Control Room Design for small studio in Luxembourg

Good Evening everybody, I did a lot of reading in this forum over the last few month, also read several books about how to plan and build your own recording studio... Let me present myself first. I am a Blues Drummer from Luxembourg Europe am 29 years old and owe a small recording studio. The studio is in a small house wich has 2 floors of ca 35 sqm per floor. On the ground floor I have a nice 20 sqm completely insulated recording booth wich I use since 2004 already, I'm happy with it since it sounds neutral, pretty dry, but not to dry and it is completely sound proof. On the first floor I have my control room, this room isnt insulated at all, so I hear cars passing the airconditioning (wich is also the heater) blowing etc. I dont need a 100% soundproofed room up here but I should be able to hear and mix low instruments in classical music. Most recordings I do are classical music and are recorded live, later I mix them in my control room. Over the last weeks I tried to learn how to use sketchup and came up with a floor plan. The sizes are exact also the wooden structure of the roof is as detailed and precise as I could get it. I tried to fit one of John's designs in but if u enable the roof layer you'll see that I have a problem with the hight. I would be thankfull for any input you guys can give me. About how to optimize this sketchup... Some more details about the control room floor. In the sketchup plan u'll see a hole, these are the stairs coming up. next to the stairs is a podium, I actualy use the space underneath for storage, the way I planed the control room now, I wouldnt be able to acces this space anymore. :-( On the front wall there is a window wich I dont necesarly have to be able to open, its nice though if u have some sun comming in or some fresh air during the breaks. I got a problem with space in my studio at the moment so a storage / machine room would be great. A room where I could put my 24 track 2" Tascam, my small run CD printing machine the drums PA etc... I also dont have any space right now for a small Kitchen ( Fridge, Coffe machine microwave oven and some diches.) I hope I didnt aske to many questions. Thanks a lot already in advance Yves Ditsch P.S. I just tried to upload the sketchup file but it's when ziped 1mb thats to big... how can I get the size smaller without loosing details in the plan? Or can I post it to my webpage for download?

Hi Yves, and welcome! Excellent first post! :)

P.S. I just tried to upload the sketchup file but it's when ziped 1mb thats to big... how can I get the size smaller without loosing details in the plan? Or can I post it to my webpage for download?

You can try to delete the things that you don't need in your SketchUp file, then use the "purge" function to make sure it all gets cleaned out. If it is still too big, then sure, go ahead and upload it to another server, and post the link here. - Stuart -

Thanks a lot Stuart :-) Nice to meet you ;-) I tryed to erase stuff also purged the whole thing down after zip still 968kb so I simply uploaded it to my studio webpage as a hidden zip file. here is the url: http://www.studiod.lu/images/StudioD_luxembourg.zip BTW I forgot to mention that the 4 main walls are stone walls, Its a very old house so its build out of sand stone this was typical in Luxembourg in the 18 hundrets. I didnt put plaster walls around my design yet cause I dont know if its best in the middle of the room like its now or maybe better against the right wall, in that case we would have even more trouble with the roof. The heater is on the rear wall right side as u can see in my sketchup. Well now I let you take a look at the plan hope it's not to confusing.

Since my sketchup is to big here a little jpeg to take a look at... Thx Yves

And here my biggest problem the height of the construction :-S

Rotate it 90°! Turn the entire layout so that the speakers are firing down the long axis of the room. That will solve a large number of problem with that current layout. Also, you are talking about the need for isolation upstairs, but what you show is only treatment: you haven't shown any isolation at all. I know you are on an extremely limited budget, but isolation implies mass, so you do need to add at least some mass around you, if you want isolation. After the isolation design is in place, only then can you start thinking about treatment. - Stuart -

Thanks Stuart you were right, I turned the control room and it fits. The storage place can be left and right of the control room. I added 7,5 cm of plaster walls around. Well the budget is limited but I rather wait till I have the money to do it than to restart 10 times over again... The rear Acoustik moduls are to high can I simply rescale them to the same high as the front once? So I can pu a plaster ceiling in my sketch up ;-) I also just realized that I'll loose some more hight by adding the floading floor. But I think thats worth it also I could put the multicores underneath... What do you think does this look more or less ok? New scetch up under folowing URL jpeg attached. http://www.studiod.lu/images/StudioD_luxembourg3.zip Yves