New House, New Studio...Advice?

So I've just moved house and I've got the upstairs set up as a mix room. I'm just looking for some advice on what people would do if they had my room. I know a bit about acoustics, however there isn't much I can do with building walls or anything fancy like that as it's a rented place and I'm a student! Being as it's a small room, I'm never going to achieve optimum sound quality, however I can definitely improve on the room sound at present. First of all, the shape is a little odd - it's sort of L shaped. The main part where all my stuff is a rectangle roughly 2.5m wide x 3.3 m long. This then has another rectangular part alongside roughly 1m wide x 2m long. Layout and Layout with Dimensions: http://h.imagehost.org/t/0151/Studio_Layout.jpg http://h.imagehost.org/t/0134/Studio_Layout_Dimensions.jpg Photos: http://h.imagehost.org/t/0964/DSCN1966.jpg http://h.imagehost.org/t/0813/DSCN1960.jpg http://h.imagehost.org/t/0859/DSCN1961.jpg http://h.imagehost.org/t/0658/DSCN1962.jpg http://h.imagehost.org/t/0071/DSCN1974.jpg http://h.imagehost.org/t/0363/DSCN1972.jpg http://h.imagehost.org/t/0872/DSCN1975.jpg There are a few obstacles that restrict where I can position my equipment…the bathroom, the immersion heater (boiler) and the chimney - none of which I can do anything about. The chimney is about 0.21m deep and 0.58m wide and the immersion heater is about 0.60m x 0.65m. The height of the room also varies, starting at roughly 2m expanding up to 2.8m high. I figured mounting some diffusers/absorbers directly onto the ceiling would work quite well as it is already angled at around 45 degrees. There is also a window recessed into the wall (flush with the outside). The cavity is about 0.92m wide and 0.37m deep. The stairs lead directly downstairs (with no doors) to a room slightly bigger than my mix room. The stairs occupy a space of around 1.23m x 0.92m. My future plan is to get a 24 (or possibly 32) channel mixer where my desk is at present, and have a rack with some outboard where my interfaces and guitar amps are, but first comes a little acoustic treatment and maybe something to plug the gap where my window is. Any help would be greatly appreciated. :) Jamie

Thank you, I'll bear that in mind. Back on topic, any suggestions? Jamie

Hey Jamie, welcome! Looks to me like you have a really difficult space to work with! Right now, you don't have room symmetry so your mixes will not translate well. You need to get the front half of the room (from your head forwards, at least) symmetrical, if you hope to produce good mixes. In other words, you need to arrange your head on a central axes of the room, equidistant from both sidewalls, and set the speakers plus your head at the apexes of an equilateral triangle. That's the basic geometry that just has to be in place. Based on that, you can start figuring out where to put your initial room treatment (bass traps and first reflection absorption) then measure the room response, to see what still needs doing. (By the way, please abide by the forum rules and upload your photos here, instead of hosting them externally, and size them correctly). The only real place where you can get some kind symmetry in that room without building new walls, is by placing your desk in front of the fireplace. One big factor in choosing that spot is the peaked ceiling. That isn't ideal by any means, but I just can't see any better way of arranging the geometry. - Stuart -