Design Layout..Is a corner back of control room a problem?

Hello to all, This is my first time posting on any forum so please bare with me. I am in the process of designing a layout for a new studio build from the ground up and have a design in mind. My concern is the shape of the control room and asymmetrical shape of the live room. I'm not sure this is an issue but when I was give a layout with rooms based on square designs, it ate up too much length from both rooms. Please let me know if the shapes are fine to work with or any suggestions would be much appreciated. I will note that I do have a friend who is a technical guy helping me on the build..figuring out modes, treatment and tuning, however, I just wanted a third party opinion before I showed him my design as his design was with more square based...a great design just taking too much length. The shell size interior is 38'x45'x14' If any more information is needed please ask. Thanks for any help!

Hi Jonz5, and Welcome! :) Yup, those shapes are fine. If you browse around the forum, you'll find several control rooms with shapes like that, and a non-rectangular live room is also a Good Thing! Looks like you are on the right track. However, there are some issues with your wall designs: you are not correctly decoupling the walls. Although you have correctly decoupled the rear inner-leaf walls of your control room from the outer-leaf walls, and you have also correctly decoupled the front control room wall from the live room, but you have not decoupled the side walls of the control room from the surrounding rooms, and neither have you decoupled the rear walls of your live room. The same applies to your guitar iso booth: it is firmly coupled to the live room, and therefore will not isolate very well at all. The only room that is fully decoupled in the correct way is your vocal booth: all the rest are coupled in one way or another. You also seem to be wasting space on those sound locks, which you would not need if you decoupled things correctly. Also, you say that you have a friend helping you "calculate modes, treatment and tuning", but there is no easy way to calculate modes for non-rectangular rooms, and it's not really worth calculating much "tuning" in advance anyway. Let me explain: You can only calculate modes easily for purely rectangular rooms, with three sets of parallel or nearly-parallel surfaces (left-right, front-back, ceiling-floor). As soon as you add more walls, or change the angles very far from 90°, the simple equations for modal behavior are no longer valid. If you did want to figure modal behavior for rooms with those shapes, then it can be done with good FEM/FEA software and an experienced operator who knows how to set up the boundary conditions and all the other parameters correctly, and who also knows how to interpret the results. Not something that most home studio builders can do! So forget modal analysis for your rooms: it simply does not apply. Also, "calculating the tuning" is pretty pointless, since reality bears little resemblance to prediction. Even small differences in dimensions and materials between the design and the actual room can cause rather large changes in actual behavior. You'll have to measure the acoustic response of the empty room anyway, as soon as all the final inner-leaf surfaces are in place, and that will tell you hoe the room is REALLY reacting. Based on that you can "tune" your room, or more correctly "treat" the room. Yes, there are programs and equations that will show the predicted behavior, but really, why bother going to all that trouble if you are going to have to measure anyway, in order to decide on your treatment? Rather, I'd design the room based on the general modern principles that you see mentioned on this forum in many places, starting with a good RFZ and using the general rules of thumb for speaker geometry and basic furniture and treatment layout, then measuring the room both before and after that is in place, to see what it did and what problems still remain, so you an design your second round of treatment based on reality, not prediction. Even the simple fact of putting speakers, a mic, a desk, a chair, yourself and the rest of the test equipment into the room is going to change the way it responds a bit. Anyway, that's my suggestions, for what they're worth! - Stuart -