Help with Redesign of existing Studio with major design flaw

Im trying to figure where to begin my redesign of an existing studio with a horrible layout. My ceilings are 16ft high.I've attached a pdf file of the existing space with dimensions. The ceilings existing tile grid have been replaced with 703 rigid fiber-glass 2'x4'x 2" thick panels covered with cloth. Between the main control room and the live room is a double pane window that is so wrong(no isolation/no double leaf wall).see attachment.The floors are all carpet.my hopes are to revamp this location into a working facility.I just don't have a clue about where to begin.I dont have the budget for floating the floor in the control room,nor to build out rooms within rooms at this point. I guess Im looking for a temp fix to get this going. My first thoughts are to get rid of the window and rebuild around it,maybe just use the other vocal booth for tracking purposes. i have broad band absorbers and bass tramps for treatment options but for the price and excellent location Im going to have to try and make it work for now.I main focus is being able to get an accurate mix out the place.Any advice/help will be greatly appreciated.[color=#BF0040] Itemized list of equipment Event ASP 8's/Openlabs Miko LXD Gen6 w/I7 & 16gb ram/ [removed]/Shure KSM 44 microphone/Universal Audio Solo 610 mic pre/Mackie BIG knob/SE Reflection Filter/32" LCD[/color] P.S. I know I should be thinking of soffit mounting the ASP 8's but with the crazy window and door placements its hard to imagine where and how to get an ideal control room design. My Budget is $1500 for this project

you said you have Broad band absorbers and bass traps for treatment "options". You mean you COULD get them, or you already have them? One thing is that your room is nearly a cube! The worst of all geometry for acoustics! Which means you will need to do some very heavy acoustical treatment Best bang for your buck would probably be to build a room full of DIY traps and panels made from rigid fiberglass and construction materials you can purchase at the hardware store as well as making some of your own skyline diffusers or at least angling some plywood on the walls to avoid flutter. spend a lot of time researching where to correctly put these things as well as your speaker and listening position. What's under The carpet? Whatever it is it's probably better acoustically than the carpet.. Especially since you have a soft ceiling and won't need to worry about flutter between the floor and ceiling.

ToneAlive wrote:

you said you have Broad band absorbers and bass traps for treatment "options". You mean you COULD get them, or you already have them? One thing is that your room is nearly a cube! The worst of all geometry for acoustics! Which means you will need to do some very heavy acoustical treatment Best bang for your buck would probably be to build a room full of DIY traps and panels made from rigid fiberglass and construction materials you can purchase at the hardware store as well as making some of your own skyline diffusers or at least angling some plywood on the walls to avoid flutter. spend a lot of time researching where to correctly put these things as well as your speaker and listening position. What's under The carpet? Whatever it is it's probably better acoustically than the carpet.. Especially since you have a soft ceiling and won't need to worry about flutter between the floor and ceiling.

yes I already have the traps and absorbers. would you say leave the window or not? the floor has concrete underneath however I do have the option to have it replaced with floor tiles.

About the window, since you said your main focus was getting a good mix, I wouldn't spend too much money on it since you can only spend $1500. As is, It still looks cool, and allows you to communicate with whoever is in there! Since you only have the single studded walls, it hard to say if your isolation issues are made worse by the window or not. If the window wasn't sealed properly, It could be isolating worse than the walls, in which case it might be a good idea to disassemble it, seal it, and reconstruct it ..if you can without destroying it! look at a good design for a studio window and determine if you think yours is sealed and built properly and decide if that will help.. Cause it might only cost you the cost of the sealant to get better isolation. Drywall is cheap too, so you could add an extra layer of drywall on each side of the wall between the control room and the live room. BUT, you were more interested in improving your mixes.. Since you already have some bass traps, you either don't have enough treatment or are putting it up in the wrong place. Figure out how to control early reflections, standing waves, comb filtering, and flutter echo and also how to set up your speakers and listening position correctly. Also think about how to do that without deadening the room totally and also, add diffusion in the right places. There are a zillion threads on here about all of these topics.. A good practical read that touches on all of these subjects and a few other things that might be useful to you is Ethanwiner.com/acoustics.html The good news is $1500 will buy you more than enough materials for all of the DIY treatments you will need to treat your room properly. All you need now is knowledge and some hard work, and you will have a lot better mixing environment.

as well as making some of your own skyline diffusers

The room is way too small to benefit from QRD based diffusers. The only options are absorption, and maybe slotwalls.

The ceilings existing tile grid have been replaced with 703 rigid fiber-glass...

I'm trying to understand: you originally had some type of false drop ceiling in there, which was lower down than 16 feet, and you have now removed that and instead you have attached 703 directly to the real ceiling, which is at 16 feet? Is that it?

The floors are all carpet.

Get rid of that: it isn't doing you any favors, most likely. What is under it?

I dont have the budget for floating the floor in the control room,

Good, because you very likely do NOT need to do that, and trying to do so might make things worse! There's one major item that you didn't mention here (and a few lessor items...): How much isolation do you need? Without that, trying to give advice on isolation would be pretty pointless!

main focus is being able to get an accurate mix out the place.

Then you should probably forget isolation, and just concentrate on getting the room laid out as well as possible, and getting some basic treatment in place. Start by setting up your speakers, desk and chair in the correct location. That normally means placing your chair on the center line of the room (left to right), at roughly 38% of room depth (front to back), then locating your speakers on top of very, very heavy, massive, solid stands, at a height of 1.2 meters above the floor. That refers to the height of the acoustic axis of the speakers, not the height of the top or bottom of the cabinet. If you can't find out where the acoustic axis of your speakers is located (should be in the manual), then use a point on the imaginary line joining the center of the woofer to the center of the tweeter, and much closer to the tweeter. Some people suggest just using the center of the tweeter itself, but that isn't totally accurate. In a room that small, the speakers should be placed right up against the front wall (use the bass roll-off control to compensate), with a thick layer of absorption between them and the wall. Place them about 1.5m apart (in other words, about 750 cm either side of the room center line), and angled to point just a bit behind the position where your head will be, when seated in the chair. The idea is that the axes of the speakers will intersect a few inches behind your head, at an angle of roughly 30 degrees. Place thick absorption on your first reflection points (side walls and ceiling), and VERY thick absorption on your rear wall. Put large bass traps (recommended: "superchunk") in the four vertical corners of the room, and hopefully some of the other corners too. Now listen and adjust. In other words, with the above setup, play music that you know really well, and listen to it very carefully. Try adjusting the position of your chair a bit, forwards and backwards, to see if you get any improvement. Try moving the speakers outwards and inwards a bit (and re-angling as necessary), but move them both together, by the same amount and mirror-imaged. In other words if you move the left speaker 3 cm to the left, then you must also move the right speaker 3cm to the right. You MUST retain perfect symmetry, but apart from that you can play with the positions of the chair and speakers until you get optimum results. Your biggest problem is that the room is almost square: You'll have major modal issues in there, which no amount of treatment is going to fully tame. But you say you don't have the budget to build or move walls, so you'll probably just have to live with what you have, until you can afford to do that. - Stuart -

[color=#FF00BF]In response to "ToneAlive" I really like the adding dry-wall ida on both sides of the wall between the control room and live room. my question is whats the best way of doing this? meaning do i try the green glue method and avoid nailing directly on to the existing dry-wall or just go ahead and nail it on? [color=#400080]In response to "Soundman 2020" about the ceiling " it's 16ft high with a false typical ciling tile grid that sits at about 13ft high.The cheap normal ceiling tiles have been replaced with 703 rigid fiber-glass tiles 2'x4'x2" covered in a burlap cloth material.They are not in anyway attached to the original ceiling. [color=#408040]Also, the floor is all carpet but the roperty manager is giving me the option of replacing it with ceramic tiling.Im thinking of using that tile that looks like wood flooring to cover the control room. Now as far as my isolation needs go my one and only neighbor operates his business at different hours, so my only concerns in that area is sound leaking from the control room in to the live room during recording. [color=#0000FF]Now i would like to know my options for positioning within the control room. There is the window,and 3 different doors to this control room. i would like to splay a wall or two if its possible but with my meager budget...wow! you guys help if you can because i dont really know where to set up my desk and monitors in reference to all of the openings within this control room design.I possibly could raise another $500 making my total budget $2000. I would like to open for business at the start of May is that feasible?[/color][/color][/color][/color]

You would do us all a favor if we could lose the font colors...this is all technical, black and white is fine, really :)