Small studio for secondary school

Hi, The school I work for (In Oxfordshire, UK) is in the process of designing a new music block, which will include a small studio enabling us to offer the Music Technology A-Level course. As a sound technology graduate, Im going to be helping them buy and fit all their equipment, as well as eventually helping run the course. There is an acoustics expert already working on the design of the building, however I need to give him more direction as to the acoustics of the control room and live room. I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for me? Attatched is the plan. The "recording studio" will be the control room, and "ensemble room" will be the live room (a video link will be needed between them). I realise the control room is not an ideal shape, but we cannot do much about the structure of the building at this stage. As it is a school, the main aim will be to provide an area for students to learn about the subject, use the equipment, and make reasonable quality recordings, rather than to gear the whole setup towards getting the best sound possible. For example, it is not really practical to use the "room within a room" technique for isolation, so other ideas would be much appriciated! The acoustics expert will ultimately be deciding on shape, materials etc. but any guidance I can give (to make sure the rooms are suitable for recording, rather than just like any other classroom!), would be really helpful! Any ideas would be greatly appriciated! And any questions I will of course answer! Thanks Dan

I would have thought between a "sound technology graduate" and an "acoustics expert" you guys would have it down pat! :D Just teasing What are the 3 other studios? I would have tie lines to all of them. The control room is very small, how many children will be in there at a time? I can't really tell from the pic if the two south facing openings are windows or doors?

Haha well you'd think so wouldnt you! :p Unfortunately acoustics and studio design is not really my best subject! And I think the acoustics guy works generally (if not exclusively) with general acoustics of buildings like schools, rather than specifically for recording purposes, which ofcourse requires a different approach! Ive posted on here before and got some really good suggestions so i thought it would be worth a go! :) So, the other 3 studios will be classrooms. They will be used for lessons (one will be a DAW lab), and also the big one used for performances. I will definitely be getting tie lines to them as well, although the acoustic treatment of those rooms is not quite so important, as they will mostly be used as classrooms. (i thought it would be good if we have the one room allocated as "main" live room, and try and make it as dead as possible) The controll room is very small, but they will be small classes. Initially I dont imagine we will have more than 10 or so people on the course, and they can be split up into groups for studio lessons. The two south facing openings are windows, but I will probably suggest that they are removed. (I think ive already mentioned it to them but they obviously havent updated the plans yet!) Thanks! Dan

Hi again Daniel! I do indeed remember your previous thread, which was basically about the need for the video monitoring aspect, due to the design oversight of not having the control room near the live room. Glad to see that the project is advancing, but disappointing to see that they still did not give you any usable space to work with!

danielpate wrote:

Hi, There is an acoustics expert already working on the design of the building, however I need to give him more direction as to the acoustics of the control room and live room. I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for me? ... And I think the acoustics guy works generally (if not exclusively) with general acoustics of buildings like schools, rather than specifically for recording purposes, which of course requires a different approach!

It sure does require a different approach! Well, my first tongue-in-cheek suggestion would be to get another acoustician, one who actually DOES understand studios... :) OK, but seriously, it doesn't sound like a good combination: It seems like nobody on the project really knows what they are doing, they are not giving you the space or construction methods you need, yet the school wants to teach this stuff to students???? Hmmmm...

I realise the control room is not an ideal shape, but we cannot do much about the structure of the building at this stage.

So you have to live with what they gave you. OK. Make the most of a bad situation. What are the actual dimensions of that "studio", and how is it built, in terms of construction materials? (walls, floor, ceiling, doors, windows).

For example, it is not really practical to use the "room within a room" technique for isolation, so other ideas would be much appriciated!

Well, if you need good isolation for that studio (and in a school environment, my guess is that you most certainly do need excellent isolation!) then you only have two other options: 1) a vacuum, and 2) mass: You can either establish a vacuum around the studio (which is kind of hard to do!) or you can install massively dense treatment inside the walls, such as thick lead or steel plating. There are no other options. Get the Physics teacher involved, and maybe he can explain to the faculty / decision makers the reality of sound. You cannot stop it by wishing it would not go through a badly designed wall. Sound does not respond well to wishes and desires! You can only stop it by removing the path for it entirely (vacuum) or by creating a barrier so heavy and dense that the sound cannot penetrate (mass). The third option (MAM or MSM or "room within a room") is a good low cost third technique, that is also based on requiring mass but intelligently uses the phenomena of resonance and damping too, to help reduce transmission. It is the most cost-effecive method of getting good isolation easily. But since you say this is not an option for you, then the school is going to have to do something expensive and complicated instead, like install lead sheeting inside the walls and ceiling. Sorry to tell you, but there is no fourth option. The laws of physics limit you to the above. If isolation is important (and it probably is here), then you either build a room within a room, or you install massively dense barriers in the walls, floor and ceiling. So the only choice they have left you with, is going to cost them lots of money. I sure do hope that the budget is very flexible! If not, then you are basically stuck at a dead end.

The acoustics expert will ultimately be deciding on shape, materials etc.

How is he going to do that, when you say that he does not know anything about studios? Shape and materials are the key to getting it right! Has he told you which room ratio he will be aiming for, and which basic design principle he is basing the room on? LEDE? DEDE? etc. Is he planning to splay the walls correctly? What does he propose for the first reflection points? Will the floor be wood / concrete / tile / carpet, and why? etc.

but any guidance I can give (to make sure the rooms are suitable for recording, rather than just like any other classroom!), would be really helpful! Any ideas would be greatly appriciated! And any questions I will of course answer!

Well, my number one advice would be to buy two copies of Rod Gervais's book immediately, give one to the acoustician and read the other one yourself. Then buy two copies of Master Handbook of Acoustics, and do likewise. Until you've done that, there isn't a lot more that can be said. The room you have been given to work with is tiny, the shape is far from ideal, you have no sight lines to the live room (so you have to waste money on video links), and they won't allow you to even build the way it needs to be built! Those two books should give you the basis for understanding why they have left you far up the creek with no paddle. Sorry to be so blunt, but frankly there isn't much you can do in your situation. You can try to make the best of it, but in this case I don't see "best" as doing the job that needs to be done! - Stuart -

Hi Soundman, thanks a lot for your comments! I totally understand your skepticism of the project, it is very frustrating not to have this studio space as the priority, get the best setup, then design the rest of the building around it, but unfortunately I have been brought to the project late (only found out about it once the plans had been pretty much finalised), and have to make do with the rooms provided. I am only working on the building by chance - i am an IT technician, but happened to notice the plans and see that they need a lot of work on the acoustics! So while I do agree with you on your points, I do think its important to emphasize that we are really trying to make do with what we've got, and make the space as good as we can get it! The studio will be used for a course which will, certainly in this school, be an introduction to music technology for most students, so it is not really required to be up to professional standard. But I will be meeting with the acoustics guy fairly soon, and will pitch high, hoping that we can reach some sort of compromise which will leave us with a useable space! So, again, your help is very much appreciated, and the more advice i can get on this the better! :) Anyway, I have attatched some images supplied to me with some of the dimensions of the rooms, hope that is helpful! (not all the dimensions were labeled unfortunately). Materials are as follows: "The walls are made from single and double leaf blockwork. These walls and cavities are lined with specialist acoustic insulation" (I have requested details about this insulation) "The floor is 75mm screed, 75mm insulation (acoustic/heat) and beam and block spanning members. The ceiling is open with a plasterboard finish, I expect that there will be acoustic panels here also. Doors into studios will be specefied to deal with 45db." The person I am talking to about this is very helpful, he says they already have data on insulation and absorption levels, so I have requested he send them over to me. Any more details I will let you know! And any ideas you can come up with for me would be really really appriciated! :D Thanks! Dan edit: as to discounting the room within a room approach, I mainly just thought it would be impractical given the size of the room... i totally agree that it is the best approach though, if i can come up with a good plan of what it would look like, I can pitch it to the guy and see what he thinks. Any ideas? :)

And the control room... not many dimensions labeled on this one unfortunately....

Hey Dan. I pity your predicament! It sounds to me that you are going to be the fall guy here... But anyway: So it seems that your control room is something less than 2 meters wide by something less than 7 meters long(!) ? There is no dimension for the length, but I'm "guesstimating", based on the width and the notation that says "12.5 sq m" There is no indication of height at all, but since the text you provided does seem to indicate a drop ceiling, I'm guessing at something over 2.5 meters. So you have roughly 12 square meters of floor space, some of which will be taken up by the bass trapping and other acoustic treatment, some of which will be taken up by equipment and furniture, and you still hope to get ten students and a teacher or two in there? I hope they are all really close friends, and remember to brush their teeth! That's going to be a very tight fit. And I didn't see any mention of the HVAC system that is going to deal with all this. You need enough air changes per hour of fresh air for at least eleven people, plus air conditioning sufficient to keep both them and the equipment cool. Did the acoustician consider this? In order to be "soundproof", the room MUST be hermetically sealed. Totally airtight. Normal school ventilation cannot be used here. You can't even tie in to the HVAC systems for nearby rooms easily, since you will be making a noise in there, and that noise cannot get into the other classrooms, to disturb whatever is going on. Also, the noise from those classrooms cannot be allowed to get into the studio. So you need to look at a dedicated / isolated HVAC system for this specific room, or a system of silencers in the ductwork if you have no choice but to connect to the general building HVAC. One things your acoustician must understand: this room cannot be ventilated just by dropping in normal HVAC ducts. Special care and techniques for installation are needed, such as oversized ductwork, silencers, high volume low speed fans, and ductwork that is lined on the INSIDE. Etc. Search this forum for "HVAC" and you'll start to get an idea of what is involved.

so it is not really required to be up to professional standard.

Understood, but you also don't want to suffocate your students, nor fry them, while the try to learn!

But I will be meeting with the acoustics guy fairly soon, and will pitch high, hoping that we can reach some sort of compromise which will leave us with a useable space!

That sounds like a good plan! But I think you need to shoot REALLY high, so that the "compromise" actually is useful.

"The walls are made from single and double leaf blockwork.

Well, is it single leaf or double leaf? A room that has single leaf around part of it, and double leaf around the rest of it, is a waste of time and money. You need double leaf all around, or it's not worth it. Can you get more information on exactly what they mean by "double leaf blockwork"? Does that mean that there are two totally separate block walls, with a cavity in between? Or does it mean that they used hollow blocks? The former is good, the later is not.

These walls and cavities are lined with specialist acoustic insulation" (I have requested details about this insulation)

The cavities do not need to be lined with "specialist acoustic insulation". Plain old ordinary fiberglass or mineral wool insulation will do just fine, and is much cheaper. Save your money for where it is needed. The purpose of insulation in the cavity is to damp the resonance. It is part of the "spring" in the "mass-spring-mass" equation. but you don't need anything specialized in there. normal insulation has pretty good characteristics, that fit the bill nicely. And I'm not sure how he can have already decided on the "acoustic insulation" that will line the walls, since there isn't any layout for the room yet (showing where people, equipment, speakers, and furniture go), and no tests have been done! He seems to be getting rather ahead of himself by already specifying the treatment without even having a floor plan in place. The only option for floor plan that I can see is that the door (which is incorrectly placed in a corner anyway, right where you need bass trapping) will be at the rear of the studio, the front will be the wall labeled "1985", with the speakers firing down the long axis of the room. You cannot possibly hope to get a 60 degree angle on the speakers, since you need to fill the entire room reasonably, and you cannot put them in the corners, for obvious reasons. So your speakers are going to be really, really close together, with a very shallow angle. There will be no stereo image to speak of in such a layout, of course. It will basically be a monophonic studio, only that it has two speakers on separate channels(!) You are going to need heavy treatment on your first reflection points, since they will be so large due to the very slight angle of the speakers, and the very large area of wall they will be covering. It is going to eat into that 2 meter width quite a bit, but you have no choice.

"The floor is 75mm screed, 75mm insulation (acoustic/heat) and beam and block spanning members.

So it is a floated floor? Ooops. Did you read this post: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8173 Too late t do anything about it now, of course. But at least you are ware of the issues.

The ceiling is open with a plasterboard finish, I expect that there will be acoustic panels here also.

That sounds like either a typical office drop ceiling, which is useless for a studio, or it sounds like he is planning to glue acoustic treatment of some sort to the ceiling. What kind of "panels" will those be? It goes without saying that the ceiling will have to be a major part of the treatment for this room, but " I expect that there will be acoustic panels here" doesn't sound like this has been well thought out! At the very least you are going to need some type of cloud up there, and you might even want to consider making the entire ceiling absorptive, several inches thick. That seems to be the only way you are going to get enough treatment in there. You will probably have to use all of the wall-ceiling corners for heavy bass trapping, too, since you can't use the rear corner due to the incorrectly placed door, and you are going to need so much of it in such a tiny room.

"Doors into studios will be specefied to deal with 45db."

I guess he means STC 45? That's reasonable, I guess. That implies thick solid-core doors with good seals and no windows.

he says they already have data on insulation and absorption levels, so I have requested he send them over to me.

Along with the other acoustic calculations, such as the predicted modes, impluse response, and RT-60?

as to discounting the room within a room approach, I mainly just thought it would be impractical given the size of the room...

Yep! With only 2 meters total width, there just isn't any space. That room is already even smaller than a shipping container. Search this forum for information on studios that John Sayer has built inside shipping containers.

if i can come up with a good plan of what it would look like, I can pitch it to the guy and see what he thinks. Any ideas?

Let's see what they already have in mind, in terms of isolatio, treatment, HVAC placement, electrical, etc. There is no use laying out your studio plan, only to find that there is going to be a huge HVAC duct right where you plan to put your speakers! Once you have all of the data available regarding decisions that have already been made for you, then we can try to figure out if there is anything at all that can be done. Once again, sorry to sound so pessimistic, but I really don't see such a small space as being even vaguely usable as a recording studio that is also supposed to seat ten students! - Stuart -