle comprised of two speaker centers and a point about 10" behind your head • The baffle extension (the face of the soffit) should be as large as you can make it, up to about 45" in each direction from the woofer in a system with a LF cutoff of around 45 Hz - There's a formula based on LF cutoff that ensures full 2 pi response for the woofer if the baffle is at least the size obtained in the formula's solution - I won´t be able to do any soffit-mounting at the moment, since, as I´ve already written before, budget won´t allow for any complex building (frames and such). • Monitors should NOT sit on the console but behind, placed on heavy decoupled stands - console placement causes early reflection problems in most cases, unless the console is slanted down in front a LOT. Monitors are on stands, and reflections have been avoided using the mirror trick. I´ve seen some people filling the stands with sand, as to give the more mass. That would be helpful, and is on the to-do list. • Distance to wall behind speakers will change response drastically - there is a wall bounce calculator on the Acoustics forum that's fun to play with (needs Excel) I´ll check that. :D • Roughly 38% of total room length from the front wall That I just found out in these last few days - but as weird as it may sound, my mixing position is quite around that spot! (Totally by chance) • Monitor angles 60 degrees Mmmmm....I must check that. I know that me and my speakers are on the corners of a equilateral triangle, so the speaker must be angled at 60º, but I´d better check. • Monitor height – tweeter at ear level (avoid mid point of floor to ceiling measurement – either sit higher or lower if necessary) If monitors are more than 3’ in height off the floor, they must be angled down. Guess what? My tweeter is just in the middle point of floor to ceiling! Aaaarg! Now what to do? Could I solve it by placing clouds and making the ceiling "disappear"? • Angled side absorption panels – left/right of mix position • Side walls 6-12 degrees • Ceiling 12 degree slope As I won´t do any wall building, I guess the angled sidewalls are discarded. Does installing angled absorption panels actually work? Same for ceiling, I can´t angle it since it´s there already, but I can angle clouds. Would it work? I recall having read that there won´t be any difference - I might be wrong, though. So, first thing would be: Do I rotate my system (using the leftmost wall as the new front wall)? If so, what to do with my existing window? Opinions? Thanks. C.

So..... more than 100 views and no more suggestions? Come on, people - at least something like "what an awful place you´ve got!" :D I´m working on a sketchup of my place, I´ll try to post it soon. My time´s being consumed by a vsti i´m developing, but in the meantime - please, suggestiones for improving my place! I asked this before, maybe it can be used as a starting point: should I rotate my setup, so my leftmost wall becomes my front wall? What about the existing window? Thanks.

Your control room area is a few inches away from being square. In order to make this room use-able you'll most likely deaden it completely. For a control room, that isn't use-able.

After a quick glance, both rooms need bass trapping. You have a lot of panels, but none of them are in corners. I'd get some panels at least 3-4" thick, if not 6" thick, and straddle them across as many corners as you can. Also, I agree that arranging the room as was suggested above will definitely help you. For more on room setup, see http://www.realtraps.com/art_room-setup.htm