can you be specific about BIG problems with layout?
OK, let me do this in many words, since it is so much quicker than modelling it in 3D.
:)
Based on the labeling you added, now I'm getting a better idea. So this is a multi-room facility, with LR, CR, two booths and utility rooms.
However (and this is what I was talking about initially), is that the best layout? It doesn't convince me, for several reasons, most of them practical, not so much acoustic. for example, you don't have any sight-lines from the CR to the LR, or at best you have poor sight lines, through the iso booth under the stairs. It would be far better to come up with an arrangement where the CR is next to the LR, with direct sight lines, and hopefully straight out the front, not off to the side: you want to be able to see into the live room as you track, without twisting your head sideways all the time. At the same time, there are no sight lines at all into the second iso booth: it has no windows! That's impractical. Apart from needing to see what is going on in the other rooms, that is just going to be plain claustrophobic! It is a tiny room, with no windows... vocalists in that room are not going to be ale to perform well: it will have the feeling of a broom closet, and nobody sings well in a broom closet...
Then there's the issue of workflow and access routes: The path into Iso-2 is through Iso-1, so the poor guy trapped in the claustrophobic broom closet can't even go to the bathroom until the guy in Iso-1 is finished!
Etc. I won't go into more details there, but this is one of the reasons why you need time.... I can see several potentially much better layouts for the rooms, but there is no time to play around with them, try out sight lines in 3D, so what makes sense, etc. If you go with that layout, you are starting out on the wrong foot, and it only goes downhill from there.
real isolation isnt that necessary as there wont be that much simultaneous tracking in live room and iso booths
OK, but this is a house, right? So you WILL need isolation from the house, and form the outside world. You can't stop tracking just because the washing machine is running and the noise is getting into your vocalist mics! There's about one million and seventy three sources of sound that can wreck your recording session, including everything from aircraft flying overhead, traffic driving past, the neighbor's lawnmower, the dog barking and the phone ringing, to rain, hail, thunder, wind, doors slamming, the TV, radio, and just people walking around the rooms above you.
Isolation is never a luxury for a studio: it is a necessity. And that's without even considering the issue of sound going the other way: what will your wife / parents/ kids say about the extreme drummer belting away his best performance at 3 AM?
the design concept is to have an RFZ control room with the larger area behind it for 'workable space' in production.
OK, but you don't have the right shape for RFZ: the walls are not splayed steeply enough. There is not any specific fixed angle that you need to attain a proper RFZ, since all rooms are different. It depends on the dimensions of the room, the speakers you use, and the furniture and equipment in the room. So I can't tell you what angle you need for the walls and ceiling, but what I can tell you is that the angles you are showing and talking about are not enough for a room that size. The only way to find out for sure what angles you need is by "ray-tracing", and that takes time. It normally takes me about 2 or 3 days to ray-trace and tweak the angles of a room for RFZ.
angled ceiling of 12 degrees good in the RFZ area?
12° is not meant for RFZ. 12° is the minimum angle you need for stopping flutter echo, but RFZ needs much greater angles than that.
are the angles doing the appropriate amount of work?
The ONLY way to know that, is by ray-tracing. Sorry. There's no simple number for RFZ, like there is for flutter echo: it depends on the room.
is it really necessary to fill the walls behind the RFZ part of the control room
Fill them with what? RFZ is a complete design concept: it requires keeping all first order reflections away from the engineer's ears until at least 20ms beyond the direct sound, and even then the level must be at least 20 dB down, followed by the correct ITDG termination, and correct decay times for each frequency region. Determining what type of treatment you need in the room is done by looking at the predict response of the room, comparing that with the ideal response, then providing the right type of treatment at the right points.
There are certain rules of thumb, yes: things that all rooms will need, no matter what. But going beyond that, determining the treatment needed for each wall, takes calculation and time. Or at the very least, experience. An experienced designer like John can probably figure out what a room needs just by looking, but the rest of us mortals need to do the math to make sure!
the HVAC will be in the room noted on the attached pic.
OK, but what about your ducts? What about your silencer boxes? What about the flow rates, flow velocities, sensible cooling load, latent load, etc.? All of that needs to be calculated in order to determine your duct sizes, and you need to know your duct sizes and locations in order to figure out the room dimensions, ceiling heights, etc. For example, it is no use just guessing that you can use 6" high ducts below your 10' sub floor joists, so you set your ceiling height to 9'6", but then later find out that you actually needed 8" ducts, and your silencer boxes have to be 10" high....
See where I'm going with this?
HVAC is an entire subject on its own, that takes days of work to figure out correctly, and it has to be done right up front, since the dimensions of the rooms depend on it.
electrical plans are simply to isolate lighting from wall jacks.
OK, but how are you going to do that? The general rule is to allow one single wall penetration into each room, then distribute the electrical wiring from there using surface-mount systems. If you have more than one penetration, you have several potential failure points for your isolation. So that also has to be planned, to make sure the electrical wiring does not interfere with the signal wiring, or the HVAC, or the isolation.
ADAM A7X's and JBL LSR6328's will be the main monitors used
Great! But that presents another issue that you need to take into account with your RFZ design. One reason why the Adam's are such great speakers, so smooth and detailed, is those wonderful ART tweeters. Those ART tweeters have very broad dispersion, and thus excellent off-axis response. But that introduces new problems to an RFZ design, since you have to account for the high frequencies acting less like rays and more like waves: so you need to ray-trace to much larger angles, and makes sure that walls and other surfaces that are more distant than you'd normally bother with, are also OK. Whereas an lesser speaker might only need ray-tracing to, say. 40°, you need to go to more like 60° with Adams.
That's why it is important to know all the details, so you can take them all into account.
(although i change gear like i change underwear)
There's an app for that! Or rather, there's a design for speakers soffits that allows you to replace speakers with a different model easily, without needing to take apart the entire soffit to do so. It sounds like your soffit design will need that concept!
no console, all digital with 64io for hardware inserts.
Great! So your desk can be very small, and that makes things a lot easier, from the point of vie of first reflections.
generally only 2-3 people will be working at a time, and mostly from the control room.
Great! So now you have one of the parameters yo need for dimensioning the HVAC system: minimum 45 CFM flow rate for fresh air in, and stale air out.
and a live room for drums,
... the loudest instrument of all, and the hardest to isolate!
:)
i know that i will be sacrificing a bit in rushing this along, but its really a do it now or not for a really long time sort of situation (for a lot reasons).
I guess this is the crux of the whole matter. since it is impossible to come up with even a haphazard and mediocre design in the time-frame you have, the question is: what exactly do you NEED? What is it that you "must have" by tomorrow? Is it just an estimate of how many 2x4s and how many sheets of 5/8" drywall you need? Just the materials? Or do you need to really have the full and final position of every last nail, screw, stud and light fitting, written in stone? If it is the former, then it should be reasonably do-able to come up with that, give or take 20%, but if you need the latter, then there simply is no way to do this.
If it is just a basic BOM that you need, then you can figure that out roughly in a couple of hours, but if you need to know the exact position where each wall will go, the runs of each duct and cable, the size of each window and door, etc. then it just ain't gonna happen.
I suspect (and hope) that all you need is rough position of walls and a basic BOM so the contractor has an idea of what he needs to do, and can present plans for approval, but that the precise locations and details can then be changed and re-designed properly, before he actually starts building. If that's the case, then it is doable. But if that's the case, then you do NOT need to know how many degrees to splay your ceiling, nor how big the bass traps need to be! Those are details, for later.
i would really like is a bit of input on room dimensions
Room dimensions depend on function. The basic minimum recommended size for control rooms (according to the ITU and EBU, among others) is 20 square meters of floor space. The basic rule of thumb is that the associated live room should have at least 5 times the total volume of the control room. That doesn't mean to say that you can't build a great studio to much smaller dimensions: it just means that it won't be optimal, as considered by the best experts in the world.
Here's a good calculator that will help you come up with a good ratio for your control room:
http://www.bobgolds.com/Mode/RoomModes.htm
Plug in numbers that make sense to you, then hit "compute", then take a look at the results. It does a full acoustic prediction of the probable performance of the room, based on those dimensions, then you can tweak the dimensions a few inches each way to see if you can make it better in some way.
or problems with the live room (specifically a good idea of how to handle the ceiling in there -- peak, angle, flat? it will be 10ft)
For a live room, 10 feet is great, but that does not allow for the isolation. Isolation will take up at least 8 inches, perhaps more, so your final inner-ceiling will be around 9' 4". There are methods for reducing that height loss, and light be as little as 2", but you don't have the time to do that, so you'll have to live with the large loss. And for the live room, I would leave the ceiling flat: there's no point to angling it.
and the control room.
The control room ceiling should be angled, and must be angled for an RFZ room, but in order to not wast space you only need to angle the front section, just as far back as the mix position (roughly 38%). You can do the same with the walls: splay only the front section, to avoid wasting space. Keep the walls parallel from there back, and the ceiling flat. You can use the "wasted" space behind those angles for silencer boxes, HVAC ducts, iso booths, etc.
any glaring problems with size and angles?
Yes!
:) See above.
GENERAL COMMENTS:
The control room looks to be nice and large, and with 10' ceilings to play with this can work out very well. Just set up the speaker soffits and the desk using the usual "standard" geometry, and you should have a great environment. Depending on where exactly you plan to build the rear wall, it might be a bit too long for a good ratio: I would plan to build the rear wall at a location where you can get a decent ratio.
If you only need basic BOM and walls for now, then just draw that room as a rectangle within the existing space that you show, and forget about angles. Make the walls 2x4 16OC with 2x5/8" drywall on one side, and filled with minimum 6" 48kg/m3 mineral wool. All doorways and window openings need triple studs on each side and oversize headers. Corners and edges need an extra stud/joist beyond what would be normal for at yircal wall, to provide the nailing surface for the second layer of drywall. Single sole plate, double top plate all around. Show the speaker soffits as heavily framed closets, and fill all the walls with bookcases, to simulate treatment. Show the ceiling as 2x8 joists (or whatever size the span tables say that you need), 16OC, also with 2x5/8" drywall, and also filled with at least 6" of 48kg/m3 mineral wool. Show the doors as back-to-back pairs, solid core.
Same for the LR: just draw that as a rectangle for now, using the same type of wall and ceiling construction as for the CR. HVAC is a tough one, but figure at least 8" round ducts all over, both supply and return, and maybe 2 to 3 tons capacity for the studio (not considering the rest of the house). You might need a pair of ducts for the CR and LR, as they are large. If you do have time to run the numbers, keep air flow speeds under 300 fpm, at the very highest. 200 is better. It can be more in the plenums and main ducts, of course, but must be slowed down to under 300 at the register. And you need one silencer on each penetration.
That's about all I can suggest. It is just barely scratching the surface, of course, and is no use at all without a structural engineer checking the numbers, and also an HVAC guy, but that's about all there is to say!
Hopefully that's enough to at least put something on paper now, for whatever purpose you need it, thus allowing you the time you need to REALLY design the place, so it can actually be built and operate as a usable studio.
- Stuart -
