Studio Build planning

Hi, I am going to try to include all the details I can to make this simpler for everyone. First of all thanks ahead of time for any help you may give. I am building a studio and don't want to do the fly by night studio where some people throw a piece of mattress pad on a wall and run with it. I want to build a mid level studio where things are done correctly but without the budget of a rock star. In this build I am guessing that just the studio without the electronics will be costing $2500-3500 for materials. Then the budget for the equipment hasnt been fully decided but I am guessing $5000 with room to grow as time goes. The location for the studio is 18 ft 1 in. wide and 22 ft. 3.75 in. long and has ceilings of about 13 ft. There is 12 ft from the steel beams to the floor. The ceiling is the wooden floor of an old gym above that is not being used at the moment but could be used in the future. The floor is a concrete floor. This will be a studio that will be used to record our own recordings as well as an actual commercial business to record bands, commercials, etc. As far as isolation goes the location is in an old furniture factory along with other businesses. Next door is a pallet manufacturer. They hammer and saw using a table saw. The noise comes through pipes in the wall which are going to be sealed. The noise also comes through a sliding door. It is not terrible noise but enough that it needs to be isolated more. I am going to build a false wall to help cancel out some of the sound from the sliding door. In the same room I also run a sign/screen printing business/computer repair business. There will be a wall built to close off the studio from everything else. I am trying to make the best use of the space and have tried all kinds of scenarios of room sizes for the Control Room, Live Room, Iso Booth and Vocal Booth. Here is the most recent plans I have. I have to add a door on the right hand wall to be able to go back and forth from the work area to the studio. The location can be anywhere on the wall. All have 8 ft walls which is negotiable as I can go to just under 12ft. CR 10 ft x 8 ft LR 10 ft x 12 ft ISO 4 ft x 5.5 ft VB 4 ft x 4.25 ft I do want to do angled walls and even ceilings if it works better. I would also like to at least have a window to the LR and if possible the VB. I plan to do the floating floor on the LR and would take any suggestions. I also have been trying to figure out the dimensions and angles for the CR. The H on my map is a pole to hold the floor above. My questions are: 1) What would be the best dimensions for a LR while still leaving room for a CR and at minimum a VB and if possible an ISO booth? 2) What angles are best for CR walls? 3) Any suggestions? If I am missing anything please ask. Thanks for any help. I want to do this right the first time. Thanks, Steven Priddy

Here are some actual pictures of the location that I took 2 days ago

Hi Steven, and welcome! :) Looks like you have a nice space there, pretty decent for a studio. Just some random comments on things I noticed in your post:

... don't want to do the fly by night studio where some people throw a piece of mattress pad on a wall and run with it.

Come on! That won't work! That type of studio would not be complete without egg crates on the walls and carpet on the ceiling! :) And of course, it would be totally useless, acoustically. So I'm real glad you decided to NOT go that route. On your budget: I think you are being a bit optimistic, so you might want to consider adding a bit more to that. But in order to figure that out, it would be good to know how much isolation you need, in terms of actual decibels of transmission loss. That's a good place to start when designing a studio. The amount of isolation you need will define the type of wall and ceiling construction that you'll use, which in turn will dictate the budget for building materials, and the sizes of the rooms that will fit in your shell, which in turn influences the layout and treatment... it all starts coming together once you get that number in place. If you don't know how to measure that, then we can explain. But you do need that number!

The location for the studio is 18 ft 1 in. wide and 22 ft. 3.75 in. long and has ceilings of about 13 ft. There is 12 ft from the steel beams to the floor.

Nice height! Height is good, acoustically.

The ceiling is the wooden floor of an old gym above that is not being used at the moment but could be used in the future.

Not so good: "Gym" implies impact noise on that ceiling, plus flanking into the building structure. That will affect your isolation plan. That is going to need some careful attention, in sealing, beefing up, etc.

The floor is a concrete floor.

Good again! Concrete slab floor on the ground is a great start. So your floors are already in place! Nothing more to do there.

This will be a studio that will be used to record our own recordings as well as an actual commercial business to record bands, commercials, etc.

Making it into a commercial facility might add some issues and costs that you weren't considering. For example, wheelchair access to all areas, ramps instead of stairs, wider doors, emergency exists, fire control, etc. You should check what your local building code and municipal regulations require in that respect.

As far as isolation goes the location is in an old furniture factory along with other businesses. Next door is a pallet manufacturer. They hammer and saw using a table saw.

That's another "not so good". That also implies impact noise, and since they are probably on the same slab as you are, that might make isolation a bit more complicated. so maybe your floors aren't finished yet...

The noise comes through pipes in the wall which are going to be sealed. The noise also comes through a sliding door.

Not good.

I am going to build a false wall to help cancel out some of the sound from the sliding door.

You mean just in front of that door, correct? You need to be careful of creating a 3-leaf isolation wall: you certainly don't want that if there are power tools and noisy machinery running next door. The photos also show a 2x6 stud wall with plywood on it, which seems to be sitting on type of footing wall: what is on the other side of that?

the studio is 18 ft 1 in. wide and 22 ft. 3.75 in. long ... I am trying to make the best use of the space and have tried all kinds of scenarios of room sizes for the Control Room, Live Room, Iso Booth and Vocal Booth.

That's less than 400 square feet, which is pretty tight for fitting in four rooms. I'd suggest that it might be better to drop one of those (for example, record vocals in the control room). If not, all of the rooms will be small and cramped. And small rooms sound lousy, acoustically. There's nothing you can do to treat a small room so that it sounds good: all you can do is make it dead, which is not much use either.

All have 8 ft walls which is negotiable as I can go to just under 12ft.

the ITU and EBU recommendations for critical listening rooms is a minimum volume of about 1500 cubic feet. With an 11 foot ceiling (after isolation), that gives you a floor area of not less than about 140 square feet, so neither the live room nor the control room should be less than 10 x 14, or thereabouts. The booth can be a bit smaller, of course, but you also need to consider that you will be lsoing lots of space to the walls themselves.

I do want to do angled walls and even ceilings if it works better.

It can help, yes, depending on what you are trying to do. For example, flutter echo can be eliminated by correctly angling walls: Modal issues can be moved to different frequencies/locations. For the control room, splaying the front walls sufficiently is the basis for RFZ design. In the live room, angled walls can help to create the "character" of the room. Etc. So yes, walls can be angled. But then again, there are some great studios around that are just plain old rectangles, so that's an option too.

I plan to do the floating floor on the LR and would take any suggestions.

Why do you think you need a floating floor? What is wrong with the existing floor? You certainly don't have the budget to do a floating floor, so I sure hope you don't need one!

I also have been trying to figure out the dimensions and angles for the CR.

What design concept are you basing the CR on? Angles implies probably RFZ or maybe CID?

2) What angles are best for CR walls?

Best angles for what purpose? If treating flutter echo is the goal then the BBC says 10° minimum difference between opposing walls (5° per side) but John recommends 12° (6° per side). If you are going for RFZ or CID, then the angle will depend on many other factors, and can only really be found properly by ray-tracing in 3D.

3) Any suggestions? If I am missing anything please ask. Thanks for any help. I want to do this right the first time.

I would suggest that a good place to start is by defining how much isolation you need, as I mentioned above. That means answering two basic questions: 1) "How loud are you/they?" and 2) "How quite do you need to be?". The first one is all about the loudest thing that will be going in INSIDE your room, that you want to make quite outside, as well as the loudest things going on OUTSIDE your room that you want to make quite inside. Number two is about how quite that loud thing has to be. For example, if you plan to record drums, then you know that you will be at least 115 dB loud in the live room. So how quite does that have to be on the other side of the wall? That means in legal terms; there are laws about how much of your noise you can allow to get into your neighbor's office. Or going the other way, how loud is the "stuff" going on around you, over which you have no control? Eg, the manufacturing business next to you, wind, rain, thunder, aircraft flying over, trucks, cars and other traffic, radios, phones, plumbing, talking, etc. (I'm guessing that heavy trucks come and go to that pallet business next door, bringing raw materials and taking away product). So how low do you need that to be inside the studio, so that it does not wreck your recording sessions? The only way to answer those questions, is by actually measuring the levels with a sound level meter. So that's where I would start. Find out just how loud things are in the "future studio" right now, from all of the noise sources around you. Also find out how quite you need that to be, by measuring in other studios, or even in your own home at a very quite tome of day, when you feel that the level is low enough for good tracking. The difference between your highest number and your lowest number, is how much isolation you need. Based on that you can look in several of the research documents that are linked from the forum, and see what type of construction will get you that level of isolation. That will define the type of building materials you need, the techniques, you need, the thickness of the walls and ceiling, etc. So that's where I would start. You say you want this studio done right, so this is one good strategy for doing it right: follow a logical sequence that leads you to the design that you need, starting with the isolation. - Stuart -

On your budget: I think you are being a bit optimistic, so you might want to consider adding a bit more to that. But in order to figure that out, it would be good to know how much isolation you need, in terms of actual decibels of transmission loss. That's a good place to start when designing a studio. The amount of isolation you need will define the type of wall and ceiling construction that you'll use, which in turn will dictate the budget for building materials, and the sizes of the rooms that will fit in your shell, which in turn influences the layout and treatment... it all starts coming together once you get that number in place. If you don't know how to measure that, then we can explain. But you do need that number!

You mentioned that I may want to raise my budget and I am not understanding where that would be necessary. I know it is not cheap but $3500 is putting a lot more than other people that do great recordings out of closets everyday without spending more than $50-100 for a few mattress pads. The budget is negotiable and I want a good studio but I am not trying to record Aerosmith in any way at this point. The noise from the pallet makers is not much. Once I seal that sliding door and close off the 2 overhead pipes that should take care of making it standard voice level. As far as decibels the area I am in has the one business behind me and in front of me is a hall way and some restrooms. The other businesses are a great distance from me. The pallet makers don't have any traffic coming in and out other than themselves a couple of times a week and you don't really hear that. I would say from experience that I will not be needing more than a 20 db drop. My main thing that I need to figure out is the sizes to do each room.

The ceiling is the wooden floor of an old gym above that is not being used at the moment but could be used in the future..... Not so good: "Gym" implies impact noise on that ceiling, plus flanking into the building structure. That will affect your isolation plan. That is going to need some careful attention, in sealing, beefing up, etc.

This would never be used as a gym again. It has no use with the current owners other than a business space. Currently a party supply place is using part of it to clean and fold their tents.

Making it into a commercial facility might add some issues and costs that you weren't considering. For example, wheelchair access to all areas, ramps instead of stairs, wider doors, emergency exists, fire control, etc. You should check what your local building code and municipal regulations require in that respect.

I plan to ramp the live room for handicap access so that won't be an issue. I have 36in doors which meets code.

That's another "not so good". That also implies impact noise, and since they are probably on the same slab as you are, that might make isolation a bit more complicated. so maybe your floors aren't finished yet...

That is why I plan to do a floating floor.

I am going to build a false wall to help cancel out some of the sound from the sliding door.

You mean just in front of that door, correct? You need to be careful of creating a 3-leaf isolation wall: you certainly don't want that if there are power tools and noisy machinery running next door.[/quote] Yes right in front of the sliding door.

The photos also show a 2x6 stud wall with plywood on it, which seems to be sitting on type of footing wall: what is on the other side of that?

That is a 2x4 wall. There is a hallway that leads to a roll up door and restrooms. Nothing to deal with as far as noise other than the occasional forklift. Any of the people that will be in that area are very understanding and willing to work with me as far as any noise. The noise is all minimal over all. I also plan to put lights to show when I am recording so that they know.

the studio is 18 ft 1 in. wide and 22 ft. 3.75 in. long ... I am trying to make the best use of the space and have tried all kinds of scenarios of room sizes for the Control Room, Live Room, Iso Booth and Vocal Booth.

That's less than 400 square feet, which is pretty tight for fitting in four rooms. I'd suggest that it might be better to drop one of those (for example, record vocals in the control room). If not, all of the rooms will be small and cramped. And small rooms sound lousy, acoustically. There's nothing you can do to treat a small room so that it sounds good: all you can do is make it dead, which is not much use either.

I have no problem dropping down a room and recording vocals in another room.

All have 8 ft walls which is negotiable as I can go to just under 12ft.

the ITU and EBU recommendations for critical listening rooms is a minimum volume of about 1500 cubic feet. With an 11 foot ceiling (after isolation), that gives you a floor area of not less than about 140 square feet, so neither the live room nor the control room should be less than 10 x 14, or thereabouts. The booth can be a bit smaller, of course, but you also need to consider that you will be lsoing lots of space to the walls themselves.

I understand what you are saying but I am not trying to record a superstar at this point. If I did get to that point I would build a larger studio. I just want to record at this point and see people do it in closets and a bedroom with no extra walls and not double layers of drywall or real soundproofing. Those guys still put out decent recordings every day.

I do want to do angled walls and even ceilings if it works better.

It can help, yes, depending on what you are trying to do. For example, flutter echo can be eliminated by correctly angling walls: Modal issues can be moved to different frequencies/locations. For the control room, splaying the front walls sufficiently is the basis for RFZ design. In the live room, angled walls can help to create the "character" of the room. Etc. So yes, walls can be angled. But then again, there are some great studios around that are just plain old rectangles, so that's an option too.

I have seen some recommend splaying and am willing to do my build with or without splaying. Mainly looking at my options.

I plan to do the floating floor on the LR and would take any suggestions.

Why do you think you need a floating floor? What is wrong with the existing floor? You certainly don't have the budget to do a floating floor, so I sure hope you don't need one!

Due to the mentioned pallet manufacturers and every day things I just feel that it would be best to do the floating floor at least on the live room.

I also have been trying to figure out the dimensions and angles for the CR.

What design concept are you basing the CR on? Angles implies probably RFZ or maybe CID?

I have seen alot of splaying in CR designs for the purpose of reflections etc for the best sound in the CR. Any suggestions welcome on that.

2) What angles are best for CR walls?

Best angles for what purpose? If treating flutter echo is the goal then the BBC says 10° minimum difference between opposing walls (5° per side) but John recommends 12° (6° per side). If you are going for RFZ or CID, then the angle will depend on many other factors, and can only really be found properly by ray-tracing in 3D.

Mainly going by echo or reflections.

3) Any suggestions? If I am missing anything please ask. Thanks for any help. I want to do this right the first time.

I would suggest that a good place to start is by defining how much isolation you need, as I mentioned above. That means answering two basic questions: 1) "How loud are you/they?"

I would be drum/instrument loud and they would be 80 db or less

and 2) "How quite do you need to be?".

Just quiet enough to record without hearing a light sound of a saw in the background of the recording.

The first one is all about the loudest thing that will be going in INSIDE your room, that you want to make quite outside, as well as the loudest things going on OUTSIDE your room that you want to make quite inside. Number two is about how quite that loud thing has to be. For example, if you plan to record drums, then you know that you will be at least 115 dB loud in the live room. So how quite does that have to be on the other side of the wall? That means in legal terms; there are laws about how much of your noise you can allow to get into your neighbor's office.

Noise coming out of my area is not an issue but I know that the more noise that is getting out of my area then the more noise that can get in. I turned my computer on very loud and playing metal music and walked over to the pallet area and it was barely above talking level.

Or going the other way, how loud is the "stuff" going on around you, over which you have no control? Eg, the manufacturing business next to you, wind, rain, thunder, aircraft flying over, trucks, cars and other traffic, radios, phones, plumbing, talking, etc. (I'm guessing that heavy trucks come and go to that pallet business next door, bringing raw materials and taking away product). So how low do you need that to be inside the studio, so that it does not wreck your recording sessions?

The noises are minimal around me once that wall is built and the pipes are sealed.

The only way to answer those questions, is by actually measuring the levels with a sound level meter. So that's where I would start. Find out just how loud things are in the "future studio" right now, from all of the noise sources around you. Also find out how quite you need that to be, by measuring in other studios, or even in your own home at a very quite tome of day, when you feel that the level is low enough for good tracking. The difference between your highest number and your lowest number, is how much isolation you need. Based on that you can look in several of the research documents that are linked from the forum, and see what type of construction will get you that level of isolation. That will define the type of building materials you need, the techniques, you need, the thickness of the walls and ceiling, etc. So that's where I would start. You say you want this studio done right, so this is one good strategy for doing it right: follow a logical sequence that leads you to the design that you need, starting with the isolation.

Yes I want to do it right and understand decibels very well as I have been in audio for 19 years. Audio is not the problem. My main thing at this point is the room dimensions for acoustical purposes that will fit into the area that I have. Thanks for yor reply, Steven Priddy

Here are a couple of ideas I had

I know it is not cheap but $3500 is putting a lot more than other people that do great recordings out of closets everyday without spending more than $50-100 for a few mattress pads.

You are talking about an area of roughly 400 square feet, and a budget of US$ 3,500. That works out to US$ 8.75 per square foot. That simply is not reasonable. What you propose doing is roughly equivalent to building out an unfinished garage or basement, and making it into a self-contained apartment, or a home theater. So to give yourself a realistic idea of how much that actually costs in reality, call a few contractors in your area and ask them for their rate per square foot, or an estimate of the total cost of turning a 400 square foot unfinished garage into a "granny flat". The actual rate will most likely be around ten times what you are guessing at. Think of it this way: If the ONLY thing you do is to lay simple cheap laminate flooring, without building any walls, ceilings, doors or windows, nor adding any acoustic treatment, nor installing the HVAC system, nor getting the electrical installation done, then you already blew your entire budget! Just for cheap laminate flooring. Good underlay alone is about $ 1.00 per square foot, decent laminate is around US$ 3 to 5 per square foot, plus installation at another US$ 1 to 2 per square foot. Your entire budget is gone, and you didn't even build a single wall. Your budget gone, and you didn't even isolate your floor: all you did was make it look pretty. So ANY type of flooring is out for your build: What you have right now is as good as it is going to get.

Once I seal that sliding door and close off the 2 overhead pipes that should take care of making it standard voice level.

I always get a little concerned when I see people say things like"I think that will be enough" or "That should do the trick". When that type of comment comes up, you can pretty much bet it wont work out like that. For example, have you measured the frequency, level and spectrum of that noise? And more important, how do you know it is not flanking? If it is flanking, then sealing off the door and pipes will not solve the problem.

I would say from experience that I will not be needing more than a 20 db drop.

Then you should probably cut holes in the walls, since you already have more than 20 dB isolation with what is there already! :) Just so you can get an idea: the average cheap house wall (2x4 studs with 1/2" drywall on each side) will give you about 30 dB of isolation (TL, of course: not STC). On the other hand, if you mean that you need another 20 dB beyond what you already have (increasing your total isolation from 30 dB to 50 dB, for example), then that implies that you need to block one hundred times as much energy as is already being blocked. You say that you understand decibels, so you already know that this is true. An increase of 10 dB in SPL is the same as an increase of one order of magnitude, or ten times the power. A 20 dB increase is another 10 times that. That's a total of 10 x 10 = one hundred times more energy. Or in other words, you have to improve the current isolation by a factor of one hundred. When you do the math, it doesn't look so attractive and simple any more.! :!: :shock: More math: If you wanted to get from where you are now to a level that is 20 dB better, and you decided to do that by adding mass to the existing walls, nothing else, then let's figure that out. Mass law (the principle of physics on which single-leaf isolation is based) says that you will get an increase in isolation of 6 dB each time you double the total mass of the isolating leaf. So let's say that right now the isolation consists of a normal house wall, as described above (2x4 studs with a single layer of 1/2" drywall on each side. Let's assume that is getting you 30 dB, and you need to get to 50 dB. So you double the amount of drywall, and add another two layers (for a total of four layers). That takes you to 36 dB. Now you have to double again for the next step, taking you to 42 dB, so you need to add another four layers of drywall (total of eight layers now). And you need to double once again to get you to 48 dB, so you need to add ANOTHER eight layers of drywall (total of sixteen now), but you still are not there. You still need another 2 dB, which implies about 50% more mass (at least it wasn't double this time!). You already have 16 layers, so you only need to add 8 now. So you'd need a grand total of about 24 layers of drywall to get where you want to go, based on what you have, and using only mass law to get there. That's not a very heartening exercise in math, but the numbers do not lie. Most people do not realize just how complicated it is to isolate a room, acoustically. Obviously, mass law is not the answer. That's why nobody even considers single-leaf mass-controlled drywall partitions for studio isolation. Fortunately, there are other methods of construction methods that give much better isolation with much less mass. The very cheapest method is called "fully isolated 2-leaf MSM construction". That's what you need. Nothing else will work on your budget. Not a hope.

My main thing that I need to figure out is the sizes to do each room.

You cannot possibly do that until you know how much space the walls will take up, and you won't know that until you know how much isolation you need! Building a studio is a process: you can't start half way through, and even then guess at what you think might work. Doing that guarantees failure, and there are plenty of threads on this forum, and other places on the Internet, that document exactly that. Way too many.

This would never be used as a gym again. It has no use with the current owners other than a business space. Currently a party supply place is using part of it to clean and fold their tents.

That's good news, at least! But you'll still need to seal that subfloor above you, and probably add mass if you need isoaltion for your studio. And not just isolation going up: because of the way sound and acoustics works, isolation is an "all or nothing" proposition. Just isolating one wall will not work. You must isolate all walls (including the ceiling as a "wall" in this context) to the same level. If you isolate 3 walls to 60dB, one wall to 50 dB and the ceiling to 30 dB then the total isolation you get from that is 30 dB, not 50 or 60. Surprising, but true.

That is why I plan to do a floating floor.

I don't think you understand what a proper floating floor is, since you certainly don't have the budget to do one! A floating floor is NOT what you see on YouTube and some other places on the internet, where some amateur hammers together a couple of 2x4s set edgewise on the subfloor (on top of some bits of rubber), stuffs fiberglass in the spaces between, then plops down a sheet or two of 1/2" plywood or OSB. That's not a floating floor! That's a resonant cavity, also known as a "drum". :shock: It's probably the best way I can think of for wrecking the acoustics of your room. Stretching a membrane across a sealed air-filled cavity is exactly how drums are made, and drums are designed to resonant. So do floors built the same way. The equations for calculating that resonance are very easy to figure, and normally the resonant frequency of such a floor is way up there in the low mids, right where you do NOT want it. The entire floor acts as a tuned membrane trap, and the chances of it being exactly tuned to one of your modal issues for the room, purely by chance, are practically nill. A proper acoustic floating floor involves carefully tuned springs, elastomers and pouring a new reinforced concrete slab on top of the existing one, then jacking it up to the required height (calculated, not guessed): You probably have just enough budget to do that for your live room, but once again you'd have nothing left for walls, ceilings, windows, doors, HVAC, electrical, etc. Floating a floor properly is no easy task. Doing it like the amateurs on YouTube is a recipe for disaster. And you most likely do not need one anyway. I did ask before, but you didn't really explain WHY you think you need a floated floor. You are on the ground floor, you have a massive reinforced concrete slab on grade floor, and you say you don't have any flanking issues. So why would you need a floating floor? You said "Due to the mentioned pallet manufacturers and every day things I just feel that it would be best to do the floating floor at least on the live room" but that's a subjective guess, not an objective measurement. To determine if you really do need a floating floor, you'd need to measure the intensity of the problem, and to confirm that it really is the floor that is causing it. I suspect that the floor is not an issue, and that your issues will be from the walls.

If I did get to that point I would build a larger studio. I just want to record at this point and see people do it in closets and a bedroom with no extra walls and not double layers of drywall or real soundproofing. Those guys still put out decent recordings every day.

:) Well, I'm not so sure that I'd agree with the quality of those recordings being "decent"! :shock: It's strange how few of them ever seem to make it onto the charts (even the obscure local indie charts), and how few commercials and jingles done in those "studios" ever get to see the airwaves! :lol: Honestly, if that's the kind of acoustics you want, then maybe mattresses on the walls is the right solution...

I have seen alot of splaying in CR designs for the purpose of reflections etc for the best sound in the CR.

Yes, like I said: Splaying is done for one of three reasons, all of them involving reflections (of different types). So you should figure out if any of those are what YOU will be dealing with in YOUR room, not what you see in other rooms. Every room is different, and you can't use a "cookie cutter" approach to building a studio. Nothing happens by chance in a studio: it happens by design and calculation. So if you calculate that flutter echo will be a problem in your control room, then that would be a good reason to splay your walls by a total of 6° on each side, symmetrically, and your ceiling by 12°. But you can also treat flutter echo with suitable acoustic absorption or diffusion panels (except that your studio is way too small to use diffusion, so you only have absorption as an option), so you could do that instead of splaying, if flutter echo is your only issue. Or if you wanted to base your room around the well-known RFZ design concept, then you would certainly need to splay the side walls, so you'd ray-trace to figure out what angles you needed. Or if your calculations showed that you were going to end up with major modal issues on the 0,1,0 axis, then you'd also want to splay the walls to help deal with that, displacing the modes up or down a bit to get a better spread. There are many reasons why you might want to splay, but they have to be calculated, not guessed. And splaying your walls just because you saw someone else do it is not a good reason: You could end up making things worse like that, not better.

I would be drum/instrument loud and they would be 80 db or less

Well, sorry, but that's just totally unrealistic. There's no drummer on this planet who can play drums down at 80 dB! :!: I've never met one that can play below 95, and even then we are talking wire brushes and soft jazz. But your average ordinary drummer for most genres is around 100 to 110, and an enthusiastic heavy metal or rock drummer can easily hit 115 dB, and more. So if you plan to record drums, and you think that the level will only be around 80 dB, well, you are just grossly mistaken. Even an acoustic guitar is louder than that! Even a normal singing voice is louder than that! Your guess is way off here.

Just quiet enough to record without hearing a light sound of a saw in the background of the recording.

That's a subjective guess, not an objective number. You cannot successfully design a studio by guesswork. To show you how unrealistic that approach is, consider these two scenarios: recording massive drums for a death metal rock band, and recording a delicate female vocal solo for a soft, breathy love ballad. In the case of the vocal, the sound of the saw would have to be about 15 dB softer than the quietest passage of the vocal, probably down around 20 dB or so (SPL). For the drums, it probably wouldn't matter if the saw was right there inside the room, at 85 dB! Two very, very different scenarios. You have to be realistic, and objective, about a studio build. You have to put real-world numbers to each part of the build, and do the math figure out what will work, instead of just guessing and hoping and that what yo saw on a YouTube video might actually work.

Noise coming out of my area is not an issue

Yes it is, if you hope to track drums! Tracking drums (or any other loud instrument) implies that you need a high level of isolation between the control room and live room, so that you can clearly hear the sound of the drums coming over the SPEAKERS, not through the walls. You also need enough isolation going the other way, so that the sound of the full track played at 90 or 100 dB in the control room cannot be picked up by the mic in the vocal booth while you are tracking the singer, and such that the drums are also inaudible for that mic. Those imply at least 50 dB of isolation, at the absolute minimum, between LR, CR and booth. So that implies overall isolation of your entire studio of at least 50 dB. So yes, noise coming form your area is an issue.

I turned my computer on very loud and playing metal music and walked over to the pallet area and it was barely above talking level.

Define "very loud": Define "talking level". What type of speakers did you connect to your computer? At what level were you playing them? What frequency range do they cover? Did you use white noise of pink noise for this test? What were the actual C-weighted, slow response sound pressure levels measured one meter form the speakers, at your room walls, and in the room next door? If you don't know any of that, then you simply do not have enough to work with. Guessing wont get you there: you need to do some realistic measurements with areal sound level meter (they aren't exactly expensive!).

The noises are minimal around me once that wall is built and the pipes are sealed.

You cannot know that unless you do the necessary measurements. Sorry, but once again you are guessing.

Yes I want to do it right and understand decibels very well as I have been in audio for 19 years. Audio is not the problem. My main thing at this point is the room dimensions for acoustical purposes that will fit into the area that I have.

Well, it seems your understanding of decibels might be fine for actual audio systems and mixing, but is way off for acoustics. There is not one single instrument that is commonly recorded in ordinary studios, that can be successfully played and tracked at a sound pressure level of 80 dB. Not one. And the final room dimensions cannot be calculated until you first know how thick your walls will NEED to be in order to proved the level of isolation that you need. So that kind of gets back to the original point: what you should do to get started, is to get a sound level meter and measure the actual levels that you will have to deal with. Until you get that done, you have nothing objective at all to base your design on. And like I said before, basing it on guesswork is a guaranteed recipe for disaster. Just look around the forum (and the internet) at some of the failed builds. We very often get people coming here, after having built a place the way you seem to want to build it, asking us for help on how to fix it because it is unusable. Once they start grasping the basics of acoustics, isolation and treatment, they realize that the only solution is to tear down what they built, and build it again. Some of them do that, and end up with great studios. Others don't, and fade into obscurity. On your layout: I think that can be improved. There's no sight lines between rooms, which is important, and there seems to be some wasted space there. You also didn't show the "false wall" that you said you would build to seal off the sliding door, so you should probably add that. And you are not showing the interior isolation walls, so you should add those too. You also seem to have only one door for each room, instead of the normal two back-to-back doors that you need for isolation. Or are you planning to build Superdoors for those? The dimensions of some of those rooms look really small, too. A vocal booth of only 8 by 4 feet is tiny, and will sound terrible, no matter how you treat it, and the ratios is pretty bad. The iso booth is even worse, at just 5 feet by 3.5. you wont even be able to get some stacks in there, let alone get enough distance between cab and mic to have a usable recording. The control room ratio is not too bad, but it does fail one of the three critical tests used by the BBC for predicting studio performance. But the live room is not good: it has a square section, being both 12 feet wide and 12 feet high. That will produce serious modal issues. I would re-arrange those rooms for better sight lines, larger volumes, and better ratios. And I'd complete the unfinished isolation walls, too: Without those, you don't know how much space will be left for the actual rooms. Your current guesses seem reasonable in some places: You have two rooms along a 22'4" wall space. On room measures 12 feet internally, the other measures 8, leaving a total of 2'4" for all of the walls, implying air gaps of around 7" inches (assuming two layers of 5/8" drywall), so that makes sense, but are nonsense in other places: for example, your total width is marked as 18'1", but you have a 10 foot room and a 9 foot room across there!!! :shock: How do you fit 19 feet of room into 18 feet of space???? And that's without even considering the thickness of the isolation walls. So that needs fixing, too. Those would be my suggestions. - Stuart -

You are talking about an area of roughly 400 square feet, and a budget of US$ 3,500. That works out to US$ 8.75 per square foot. That simply is not reasonable..... The actual rate will most likely be around ten times what you are guessing at.

$8.75 x 10 = $87.50 x 400 = $35000 So if it is going to cost $35000 just to build the rooms then I would just walk away. I think you are looking at recording Eminem or Elvis or something which I am not. This whole thing isn't so much about the cost as it is the dimensions. Cost will be adjusted as necessary. This budget is on the rooms alone for things like wood, insulation, drywall, sealant nails, screw, etc. This is not meant to include bass traps, hvac or anything of that liking. You are venturing off the subject of my questions and concentrating simply on budget.

Think of it this way: If the ONLY thing you do is to lay simple cheap laminate flooring, without building any walls, ceilings, doors or windows, nor adding any acoustic treatment, nor installing the HVAC system, nor getting the electrical installation done, then you already blew your entire budget! Just for cheap laminate flooring. Good underlay alone is about $ 1.00 per square foot, decent laminate is around US$ 3 to 5 per square foot, plus installation at another US$ 1 to 2 per square foot. Your entire budget is gone, and you didn't even build a single wall. Your budget gone, and you didn't even isolate your floor: all you did was make it look pretty. So ANY type of flooring is out for your build: What you have right now is as good as it is going to get.

I along with friends will be doing all of the installation. I have 2 electrician friends as well as an HVAC guy. I will be using split systems for the purpose. Again nothing to do with the framing.

Once I seal that sliding door and close off the 2 overhead pipes that should take care of making it standard voice level.

I always get a little concerned when I see people say things like"I think that will be enough" or "That should do the trick". When that type of comment comes up, you can pretty much bet it wont work out like that.

I have been in audio for 19 years and am very good at determining sound levels. Part of my old job consisted of determining levels which was done by ear and I could determine very well within specs that I was given.

For example, have you measured the frequency, level and spectrum of that noise? And more important, how do you know it is not flanking? If it is flanking, then sealing off the door and pipes will not solve the problem.

It is minimal and is done 100 ft or more from the other side of the wall. I am more worried about the size than the isolation at this point which has totally been avoided.

I would say from experience that I will not be needing more than a 20 db drop.

Then you should probably cut holes in the walls, since you already have more than 20 dB isolation with what is there already! :) Just so you can get an idea: the average cheap house wall (2x4 studs with 1/2" drywall on each side) will give you about 30 dB of isolation (TL, of course: not STC).

I seriously feel like you are insulting me and making out like I am stupid. You shouldn't judge people based on how you interpret what I write. The pipe is a 6 inch pipe that is a big hole in the wall that other pipes traveled through. It was only used as a path. As far as the sliding door there is a gap around the edges that sound can come through. Once that gap is gone there will be a large change in isolation.

I don't think you understand what a proper floating floor is, since you certainly don't have the budget to do one! A proper acoustic floating floor involves carefully tuned springs, elastomers and pouring a new reinforced concrete slab on top of the existing one, then jacking it up to the required height (calculated, not guessed): You probably have just enough budget to do that for your live room, but once again you'd have nothing left for walls, ceilings, windows, doors, HVAC, electrical, etc. Floating a floor properly is no easy task. Doing it like the amateurs on YouTube is a recipe for disaster.

I appreciate the info and explaining it. I have a better understanding now.

And you most likely do not need one anyway. I did ask before, but you didn't really explain WHY you think you need a floated floor. You are on the ground floor, you have a massive reinforced concrete slab on grade floor, and you say you don't have any flanking issues. So why would you need a floating floor?

Not really sure now. I have been reading over post in this forum where they did use them and noone said not to. My main thinking was to prevent vibration from the drums to other rooms as well as isolation which I am guessing you would see the concrete floor as good enough for isolation.

You said "Due to the mentioned pallet manufacturers and every day things I just feel that it would be best to do the floating floor at least on the live room" but that's a subjective guess, not an objective measurement. To determine if you really do need a floating floor, you'd need to measure the intensity of the problem, and to confirm that it really is the floor that is causing it. I suspect that the floor is not an issue, and that your issues will be from the walls.

I feel no vibrations at all from the pallet makers.

:) Well, I'm not so sure that I'd agree with the quality of those recordings being "decent"! :shock: It's strange how few of them ever seem to make it onto the charts (even the obscure local indie charts), and how few commercials and jingles done in those "studios" ever get to see the airwaves! :lol:

More than you think make it to the airwaves.

Honestly, if that's the kind of acoustics you want, then maybe mattresses on the walls is the right solution...

Again I state that I want to be mid level not like these studios but not trying to record Elvis either.

Yes, like I said: Splaying is done for one of three reasons, all of them involving reflections (of different types). So you should figure out if any of those are what YOU will be dealing with in YOUR room, not what you see in other rooms. Every room is different, and you can't use a "cookie cutter" approach to building a studio. Nothing happens by chance in a studio: it happens by design and calculation. So if you calculate that flutter echo will be a problem in your control room, then that would be a good reason to splay your walls by a total of 6° on each side, symmetrically, and your ceiling by 12°. But you can also treat flutter echo with suitable acoustic absorption or diffusion panels (except that your studio is way too small to use diffusion, so you only have absorption as an option), so you could do that instead of splaying, if flutter echo is your only issue. Or if you wanted to base your room around the well-known RFZ design concept, then you would certainly need to splay the side walls, so you'd ray-trace to figure out what angles you needed. Or if your calculations showed that you were going to end up with major modal issues on the 0,1,0 axis, then you'd also want to splay the walls to help deal with that, displacing the modes up or down a bit to get a better spread. There are many reasons why you might want to splay, but they have to be calculated, not guessed. And splaying your walls just because you saw someone else do it is not a good reason: You could end up making things worse like that, not better.

This is why I am asking if I need to do this. Again you are stating the obvious and not appealing to the questions being asked.

I would be drum/instrument loud and they would be 80 db or less

Well, sorry, but that's just totally unrealistic. There's no drummer on this planet who can play drums down at 80 dB! :!: I've never met one that can play below 95, and even then we are talking wire brushes and soft jazz. But your average ordinary drummer for most genres is around 100 to 110, and an enthusiastic heavy metal or rock drummer can easily hit 115 dB, and more. So if you plan to record drums, and you think that the level will only be around 80 dB, well, you are just grossly mistaken. Even an acoustic guitar is louder than that! Even a normal singing voice is louder than that! Your guess is way off here.

Not sure how 80 got in there. It was near 3am and I was extremely sleepy.

I turned my computer on very loud and playing metal music and walked over to the pallet area and it was barely above talking level.

Define "very loud": Define "talking level". What type of speakers did you connect to your computer? At what level were you playing them? What frequency range do they cover? Did you use white noise of pink noise for this test? What were the actual C-weighted, slow response sound pressure levels measured one meter form the speakers, at your room walls, and in the room next door? If you don't know any of that, then you simply do not have enough to work with. Guessing wont get you there: you need to do some realistic measurements with areal sound level meter (they aren't exactly expensive!).

Again I get what you are saying. What definition do you need of talking level? That of a normal person and not of someone that can be heard a city block away. The speakers are $400 Boston Acoustic surround speakers with subwoofer. I had the volume at max and was playing metal music.

Well, it seems your understanding of decibels might be fine for actual audio systems and mixing, but is way off for acoustics. There is not one single instrument that is commonly recorded in ordinary studios, that can be successfully played and tracked at a sound pressure level of 80 dB. Not one.

Again a mistype on the 80. I have seen drums recorded in a basement bedroom where you could barely hear them coming out of the room with nothing added to the room. If I build a room with walls with insulation and 2 layers of drywall it will be 10 times better than that.

So that kind of gets back to the original point: what you should do to get started, is to get a sound level meter and measure the actual levels that you will have to deal with. Until you get that done, you have nothing objective at all to base your design on. And like I said before, basing it on guesswork is a guaranteed recipe for disaster. Just look around the forum (and the internet) at some of the failed builds. We very often get people coming here, after having built a place the way you seem to want to build it, asking us for help on how to fix it because it is unusable. Once they start grasping the basics of acoustics, isolation and treatment, they realize that the only solution is to tear down what they built, and build it again. Some of them do that, and end up with great studios. Others don't, and fade into obscurity.

I will be looking for my meter or going to buy another to get the results.

On your layout: I think that can be improved. There's no sight lines between rooms, which is important, and there seems to be some wasted space there. You also didn't show the "false wall" that you said you would build to seal off the sliding door, so you should probably add that. And you are not showing the interior isolation walls, so you should add those too. You also seem to have only one door for each room, instead of the normal two back-to-back doors that you need for isolation. Or are you planning to build Superdoors for those? The dimensions of some of those rooms look really small, too. A vocal booth of only 8 by 4 feet is tiny, and will sound terrible, no matter how you treat it, and the ratios is pretty bad. The iso booth is even worse, at just 5 feet by 3.5. you wont even be able to get some stacks in there, let alone get enough distance between cab and mic to have a usable recording. The control room ratio is not too bad, but it does fail one of the three critical tests used by the BBC for predicting studio performance. But the live room is not good: it has a square section, being both 12 feet wide and 12 feet high. That will produce serious modal issues.

The wall height is negotiable up to 12 feet. I wasn't saying that I was going to set them at 12 feet. As far as the vocal booth being tiny at 4x8 I am so glad that you are rich and can afford a booth the size of my studio but again I am not trying to record Elvis.

I would re-arrange those rooms for better sight lines, larger volumes, and better ratios.

What would you recommend?

And I'd complete the unfinished isolation walls, too: Without those, you don't know how much space will be left for the actual rooms. Your current guesses seem reasonable in some places: You have two rooms along a 22'4" wall space. On room measures 12 feet internally, the other measures 8, leaving a total of 2'4" for all of the walls, implying air gaps of around 7" inches (assuming two layers of 5/8" drywall), so that makes sense, but are nonsense in other places: for example, your total width is marked as 18'1", but you have a 10 foot room and a 9 foot room across there!!! :shock: How do you fit 19 feet of room into 18 feet of space???? And that's without even considering the thickness of the isolation walls. So that needs fixing, too.

Sorry that should have been 5.75 feet wide not 9. Basically doing a double wall setup with 2 layers of drywall and adding insulation using RC. Never mind the budget at this point. Let's make it irrelevant as that seems to be what you are concentrated on. What would you consider a good size for the rooms. Taking out the ISO room if necessary. I have a space outside of this area that I can build an ISO room if deemed necessary. Thanks, Steven Priddy

Well, it seems that you don't want to focus on the things that you should be focusing on, you aren't interested in hearing about the method you should be using, you've already made your mind up about what works and what doesn't, you seem to have far more experience than anyone else on this forum in acoustics, and you prefer to ignore all the advise I've given you so far (since it is obviously such badly mistaken, and very wrong advice), so I don't see any point in trying to help any further. Maybe someone else want to take over at this point, and tell you what you WANT to hear, instead of what you NEED to hear. I'm done.

Soundman2020 wrote:

Well, it seems that you don't want to focus on the things that you should be focusing on, you aren't interested in hearing about the method you should be using, you've already made your mind up about what works and what doesn't, you seem to have far more experience than anyone else on this forum in acoustics, and you prefer to ignore all the advise I've given you so far (since it is obviously such badly mistaken, and very wrong advice), so I don't see any point in trying to help any further. Maybe someone else want to take over at this point, and tell you what you WANT to hear, instead of what you NEED to hear. I'm done.

Good because I have bit my tongue through the last posts. You seem to have a bad habit of personally attacking people. You are not being friendly at all. Rather much being just the opposite since you seem to know it all.It's not what I want to hear at all. I can't very well please what you want to say because I am not in a 10,000 square ft facility with unlimited funds. You built yours in a space smaller that what I have and are attacking me! I have to start somewhere and all you keep saying is noise level readings/not enough space/not enough money. How about taking a different approach and not looking down on people like you are better than them. I just lost all respect for you. Maybe that is the difference of people in Chile. Goodbye. I will look else where I guess since things are all too personal here.

Soundman2020 wrote:

:D

So very unprofessional as a moderator. You should spend more time working on your studio build.

A smiley face is unprofessional? :shock: Go figure. :)