Template Basement Studio Design

As mentioned in an earlier thread, I'm looking for a house with an appropriate basement for building a small mixing room. An adjacent live room would be icing on the cake. DISCLAIMER: this is my first design ever! I've come up with a template, which is based on an 8 foot ceiling and a 1:1.4:1.9 room ratio. While house hunting, I want to use this design to make sure I buy a suitable basement. It's also a fun exercise in design. Please give me your criticisms! The red indicates bass trapping, green means slat absorber, and yellow means diffusion. The white box is my rack. The model doesn't include the outer leaf but I think i can figure that out. Thanks in advance! PS my real estate agent is perplexed at my basement obsession. It's quite funny... :lol:

so, get a basement with 10' ceiling and 21'x16' open space for the CR and whatever else you need for live room. this way you can easily build a room-within-a-room with HVAC ducting etc and plenty of air space around it.

Glenn, I would LOOOOVE a 10' ceiling. I've looked at about 40 houses in the Toronto area, and 90% of the ceilings are 6'8". I've seen two that had an 8' ceiling, but both were considerably lacking in width. I may be able to underpin, but I don't think digging down >3' is economically viable. From what I've seen, it only seems reasonable to expect an 8' ceiling, though I will certainly try for more. If I do have to compromise and take 8', is there anything you'd change about my design? Regards, Dave

is there anything you'd change about my design?

Yup! I would definitely NOT have the rear end of the room narrowing down like that! That is going to cause you big issues in several ways. Rather, take your isolation wall to the corners of the existing room, and use those corners for superchunk bass traps. I'd also soffit mount the speakers, and try to get better symmetry around the desk and rack up front. Symmetry is very important in the front half of the room, and it looks like that design of desk and rack might upset things, since one speaker is firing over the desk surface while the other is firing over empty space. Maybe you could build the rack into the desk top, with some equipment on each side, or put it under the desk extend the desktop to cover it). Your listening position is also in a really bad place: it seems to be in the middle of the room! You should fix that too, and get your speaker / listening position geometry right. For example, your speakers are too high above the floor. - Stuart -