Control Room Rear Wall Angle Symetry

Hi! This is my first posting here, although I've been reading the forums for quite a while now and learning a lot - with a lot left to learn! I'm going to be starting construction on a sound studio in an old brick and beam warehouse type space, my work is primarily voice over and sound design for commercials, and music for TV/commercials (mostly in-the-box, with occasional guitars/vocals). My space will be built into a larger room which has brick walls and hardwood floor, drywall/exposed wood beams on the ceiling. My total space for contol room and sound booth is about 32'x15.5', celings are 10'8" high. The new walls will be stud/drywall, with doubled 5/8" and Green Glue on one side at least. My main question now though is about rear wall symetry. Due to the layout of the space, I will need to build an angle into the corner of the rear control room wall (around 45 degrees) to allow passage on the other side. This wall will also have the door to the control room in it. My question is, given that one side needs to be angled, is it better to duplicate this angle on the other side, or is it better to keep as much volume as possible in the room? I would think symetry would be important even in the rear, but trapping will be trickier the more angles I have and the loss of space isn't the greatest... So I guess my question is: which is the lesser of two evils? Thanks so much in advance!

I've posted the same question over at Gearslutz and got one response favoring each option... anyone care to be a tie-breaker? :wink:

Solution 2 makes the room smaller, so I should go for solution 1. You are fairly far from the back wall and in a near field monitoring situation, so I cannot imagion the back will give you much problems. But even then you can do tweaking with absorption.

Thanks Bert! Just to give a little more context, here's some shots of the space and a floor plan for the entire studio (the walls in blue are the planned new walls):

curious ... what is the floor to ceiling height in this proposed control room ? My control room had to have a small 'kick-in' wall, at back of room, to skirt around a pump, it was recommended to duplicate the same 'kick-in' on the opposite back corner wall. My room is approx 12' wide by 15' long. It would be interesting to hear [read] at what distance point, rear wall symmetry becomes a non-issue.

Hi, I´m also new to this site, so If my ideas are rubbish, somebody please tell me ^^ In the rear of your control room, you will probably want some bass trapping. This is harder to do and keep symmetry, if you have a door in the rear corner. What about flipping the whole desing? You could have your control room symmetric, and you could install more efficient bass trapping that way. The entrance door would lead into a small airgap, like in the upper left corner of your design. From there, you could enter the control room, or the booth. You could use the space in the down right corner for your booth, so you would keep symmetry, and end up with more space

Thanks guys! :) The ceilings are about 10'8" (the floor slopes a bit, so one point its around 10'10") going to the drywall between the joists, and the joists come down about 1'. Not a rubbish idea at all! I had thought of flipping the design like that to make the airlock have the angled wall, and also the added benefit of airlocking both the CR and the booth. My only real reasons for not favouring that design are that clients would need to navigate the airlock (seems simple, but you'd be surprised haha) and that they would need to enter at the front of the room from the back of my desk (if I literally flipped the design to still face my desk toward the booth window). I could of course face my desk away from the door and have the booth behind me - not ideal in terms of where client is looking and me making eye contact with talent, but it would solve the problem of symmetry and maintining the integrity of my front wall...

RJHollins wrote:

It would be interesting to hear [read] at what distance point, rear wall symmetry becomes a non-issue.

In a LEDE situation the advice is to have the backwall about 20 msec away from the listening position to prevent disturbing reflections becoming prominent. Then you don't really need absorption on the back wall. But when you're only using nearfield monitoring, this is less critical, of course because there is a large level difference between direct sound and reflections. If you make the front of the room absorbing you also prevent for combfiltering from speaker diffraction and you create a bass trap. And it is easier to realize this with normal corners than with one or two corner(s) cut off, IMHO.