vocal booth for spoken word etc

Hi, I'm new to posting on this forum, after lurking for a few weeks. Let me start by expressing extreme gratitude and admiration for this wonderful forum. I hope someone can help me or point me in the right direction. I have a small studio set-up that I use for solo and duo acts, and also for recording meditation and other spoken word material. I record one voice or instrument at a time except for very rare occasions. I have been set up in a cottage at my place in the mountains in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland in Queensland, but had problems with the spoken word work because of external noise interference. Sometimes these people speak incredibly softly, which means that gain on the mic is right up even though their mouth is only inches from the mic. My noise issues are: creaking roof caused by intermittent sun/cloud; occasional planes overhead; occasional cars and trucks on road 150 metres from cottage; crickets and frogs (deafening when you're outside sometimes); also rain (we had more than 3 metres last year, including 340mm in one day). My clients often want to have just their voice on the CD, with no backing music to mask issues. In the past I have had to resort to extreme editing, gating and noise reduction programs to get anything suitable ... with the resultant reduction in "naturalness" of the recording. I don't have close neighbours and in any case will not be recording drum kit or loud guitar or bass amps. Most guitars and basses I DI and use virtual amps. I'm trying to stop noise from getting in, rather than getting out. I want to convert a 2-car garage, on a concrete slab with timber frame, cedar walls and corrugated iron roof, and double rolladoors. The building is 8m by 6m by 2.4m (L, W, H) and I need to reserve a storage space about 2.5 metres wide ... so I have 5.5 by 6m to fit everything into. The walls are 2.4 high, and the roof is pitched to a gable 1.3m higher, running the length of the building. Given the type of noise that I need to isolate from, what is the simplest way to build a suitable iso booth in this context? My feeling is that I want a control room and iso booth for most work, and a separate room that can be used for relaxing, rehearsing and occasional tracking of larger groups. I have been thinking that if I line everything with gyprock and use the best insulation I can find that will do for the control room and the rehearsal space, but that I should build a room-within-a-room for the iso booth. Does that make sense? I will add here that aircon is an issue as we are humid to the point where condensor mikes suffer crackling. We often spend days at a time in cloud ... ie 100% humidity. So ... any ideas, tips, pointers, suggestions, links, references? Much obliged Andy

welcome! i think your idea is probably the right one - create a control room which has some acceptable evel of isolation to meet your requirements and then build a very highly isolated vox booth. you will have to have your HVAC be virtually silent in the booth so you will want to use very slow air movement but of sufficient quantity to change the air in the booth frequently. so this implies some tweaking of duct dimensions and the system fans to get to say 30fpm (10mpm) or less. plus have the ducts full isolated from the the outside otherwise if defeats your purpose.

Thanks for the validation .... I've seen mention of people using a standard domestic split system AC unit, which is boxed and the air then ducted into the studio. Is there a plan for this somewhere on this site or elsewhere? And, please forgive the newbie obvious question ... but what does the "HV" stand for? cheers and thanks Andy

HVAC = heating, ventilation, air conditioning one option would be to cool/heat the CR and then exchange air with the booth. this could simplify the construction and reduce costs. there are several plans around for vox booths plus a bunch of HVAC information in the construction forum.