Studio Design in an odd shaped room?

Hi John and all the members, I am so glad I found this site and forum...It has already answered most of the questions I had about making my own studio at home. The biggest problems I have are the shape of the spare room in my house, as well as where to put the vocal/guitar booth, and where to put my desk with the studio monitors for the best sound... There is a 2.5m window along the main wall. I have laminated flooring in the room that I will be using, but it is brick and plaster for each wall(incl. the incove). The ceiling are 2.67m high with ordinary thin ceiling boards. I have included 5 pics of the exact dimensions of the room(to scale) with possible places for the vocal/guitar booth...BUT...Where to put the desk????...It's a hurdle I just can't seem to clear. Any help would be great. You can put the pics into MS paint even, and possibly repost pics with the area you guys think would be the best setup. Thank you very much. Cheers, Tim.

I could always angle the one wall of the Vocal/guitar booth and place my desk in the middle by the window.

Hi Tim, and Welcome! :) The good news is that you seem to have a nicely sized space there! The bad news is that the room geometry is not much good, acoustically or practically. The good news is that it can be fixed! :)

with possible places for the vocal/guitar booth...BUT...Where to put the desk????...It's a hurdle I just can't seem to clear.

There are some very basic requirements for setting up your mix position, that I'm sure will lead you to the best location. First and foremost is symmetry. The chair, desk, and speakers MUST be arranged symmetrically, with the left half of the room being a mirror image of the right half. If you don't have symmetry, then you don't have a mix: It is imperative that both speakers must sound exactly the same at the mix position (where your head is), and in order to do that, they must be in identical acoustic environments, the same distance from side walls, the same distance from the front wall, the same distance from the center line, and most of all, the same distance from you. So look at potential positions in your room that meet this requirement. The part of the room in front of you (between you and the speakers) must be exactly the same to the left and right of where you sit. It is also good if the part behind you is also left-right symmetrical, but most important that the front half of the room is. If your speaker are not in identical acoustical environments with you in the middle, then they will sound different, and you will not be able to mix. You might get a mix sounding good in the room, but as soon as you try to listen to it at some other place, such as your car, stereo, iPod, club, office, radio, TV, or any other place that does not have the exact same defects as your room, it will just sound "wrong". This is called "mix translation", and without good room symmetry, your mixes will not translate. Next, the speakers should be aimed down the longest distance possible, so that the rear wall is as far away behind you as possible. That implies setting things up so that the speakers are NOT facing across the room, but rather down the length of the room. The reason for this is so that the reflections coming off the back wall are delayed as much as possible, and reduced as much as possible in level, before they get back to your ears. There's a technical parameter knows as the Haas time, or Haas effect, that comes into play here, and affects the way your brain interprets reflections: ideally they need to arrive at least 20 ms after the direct sound, and at least 20 dB lower in intensity. Once again, if the first reflections are arriving at your ears too soon, or too loud, then you are not hearing the truth coming from your speakers, and your mixes will not translate. Those are the two most basic, fundamental issues. Combining these two, basically your only option is to have your room centered on the right wall in your diagram, marked "2880mm". That must be the front of your room, where your speakers will be. There are no other good options. Now for the next round: The listening position should be at about 38% of the room depth (front wall to back wall), ideally. That's not a rule! Just a theoretical good location for a starting point. So start by setting up your chair so that your EARS will be that distance form the front wall. Your room seems to be 5.18 m long, so your ears should be about 1.97 m from the front wall. Call it 2m (you do NOT need to be precise down to the mm!!). So set up your chair in such a way that your ears end up roughly 2m from the front wall. Next, the speakers and your head should be arranged based on an equilateral triangle, so that the distance between the speakers is roughly the same as the distance from each speaker to your ears. In reality, the distance to your ears will be a bit less, but that's fine. To accomplish this, the speakers must be set up at an angle of 30° AND point directly at your ears. However, the speakers also need to be spaced well away from the side walls: they must NEVER go in the corners. Now we get to the problem I mentioned above: your room geometry as it is does not allow for this. The room is too long for things to work out like this. So the room needs to change size... Fortunately, you need a vocal booth! So the obvious thing is to chop of the rear of the room, making it shorter. In fact, if you chop off that rear alcove to use as your vocal booth, things work out quite well: The room length then becomes 4.16m, and the geometry falls into place. so build a wall across there, in line with the existing wall, and put a door and window in it. That will be your vocal booth. (Of course, the booth needs isolation and treatment too, but that's a different issue entirely, and not what you asked for here...). So, let's re-do the above: with the room length of 4.16 m, your ears need to be 1.5 m from the front wall, so move your chair forwards a bit, until you reach that position. Now to set up your speakers: You don't say what speakers you are using (make and model), and that is very important, but I'll assume they are typical front-ported small "near-field" type studio monitors, with room correction controls on the rear. (You need those controls to compensate for the placement of the speakers in the room). So, firstly, the speakers MUST be mounted on stands (not on the desk, or on a shelf, or on the console bridge: those are all common mistakes, and big mistakes). They need to go on stands, and the stands must be massive (as in very, very heavy). Some folks just stack up some concrete bricks and wrap them in cloth, others buy or make hollow steel or PVC stands and fill them with sand, and there are other methods too, but the point is: "mass, and lots of it". The reason is simple: the speakers must be mechanically isolated from the floor, and this is the easiest / cheapest way to do so. OK, so how high should the stands be? That depends on your speakers. The correct height is for the acoustic axis of the speakers to be 1.2 m above the floor. Note that it says "acoustic axis". That's the imaginary point on the front of the speaker where the sounds "seems" to come from. Some manufacturers show that in their manuals, others don't. If you don't know whre it is on your speakers, then you can "guesstimate": it will be on a line joining the center of the woofer to the center of the tweeter, and much closer to the tweeter than the woofer, maybe around 80% or so. So imagine that there is a line poking out of the front of the speaker at that point, and extending out forever, perpendicular to the front face: that is the acoustic axis, and that's what needs to be 1.2 m above the floor. So design your stands so that the acoustic axes of YOUR speakers are 1.2m above the floor. (And if you ever replace your speakers with a different model, with different dimensions, you will need to adjust the height of your stands to compensate...) Why 1.2m? Because that is the height of your ears, when you are sitting down! So set up your stands about 70cm from the side walls, and about 40 cm from the front wall. Depending on the size of your speakers, that should give you just enough space between the speaker and the front wall to install a thick layer of acoustic treatment, which you will need to control the artifacts. Put your speakers on the stands such that the center of the front panel is as above: 70 cm from side wall, 40 cm from front wall. Angle the speakers so that they are pointing at your EARS, not at your EYES! You listen with your ears, so that's where the speakers should be aimed. If you do this correctly, then those imaginary axes will be interesting about 25 cm BEHIND your head, at an angle of 60°. Bingo! Done! That's it! Now you have your room set up correctly, for the best possible geometry. All you need to do now is to add the necessary acoustic treatment, and it should sound pretty darn good! Without the treatment, of course, it will not sound so good... - Stuart -