Mid size warehouse, needs control room

Hi Everyone I am looking at warehouse spaces for my studio to move to. I have been running a 2 inch 24 track studio catering for "rock bands" for about 10 years but have been in a temporary space for the last few years.. I am ready to move my gear into a new location, and would love some advice. I have found one location that I like. I am considering this space because the asking rent is very cheap, and this is going to be a one man operated and financed enterprise so am trying to do it on a small budget. I arranged to inspect the warehouse again and take an acoustic consultant. When inspecting, I took a a tape measure and tried and get as many dimensions of the rooms as possible. The ceiling looks to be a drop ceiling, and I was unable to measure the true ceiling height. I believe there is at least another meter to the true ceiling past the drop one. The acoustic guy has not given me much good info except he thinks it would be a great space for a studio... Any suggestions as to if I can work in one of the rooms as a CONTROL ROOM (I will treat it, traps and such) or if I need to build a new room, and if so, where the best places might be to look at this construction. I think I need a new room.. and am probably going to remove that one I have flagged as a possible control and build out from there. At this stage I am hoping someone can point me in the general direction of what dimensions this room should be, and any advice on modern construction techniques for getting good isolation on a budget. I hope I have provided good info for a reply, please let me know if there is more I can post. I have a lot of internal photos.http://minus.com/m7CeJAc6LBqiM

Hi Adam, and welcome to the forum! :) Organizations such as the ITU, IEC, EBU, AES, the BBC, Dolby and others have published specifications on what is needed for a good control room, and they mostly agree with each other, with very few differences. The basic parameters include things like floor area, room volume, shape, reverberation time, speaker height and positions, listening position, etc. Of course, this does not mean that you cannot have a good control room that doesn't meet the specs! Not at all: many people here on the forum build very successful control rooms in much smaller spaces. But if you want a "world-class" studio, the best it can possibly be, and want to claim that it meets the specifications of all those acronyms, then going with their specs is a good idea. The area you indicate as a possible control room is on the borderline for floor area, if you only want to do stereo (2.0 or 2.1). But if you want to do multichannel (5.1, 7.1, etc) then it is too small to meet the specs. The other issue is that it is long and narrow, which is not good for a control room. The issue is that some relationships between length, width and height are really bad for acoustics, while others are really good. For example, a room that measures 3m wide, 3m high and 6m long would be terrible! There is a direct relationship between the dimensions, so all the room modes (standing wave frequencies) are exactly aligned, in all three dimensions: it would be impossible to mix well in there and still get the mixes to sound good when played in other places. This concept of relationships between dimensions is generally referred to as the "room ratio", and there are many simple "room mode calculators" that you can just plug in your room dimensions and it spits out an answer as to whether that is a good "ratio" or a bad "ratio". In general, long narrow rooms do not stack up well, and don't have good ratios. I didn't actually run the numbers for your dimensions, mainly because you don't know what the real height is (drop ceilings don't count), but intuition tells me that your ratio won't be good. Of course, you can change your ratio to a good one by building new walls, moving the current walls, building a new solid, massive ceiling, etc. But if you are going to go to all that trouble and expense, then it probably would be worthwhile to just build an entirely new control room that is custom designed to start out with a good ratio. The other issue is which of the many design concepts you want to use for your control room. There are several different philosophies on how to build a great control room, and they all work (some good, some not so good), and a few of those specify very specific shapes for the room. For example, if you follow the modern (and VERY good) "RFZ" concept, then you need to angle the front section of the side walls. RFZ means "Reflection Free Zone", and the basic idea is that you angle some of the internal surfaces such that no reflections can reach your ears within a certain time period, and at certain levels. This is done so that you can ONLY hear the direct, clean, unaltered sound coming straight from the speakers, without the room modifying it in any way. The first reflections that you hear arrive at a low enough level, and after a long enough delay, and with a good enough tonal and temporal balance, that your brain just interprets them as neutral "ambiance", not direct sound. So your ears and brain are only concentrating on the exact, pure, clean sound coming from the speakers, without the room "coloring" that sound first. You hear the truth, only the truth, and nothing but the truth. So RFZ is a really good design concept, very common these days, but it does mean that you need to "splay" parts of your walls to the correct angle. On the other hand, if you choose to go with the old (and now unpopular) LEDE design, then that can be done in a rectangular room. "LEDE" means "Live End, Dead End", and as the name implies, one half of the room (usually the back) is made very "live" (reflective and diffusive), while the other end (usually the front) is smothered in thick absorption, until it is totally dead. But "dead" is not nice, and many people who work in LEDE rooms find them tiring, fatiguing, and a bit unpleasant. But some people love them. There are several other design concepts, such as "MyRoom", CID, NER, and variations on each, with each of them having certain basic shape or size constraints. So it really helps if you decide on which concept you want to follow, before deciding on the room shape and size. I'm surprised your acoustician didn't mention all this to you. That's one of the first things he should discuss with you, when deciding on a space.

and am probably going to remove that one I have flagged as a possible control and build out from there.

To be very honest, that sounds like the best plan to me. Rather then try to kludge an existing room into what it isn't, it would be better to start with a clean slate and design it specifically. Especially when you have the space to do that, as you do. So I would suggest designing the control room from scratch, and if you want my opinion, I'd go with RFZ design. LIVE ROOM: The good news is that you have a great space for the live room! You already have 2.8 m height, and suspect that you might have another meter up there, so that would be great for a live room. Sound waves like height, and especially things like drums can benefit from very high ceilings.

At this stage I am hoping someone can point me in the general direction of what dimensions this room should be,

For a control room, the specifications I mentioned before set 20 m2 as the minimum floor area for a critical listening room for stereo material (2.0, 2.1), and 30 m2 as the minimum area for multichannel (5.1, etc). Like I said, you can still have a great room that is much smaller than that, but if you have the space and want to shoot for "best possible", then go with those. There are also recommendations for the relationship between the size of the control room and the size of the live room. This can be important: if the live room volume is not significantly larger than the control room, then you won't be able to hear the natural reverberation tails from the live room as you listen in the control room, since they will be masked by the control room's own tails. Etc., Lots of things to consider when designing a studio...!

advice on modern construction techniques for getting good isolation on a budget.

Fully decoupled, two-leaf MSM is the only way to go. That's just a fancy way of saying that you each room has two walls around it, where a "wall" is a stud frame with drywall on only ONE side of it. So basically, the building itself is your outer leaf, then you build a single "inner-leaf" for each of the rooms. Think of it like a show box (the building) with several match boxes inside (the rooms). If you think about being inside any of those room-matchboxes, then you will see that there are only two "leaves" between you and the next room, as well as between you and the outside world. No matter which way you go, there are two leaves to get to the next space. Only two leaves! Never one, and never three. 2 and only 2 is the way to do this right. There are complicated equations that describe how these 2-leaf walls works, and mountains of research and testing in laboratories, so this is known to be the best possible way of getting high levels isolation at low cost. There are other methods too, but they ALL imply greater cost. Once again, I'm surprised that your acoustician didn't tell you about this. Isolation and design concepts are the two most basic things that a studio designer discusses with a client, when looking at a possible space. The materials you can use to make each leaf are normal, common, typical construction materials. You can make a leaf from concrete, brick, plywood, OSB, drywall ("plasterboard"), and several other things. The key is that the leaf needs to be heavy (lots of mass), solid, and rigid (stiff). So you can do that by building it up from a couple of layers of lighter stuff. For example, a common method is to use two layers of 16mm fire-rated drywall (one right on top of the other), on a stud frame. The studs can be either wood or metal. So these are just normal building materials that you can buy at any hardware store: nothing special or exotic required, no unusual tools, etc.

I have a lot of internal photos.

It would be better if you post some of those photos here on the forum: it is one of the forum rules that photos should be posted here, not linked off-site. The reason is that in the past some really good threads on the forum have become useless, because the photos that everyone is discussing are no longer there: the hosting service moved, or went out of business, or changed, or the account expired, or whatever. So those threads are basically pointless now, which is very frustrating for someone who found exactly what they were looking for, but can't see the photos! So please post at least a few key photos here on the forum. - Stuart -

Stuart, thank you for your very informative post and the welcome to this forum. I have been trying to get info on some other sites and it has been a bit quiet. I really appreciate your time taken to answer. I will try and give as much detail as I can. Yes, it will be a stereo mix room, no surround. I do have one set of monitors that have a sub however.. just a pro-sumer setup that I know well. The other pairs of monitos are NS10's and Dynaudio BM15a's. I usually mix at a low volume and it is usually punk / heavy rock / metal. I have to be honest and say I have rarely worked in treated control rooms. I ran a studio for 10 years in an industrial warehouse that had a wall I built to seperate the live room from control room, but it was not done with any RFZ angles in mind, and I basically put up curtains where I thought there was slap back echo. It seemed to work, things translated (or maybe I learned how to mix so it would translate). I have done SOME work in professional rooms, but not a lot of mixing, usually tracking. So when you ask if I want a LEDE or a RFZ room, I really don't know. I guess I am going for a RFZ approach as this is what most studios are using these days, and hey you suggest it and I think you have a better education at room design than me.. to me this is like learning how tires are made to drive my car. I know, acoustic knowledge is essential to being an engineer.. and if I don't throw money at it I have to step up and learn these concepts. I have not heard of "MyRoom", CID, or NER, I will Google research these this evening. My room looks interesting but looks very expensive. I think I would just build a bigger room. Set 20 m2 as the minimum floor area for a critical listening room for stereo material = check. This is the kind of solid info I have been looking for. Fully decoupled, two-leaf MSM is the only way to go. In a previous studio I had, I built a wall dividing live room from control room. I made it a two leaf side on the live room (gyprock then soundstop), then rockwool, air, rockwool, then MDF (Control room side). I got an amazing amount of isolation from it, I could have a metal band full tilt on the other side and be confident I could make EQ decisions during tracking. So I guess this method still stands up to get best isolation. I have been reading recently that you should not glue the two leaves.. what does this mean? They need an air gap? Or that one should just screw the 2nd leaf into the 1st? OK here are some key photos. In this next pic you can see to the left, the edge of the wall I am probably going to remove to extend out a new one to make control room. The room with the 2 windows is the one I think will be removed and made bigger control room. Another photo of live room, showing the other rooms it has that will be booths / vocal spaces. Thanks again for your help.

I read the Rod Gervais book over the weekend. Great read and opened my eyes to a few things, mostly the things people think will help that actually reduce STC ratings. I think I have a spot in the warehouse to build the control room now. Can I just confirm I have this correct: "The Golden Section is a set of ratios that has the smallest dimension (often the height) the starting point; then the next longest dimension is 1.62 times that length (often the width); the final dimension is 1.62 times the second dimension (usually the length of the room). When a room is built using these ratios, sound in the room is incredibly even - Ideal for a studio." So if I know the true height of the ceiling, I should be able to determine my room dimensions to adhere to this? I hope to get in there this week, remove the drop ceiling and get some data on this.

There are many known good room ratios: the one you mention (1 : 1.62 : 2.62 ) is just one of them, and is suitable for long, narrow rooms. Arguably, the best ratio of all is 1 : 1.14 : 1.39. This is "Sepmeyer's best ratio", and give the smoothest modal distribution of all possible ratios, and is more suitable for typical project studio size rooms. So with Sepmeyer 1, if your room were 10 feet high, you would make it 11.4 feet wide and 13.9 feet long. The ratio you mentioned comes in at number 20 on the list of good ratios, 19 places behind Sepmeyer 1. Try using Bob Golds' room mode calculator to figure out what ratios would work for you. Personally, I think it is the best room calculator out there (although it is a bit cryptic in the way it presents the information). http://www.bobgolds.com/Mode/RoomModes.htm - Stuart -

Is this some real solid data as an answer I see before me? Booya..! so if my roof is 3.8 metres.. 1 : 1.14 : 1.39 3.8 : 4.33 : 5.28 Yes? Seems a bit small. But I guess this is governed by the roof height.. Latest thoughts on control room: It raises above the drop ceiling. It will be a room within a room.

Yes? Seems a bit small. But I guess this is governed by the roof height..

If you want it bigger, and your roof height is a limit, then use a different ratio that works better for longer, wider rooms. There are many ratios to choose from. The one I gave is just the "best" of the all, but is more applicable to squarish rooms. Check out the link on Bob Golds' calculator, and you'll find a list of all of the good ones, and even the good ranges. Select the one that best fits your needs. - Stuart -