Small studio with control rm & vocal booth: air lock needed?

Hiya, I'm making a small project studio that is just composed of a control room and a vocal booth. I will be sharing the space with a photographer who will be using the other half of the whole space. A friend of mine recommended to build an air lock around the entrances to the vocal booth and to the control room, but I am concerned that I won't have the space. Would using double doors for the vocal booth help reinforce the isolation around the door, if I didn't have an air lock built around its entrance? Right now, the rough idea would be to have the control room and vocal booth to have their own door which leads from the outside/shared space. If I didn't incorporate an air lock, would it be more advisable to have the door lead into the vocal booth from inside the control room? I am a newbie with studio construction, so thanks for any tips and advice!

Hi. Please read the forum rules for posting (click here). You seem to be missing a couple of things! :)

A friend of mine recommended to build an air lock around the entrances to the vocal booth and to the control room, but I am concerned that I won't have the space.

We'd need to know a lot more about the space itself, including dimensions, construction materials, and things like that, as well as what your goals are, in order to be able to help you with that decision. A sound lock might or might not be necessary, and you might or might not have enough space to do it, and you could even consider using the vocal booth as the sound lock, if you are very limited on space. Or there might be other options, too. Back-to-back doors might also be a possibility, or a necessity, or neither. The most basic question here is: "How much isolation do you need?". And the answer needs to be in decibels, not subjective statements. You need to either estimate or measure the actual number of decibels of isolation that you need for your build, preferably using a sound level meter. That's the only real starting point for deciding on the answers to the questions you are asking. If you only need 20 dB of isolation, then just simple walls and doors will do. If you need 100 dB of isolation then only massively heavy back-to-back doors with a large sound lock would work, provided that your walls, floor, ceiling and everything else were also done to the same level. Of course, your actual need will be somewhere in between those two extremes, but you need to figure out just where it is. Each time you increase your isolation needs by 10 dB, you need to stop ten times more energy, so it becomes exponentially harder and more expensive to get to high levels of isolation. Going from 20 dB to 30 dB of isolation is a piece of cake, costing just a few hundred dollars. Going from 100 dB to 110 dB is going to cost millions of dollars, and as far as I know such an extreme level has never been accomplished yet. In each case the increase was only 10 decibels, but it is a logarithmic scale, so small numbers can mean huge differences. So it is important to decide on how much isolation you need first of all, and once that is in place, then you can consider what construction methods and materials would accomplish that. - Stuart -

Thanks Stuart! Will do more research!