Commercial premises - blank canvas

We have just got a new area to set up a mixing room. The space available for construction measures approximately 10m x 7m with a ceiling height going from 3m up to 5m (it's the 10m length that slopes). We can put windows in the front wall (7m x 3m). One of the 10m long sides will be next to an existing wall. The plan is to build four new walls and a new ceiling inside the existing building as soundproofing will be needed. We don't need to fill up this space if not necessary to go that big, but I want a really great sound! Obviously we can angle the walls and ceiling to get the optimum in the space available. Are there any blueprints for great rooms in this kind of size? What I'm really hoping for is that someone who knows about this stuff can tell me the best dimensions of room that I can build in this space - including splay angles of walls and ceiling. Another thing is I'd like to soffit mount the monitors - I have a pair of ADAM S4X-V (might upgrade them some time in future). It would be mainly stereo work but I'd like to have the option of mixing surround too - mainly for other people using the place. I also have a pair of S3X-V and a Sub 12 - would these work as the rear speakers and sub along with the soffit mounted S4X-V? Could I get maybe a S3X-H as the center channel? I work in construction so the hours to build this are not a problem and I'd like the budget for materials to come in at £2000 - £3000, excluding mechanical & electrical fit-out, but including structural and acoustic materials. The floor is smooth concrete. I'm in the UK in the South West. Thanks in advance for any adice for this new project beginning!

Sorry - I meant to post this in the design forum. Can someone move the topic there please?

Hi Matt, and Welcome! :) Sounds like an interesting project. Is this just going to be a control room, or do you also want to fit in a tracking room, iso booth, etc.? Building a studio can't really be done using the "cookie cutter" approach based on someone else's blueprints. All studios are different, so unless you have the identical space, needs and budget of what someone else did, you can't really just take their design and plonk it down in your space. Yours needs to be designed for YOUR space, your needs, your budget, your style, etc. And of course, it takes quite a while to learn how to design a studio! There's just so much you have to think of. Designing a studio is nothing like designing a house or office, and even though you work in construction, there too you'll find large differences: Techniques and methods that you use in normal construction just aren't applicable to building a studio. So there's a steep learning curve ahead of you. The good news is that you are in the right place! That's what this forum is all about. Folks here will be more than happy to point you in the right direction, and help you along the way. But it takes a while to get there, since sound just doesn't behave the way most people think it does, and getting your head around those concepts takes time. Having said that, there are some general guidelines that can help you get on the right track. For example, you asked about the "best dimensions" for your room. Well, it turns out that it isn't really dimensions that count as such, but rather ratios between dimensions. The ratio between the length, width and height of your room is important. There is no single "perfect" or "golden" ratio, so don't go looking for one of those. Rather, there are sets or groups of good ratios, and groups of bad ratios. Any ratio where one dimension is an exact multiple of another is bad, and if you happen to have all three dimensions in a direct relationship, that's about as bad as you can get. so a room measuring 2.5 meters high, 5 m wide and 10 m long is going to be really, really terrible. No amount of treatment is going to make that room acceptable. So the idea with ratios is to stay away from the bad ones, get close to one of the good ones, and you'll be fine. Same applies to geometry: there are some rules of thumb there too: Speaker height is 1.2m, listening position at 38% of room depth, speakers angled so the acoustic axes intersect at 60° a few cm behind your head, etc. But those are not "written in stone" rules: just guidelines, starting points. You won't get arrested by the speaker police if your chair ends up at 41% or 36% of room depth! Same applies to isolation (keeping sound in or out, sometimes called "soundproofing"), and treatment (making the room sound good). There are general rules of thumb about that too. Same for splay angles (if you choose to splay). Same for soffits (if you choose to soffit mount). So there are plenty of guidelines, recommendations, specifications, and concepts that you can learn, and there are ways of "pushing" those around a bit, to get the room YOU want, which might be the same size and shape as somebody else's, but with different needs. If he records the charango, bagpipes and didgeridoo, while you record and extreme heavy metal, then you have different needs! So learning those rules of thumb, and understanding when and how far you can bend them, isn't so easy. You mention that you want to soffit mount, and that is HIGHLY recommended around here! So that already sets some parameters for your room. You mention splaying walls, so I imagine that you are thinking about an RFZ design, and that sets a whole bunch more parameters. You also mention surround, and from what you say you seem to be talking 5.1, which adds another entire truckload of parameters, so that's all good! Having that basis already fills in a lot of the guidelines for your room, and suggests a lot of the basics, so you have a good starting point. While on the subject of 5.1: you ask about speaker models for that: the sub-12 will work fine for what you want, but IEC and EBU specs for 5.1 rooms call for all the speakers to be the same type, and the speakers themselves can influence a lot of the design decisions for your room, so you should probably decide on what your final speakers and setup will be now, even if you won't actually purchase / install those speakers for a while. Using a 5.1 room for 2.0 and 2.1 is simple, but upgrading a room that was designed only for 2.0 to do 5.1 is a major big-time headache. so if 5.1 is in your future, design for it now even if you only have 2 speakers in there to start with. So, what I'd suggest is that you buy yourself "the Bible", and read it cover to cover a few times. I'm referring to "Master Handbook of Acoustics", by F. Alton Everest (abbreviated "MHoA"), not the REAL Bible (although reading that one from cover to cover can also be very useful!). MHoA is the best book to get you understanding how sound really works, how it interacts with materials, rooms, people, etc., and how to get a handle on designing a room. When you are done with that, buy "Home Recording Studio: Build it like the Pros", by Rod Gervais. That will give you the basis for the actual "nuts and bolts" of putting the parts together. MHoA is more theoretical, so you understand what you are doing, and Rod's book is more practical, about actually doing it. With those two books and this forum, you should be able to design and build a darn good studio! - Stuart -

Hi Stuart. Thanks a lot for that info - I know I have a lot to learn but I'm really interested in this. I will try to get hold of those books you mentioned - not sure if I'll be able to comprehend the theoretical stuff though. The room will be used for both writing and mixing mostly, although I'd like to be able to record in there occasionally. Perhaps an iso booth would be helpful for some things. Does the 'bible' give any formulas or design processes that I can follow - sort of plug in my numbers and get a design out? Or does it require a bit more interpretation and skill than that? Matt.

I will try to get hold of those books you mentioned - not sure if I'll be able to comprehend the theoretical stuff though.

They are not too complicated. Everest has an easy-going type of writing style, and takes you from "knowing nothing" in the first few chapters, leading you through the basics. The title sounds intimidating, but it really isn't. He only uses basic math, and his explanations and examples are clear.

The room will be used for both writing and mixing mostly, although I'd like to be able to record in there occasionally. Perhaps an iso booth would be helpful for some things.

OK, so basically a single.room studio with an iso booth, but no live room? With 70 m2, you probably have space for a decent live room as well, without compromising on the control room. Once again, ITU and EBU recommendations are for a critical listening room to have a volume of at least 45 m3, and you can hit that with no trouble in your space, leaving room for other rooms too, if you want them. But if you never need to play or record any instruments, and only ever plan to mix stuff tracked elsewhere, then there's no point to having a live room.

Does the 'bible' give any formulas or design processes that I can follow - sort of plug in my numbers and get a design out? Or does it require a bit more interpretation and skill than that?

Unfortunately, there isn't really a "paint by numbers" approach to studio design. It's more a case of trading off "things" against "things" all through the process. For example, if you wanted the best possible acoustically dead environment, then don't build anything! Go out in the middle of a very large empty field, and do your work then. Open air is the equivalent of unlimited Sabins of absorption all around, perfectly flat response, and an RT-60 time of zero at all frequencies! So if dead acoustics is your thing, then that's the solution. But there are obviously practical reasons why you cant do that, so your very first trade off is "I need a roof over my head and four walls around me." That's the start. From then on, its a process of refining the balance between what you WANT acoustically, and what you can GET acoustically. Another example: isolating your room (a.k.a. "soundproofing") means that you are building something around you that will stop sound getting out. Well, if it can't get out, then obviously that means that it has to stay IN. So if all your sound is staying inside, bouncing around between the walls until it dies away eventually, then you have a problem called "reverberation". Just the simple fact of needing to isolate the room creates the problem of reverb. If you didn't need to isolate (the "open field" scenario again), then you wouldn't have a reverb problem. So now you have to treat the room with various acoustic devices, each one designed to go in a specific location and take care of the specific problems in that location. But that takes up space, and can alter the sound that you are trying to hear, so you have to take that into account. EG: You have to build bass traps: there's no choice about that. They deal with bass energy rather well, and help to tame room modes. But they also suck out high frequency energy from the room, way more than you need! So you have to treat the bass traps to keep the highs in the room and only let the lows through. But now you have devices that do different things to different frequencies, so you don't want those close to where you sit! So you sit far from where they need to be. bass traps are usually a lot of absorption, but too much absorption in the room makes it sound dull and lifeless. To little and it sounds hollow. So you have to balance the absorption with reflection and diffusion: But you don't want your reflections getting to your ears too loud or too early, so it helps if you design the room to keep reflections away from your head, so that you only hear the direct sound from the speakers, followed much later by low level reverb, delayed as long as possible. Etc. etc. etc. It's a process, where you start out with a rough layout, then start fiddling and refining, moving things around, changing angles, positions, shapes, sizes, etc. and trading off this against that, until you end up with the best possible design that fits your needs, and your room, and your budget. Sure, if all you want is a mediocre studio that you can do basic work in, then you can go with a simple "cookie cutter" design, but it will never be the best it can be. Make a rectangular room with Sepmeyer's first ratio, set up speakers on stands against the front wall, 1/3 intervals, equilateral triangle, chair at 38%, superchunks in the rear corners, thick absorption on all first reflection points, done. That will make the room sound reasonable, but nowhere near to how it could be. If you want a real quality room, then it takes time to figure things through very carefully, tweaking everything, until it meets YOUR needs as well as it possibly can. It would be nice if you could just open a spreadsheet, plug in the size of the space available to you, and out pops a complete design that shows you exactly what to do and were to put everything, but that simply isn't possible. I hope I'm not painting this too dismal for you! It's not! It isn't that hard to do (although it takes time), and it's fun! Hope I'm not discouraging you! Not my intention at all. - Stuart -

Just a note to say I have continued this discussion in the design forum rather than here in construction. Here's the link. viewtopic.php?f=1&t=17595 Thanks for all the help so far. Matt.

Wow!! This is some information! Made me think more, Thank You!