my empty room

I attached an image of the room I'm working with and working in. It is 100% untreated. The dimensions are printed in the image itself. Thankfully it's not a perfect square, though the walls are parallel. The floor is carpetted. As far as treatment: ANYTHING GOES and whatever it takes. I'm starting to build absorption panels this week. Any advice is greatly appreciated (I'll have a nice girl write your name on the studio wall if your ideas are used, heehee). Here goes, from the beginning, from scratch. Mike the room:

can you provide a detailed list of equipment you have/plan to have?

Hey Gull, Thanks a million for replying. the gear is more or less what's you'd find in a home studio. The mixing desk is virtual (inside Cubase), but I use a Mackie 1604VLZ (rackmounted) to patch in vocals and guitars. Equips: - Mac with two displays on a workstation/table. - Soundcard is a rackmount MOTU. - Event Studio8 powered monitors (100W per side). They'll go on pillars. - microphone and a couple of guitars. - small sofa. As far as construction, I'll do whatever it is. I'm motivated to start building 'it', I just would love to know what 'it' is, and where to mount it all. :yahoo: Any advice, direction or insight is hugely appreciated. -Mike

Hey Mike, Welcome! :) There are a few general "rules of thumb" about laying out your studio and positioning your speakers and head correctly, and there's a rough procedure from getting you from where you are now, to your final design. First, your room ratio: That's the ratio of height to length to width, normally expressed as something like "1 : 1.14 : 1.28". Your ratio right now is 1 : 1.52 : 1.68, which isn't bad but could be improved. So first question: Do you need to isolate your room ("soundproof" it)? If so, how much isolation do you need? The reason I ask is because the additional inner-leaf walls that you would need to isolate your room can be designed to give you a better ratio, and a better layout. But that costs money, and you didn't mention your budget (although you did say that you are prepared to do whatever is necessary). So first order of business would be to decide if you are going to isolate your room and then treat it, or just treat it as-is. So let us know if you are willing to build more walls inside that room, and if you have the budget to do so. Also, tell us about how that room is built right now, and what is around it. For example, is the floor concrete? Wood? Do you have noisy neighbors close by, or does your noise bother them? What is above you? What are the walls and ceiling made of? How loud are you? Etc. And the biggie: What is your final goal? In other words, why are you building this? What do you want to achieve? In other words, give us as much info as you can so that we can better understand where you are and where you need to go. - Stuart -

First, your room ratio: That's the ratio of height to length to width, normally expressed as something like "1 : 1.14 : 1.28". Your ratio right now is 1 : 1.52 : 1.68, which isn't bad but could be improved. So first question: Do you need to isolate your room ("soundproof" it)? If so, how much isolation do you need? are going to isolate your room and then treat it, or just treat it as-is. I would love to isolate and then treat it but I just learned that anything I do will have to be able to be taken out if and when I leave here (ugh). I could afford to buy the materials I need though, and I could build a modular/removable temporary walls to improve the room's ratios, if thats possible. The floors are old carpet. Underneath is wood. I can remove the carpet to expose the wood if that's what you recommend. The walls are standard house walls of painted sheetrock. Above the celing of this room is another room (my living space). The ceiling is standard house celing (sheetrock?) it's painted with celing paint. It's a free standing 'cottage' kind of thing, so my noise wont disturb neighbors. Outside is a main road. I've learned to work at night when there's no traffic outside. At this point I think working at night is the affordable route to take. I came across a graphic at this site, kind of a 'software mock-up' of a room that looks like it started off like mine. When I saw the graphic, my first reaction was "That's exactly how I would love this place to be." What is your final goal? In other words, why are you building this? What do you want to achieve? I want to acheive a workspace where I know I'm hearing exactly what's going on in the mix. Where it Sounds as clean as possible and looks great! :D

I would love to isolate and then treat it but I just learned that anything I do will have to be able to be taken out if and when I leave here (ugh).

Ouch! Not nice. That creates a real problem for isolating, since anything you do to isolate means "damaging" the existing room to a certain extent. One option you have is to take off the existing drywall from the walls and ceiling, beef up the other side from inside (between the studs/joists), put resilient channel (RC) on the studs/joists, fill the cavities with rockwool, and put two layers of 5/8" drywall back on top. That would leave the room looking pretty much the same as now, except about 2 inches smaller in all dimensions (due to the thickness of the RC plus the extra drywall), and it would improve your isolation quite a bit. Not optimal, but probably worthwhile. And you would not have to do anything when you leave. You would still need to build plugs for your windows and replace your doors with solid cores, plus add good seals to them, but it would work quite well. Another option is to take off the existing drywall on walls and ceiling, then build a proper "room in a room", but that would mean major re-working when you leave: You'd have to take out your "room-in-a-room", and put up more drywall on the original studs, to leave the room back the way it is now. It's a lot more effort and expense, but will get you much better isolation, and a much better room too, as you'd be able to move walls around and angle them as necessary. The big issue in both cases is the floor: wooden floor probably means that you can't add much more weight to it safely, so your options are very limited. You'll need a structural engineer to take a look at that floor and tell you how much extra mass it can support, before you start. - Stuart -

that's the biggest ouch I ever hope to hear actually. I'll just build absorption and clouds and mount them on the walls and ceilings. It's my HOUSE. By "cottage" I just meant there aren't neighbors in the other side of the walls that will be disturbed or who will disturb me. The structural integrity of the wood floors and the ceiling are such that I'm more than confident that an elephant could drive a truck into this room without breaking through the floors. Stu- assuming it's quiet outside, could you tell me where to put what, and also what angles/ratios you recommend? I'll create with your expert advice as a guide. Thanks in advance. Mike.

put the mix desk centered window on the 13'6" wall (left) even though this goes against the "shoot down the long ways" guidance. treat your walls and ceiling on first reflection points with 4" absorbers. super-chunks in the corners (or using a 4" thick rigid insulation spanning the corner - 34" wide and pink insulation behind it). on the wall behind your mix position, build out one of John's 12" deep absorber cabinets. on the rest of the room - scattered 4" thick absorber on the ceiling and walls to bring in the room "reverberation" to the desired level (probably around 500ms for all frequencies). put your monitors on stands close to the wall. a heavy drape over the window will help dampen that a bit and allow some light when needed.

why not shoot down the long ways? Am I making too big a fuss over something that's really easy?lol.

why not shoot down the long ways?

That would be the normal and recommended way of doing it, yes, but in your case you really don't have that option: the door, window and closet all mess up your options there. If you are not going to isolate, I'd go with Glenn's suggestion and just treat it as-is. The only thing I'd add to what Glenn said is replace the carpet with laminate flooring. Much better acoustically. So your desk would be facing the window, centered on that wall, with your speakers on each side of the window (or on the center line of the room if the window isn't centered), up close to the wall on very massive decoupled stands, about 1.7 m apart (67"), with absorbers behind them, up against the wall. Your chair will be about 1.4 m from the front wall, and the speakers will be angled roughly 30° so that they are aimed just a little behind your head. The idea is that the axes of the speakers intersect about 7" behind your head. The stands should be sized so that the acoustic axis of the speaker sits about 1.2m above the floor (47"). That gets your basic geometry right. The numbers are not carved in stone, so you can adjust them a bit to get the best sound, but they do give you an excellent starting point. The rest of the basic treatment is exactly as Glenn said. Then when you are done with all that, run an analysis of the room with REW, and post the results here so we can see what else might need doing. The above would be the best approach if you aren't going to isolate or build walls, and I don't see how you can build any walls in there, unless you go the whole hog and do the "room in a room" approach. - Stuart -

I just got word that it's okay to isolate. I can change the shape of the room with some constructuction and then treat it. I found a picture online of a room that looks like it started at about the same size. At this point, I might use the budget to just move far away lol. For now though, the window and the closet door at the desired front of this room are about to be covered with a new angled wall.

Great! So you get to spend even more money! :) Seriously, that's good news. Now you have lots of opportunities. You can start by rotating the room from the way we were talking about,m 90° clockwise. That will place the front of the room at the top of your sketch, with the speakers firing down the long axis, as it should be.

the window and the closet door at the desired front of this room are about to be covered with a new angled wall.

Whoa! this is going to be a control room, right? So why do you want to mess up the symmetry of the front half of your room (which is critical for good translation) by angling a wall across the corner? That doesn't make much sense. Keep the front half of the room symmetrical, at all costs, and do not eat up space from your corners. Rear corners are excellent for bass trapping, and front corners are excellent for soffit mounting your speakers, which will greatly improve many things, acoustically. - Stuart -

Soundman2020 wrote:

Great! So you get to spend even more money! :) Seriously, that's good news. Now you have lots of opportunities. You can start by rotating the room from the way we were talking about,m 90° clockwise. That will place the front of the room at the top of your sketch, with the speakers firing down the long axis, as it should be.

the window and the closet door at the desired front of this room are about to be covered with a new angled wall.

Whoa! this is going to be a control room, right? So why do you want to mess up the symmetry of the front half of your room (which is critical for good translation) by angling a wall across the corner? That doesn't make much sense. Keep the front half of the room symmetrical, at all costs, and do not eat up space from your corners. Rear corners are excellent for bass trapping, and front corners are excellent for soffit mounting your speakers, which will greatly improve many things, acoustically. - Stuart -

That closet...and you know I'm asking you out of almost total ignorance: Soffit mounting = at 30 degree angles, would mean shaving a bit from the room length? Sheesh how am I going to do with this closet(cavity) right there? I'm thinking: cosmetically just erase the closet's existence (door off, mouldings off, sheetrock it, no more closet). Then center the soffit-mounts at 30 degrees, with the near fields about 4 feet apart? Today me started making a materials list. heehoo. I'm going to attach a graphic of what I'm planning on to show you.

I'm going to attach a graphic of what I'm planning on to show you.

Do it in SketchUp. It's free, easy to use, and pretty much a standard on this forum. It takes a few hours to learn, but once you do you'll be VERY glad you did. - Stuart -

Soundman2020 wrote:

I'm going to attach a graphic of what I'm planning on to show you.

Do it in SketchUp. It's free, easy to use, and pretty much a standard on this forum. It takes a few hours to learn, but once you do you'll be VERY glad you did. - Stuart -

I'll do that. :D

Don't let them bs ya phlange...it takes much longer than a few hours to get the basics down...

it takes much longer than a few hours to get the basics down...

Aww, come on, Brien! Ya mean 847 hours is not "a few"? :) ... - Stuart -

that's hardly half-a-years time for a normal work year. if you're not already at 250% you're just not living! :twisted:

you guys are killin' me...