New to the forum and have been lurking for the last few days. Lot of great info here and my thanks up front for anyone contributing on my new endeavor.
I'm taking over the lease on a two story building in Burbank, Ca. The building has existed as a post audio facility since the 90's and has about 10 rooms with various video edit bays, two ADR/VO studios, offices and a really nice mix room where they've been posting movies and TV shows. My plans are to take over the main mix room and turn an adjoining lounge area into a tracking room. I've built 4 studios before, my last in 2000 and I have a pretty good idea of the design concepts behind building a decent room. I'll try to document the progress and post here if anyone might be interested.
I've been looking over some of the designs here with great interest. Since the space I'll be turning into a tracking area is directly under a couple of office/production rooms, isolation is of extreme importance. I'm definitely going with a room in room design and since space is somewhat of a limited commodity, especially ceiling height, the designs with drywall layers on the outside of the framed walls looks to be a great space saver while still having the same amount of layers and isolation.
Anyways, just a couple of questions as I start my planning.
1. Do I float a new framed floor? Seems like there are enough opinions here questioning the real value gained by floating floors. The existing floor is concrete slab. Since I only have 9' 11" from floor to the bottom of the 2nd floor floor joists, every inch not wasted in floor to ceiling height will be important.
2. What about MDF/particleboard? Looks like all the designs use drywall in their STC ratings. One of the studios I built utilized a MDF/Soundboard/MDF sandwich and it worked out pretty well. Seems like the MDF really stopped the low end How much more isolation can I gain with a couple of layers of MDF as opposed to multiple drywall layers?
Thanks,
km
Building A New Room...... Again!
Originally posted at johnlsayers.com, topic 13851.
Hai there KM!
Welcome. A few days eh, take another year to get updated :p There's much good info on building a recording room, read and read again. free of charge ;) I'll be short:New to the forum and have been lurking for the last few days. Lot of great info here and my thanks up front for anyone contributing on my new endeavor.
If the concrete floor is seperated from the rest of the building and it's on ground-level I'd forget about floating the floor without question. If you want to save space and not go through the hassle of actually building a *working* floor that floats: don't float. :)Anyways, just a couple of questions as I start my planning. 1. Do I float a new framed floor? Seems like there are enough opinions here questioning the real value gained by floating floors. The existing floor is concrete slab. Since I only have 9' 11" from floor to the bottom of the 2nd floor floor joists, every inch not wasted in floor to ceiling height will be important.
MDF and GB have about the same density so, yeah, isolation will be about the same. GB is, at least where I live, cheaper. "soundboard", what's that?2. What about MDF/particleboard? Looks like all the designs use drywall in their STC ratings. One of the studios I built utilized a MDF/Soundboard/MDF sandwich and it worked out pretty well. Seems like the MDF really stopped the low end How much more isolation can I gain with a couple of layers of MDF as opposed to multiple drywall layers?
Yes a few people have suggested that there was not really any benefit to using the mdf. If I do use it I may sandwich a layer of it between two layers of GB just to have a different layer. Soundboard is a cardboard/ceiling tile sort of material. From the comments I'm seeing it doesn't appear to be of much value at all so I don't think it will be part of my new design.Hai there KM!Welcome. A few days eh, take another year to get updated :p There's much good info on building a recording room, read and read again. free of charge ;) I'll be short:New to the forum and have been lurking for the last few days. Lot of great info here and my thanks up front for anyone contributing on my new endeavor.If the concrete floor is seperated from the rest of the building and it's on ground-level I'd forget about floating the floor without question. If you want to save space and not go through the hassle of actually building a *working* floor that floats: don't float. :) Thanks for the welcome and the info. Kind of what I was thinking. The entire first floor is built on a concrete slab floor. Even though there are adjacent rooms on the slab the proposed tracking space is not really next to any other audio rooms or offices with the exception of the existing Mix/Control Room. That room is fairly well isolated. I had someone smack my drum kit in the lounge area while I listened from different rooms. It wasn't too bad in the control room and I think getting the double walls in there will solve those issues. My main iso concerns will be for the spaces above on the second floor which is completely unacceptable now. Of course, the existing lounge ceiling is a dropped acoustic ceiling (2' x 4' panels) and no insulation. Didn't expect it to provide any isolation at all.Anyways, just a couple of questions as I start my planning. 1. Do I float a new framed floor? Seems like there are enough opinions here questioning the real value gained by floating floors. The existing floor is concrete slab. Since I only have 9' 11" from floor to the bottom of the 2nd floor floor joists, every inch not wasted in floor to ceiling height will be important.MDF and GB have about the same density so, yeah, isolation will be about the same. GB is, at least where I live, cheaper. "soundboard", what's that?2. What about MDF/particleboard? Looks like all the designs use drywall in their STC ratings. One of the studios I built utilized a MDF/Soundboard/MDF sandwich and it worked out pretty well. Seems like the MDF really stopped the low end How much more isolation can I gain with a couple of layers of MDF as opposed to multiple drywall layers?