New Studio in Denver

Edit: You can see the finished studio here! www.eshrecordings.com Hi, long time lurker, first time poster! Let me get immediately into the details. I am currently building a fully functional recording studio, the space I have allows for one main tracking room, an ISO booth (both already under construction) and a large (by my standards) control room. The design of the TR and ISO are fairly simple, but the control room design is where I could use some help. Dimensions: 20'(L) x 15.5'(W) x 11'(H) The space available is part of a much larger area, but at this point in time my budget only permits the use of these dimensions. I will be building the CR as a room within a room. Our building is located on a very busy street with frequent trucks passing so STC is a consideration, sorry, I don't have an spl meter :( Most of the exterior walls of the building are cinder-block, but the front of the building is almost all glass. Floor is concrete with a layer of commercial carpet. My idea is to build the room within a room, without floating the floor. I feel like its overkill four our purposes. Instead we will frame up the floor and fill it with sand. What do you think? The side if the room that faces the tracking room has a 64"x24" window in it. My main concern is if I should build the room to be set up with the monitors firing down the long side of the room or the narrow side. I am leaning towards LEDE treatment with an emphasis on the DE What do you guys think? Design ideas? Budget: Somewhere around $10,000 usd. Might be able to stretch it higher, depends on some investors, but I would like to keep it lower and buy some gear with the extra money 8) Thank you in advance -Taylor

I already said "welcome" in your other thread, but I'll say it again here: Welcome!

20'(L) x 15.5'(W) x 11'(H)

That's a pretty decent size for a control room. Nice!

Our building is located on a very busy street with frequent trucks passing so STC is a consideration,

I think you mean "isolation", not "STC". STC is not a good way of measuring isolation for studios, since it does not consider low frequencies at all. There's two and a half octaves at the bottom end of the scale that STC totally ignores, and those are the two and a half that are the most difficult to isolates. So it's much better to talk in terms of TL (Transmission Loss), or just plain "isolation", to avoid confusion.

sorry, I don't have an spl meter

Better get one soon, then! You'll need it frequently in your build, and especially in the stage of treating the rooms after they are built. Without a sound level meter, you really don't have much to go on in deciding how to design and build your studio.

Most of the exterior walls of the building are cinder-block,

That's reasonably good, but do make sure you seal it well before you start building anything. Even better would be to put a layers of plaster on it.

but the front of the building is almost all glass.

Ouch. How thick? Fixed or operable? Well sealed?

Floor is concrete with a layer of commercial carpet.

The carpet can go: that's useless for acoustics. The concrete is excellent, though.

without floating the floor.

Good. You do NOT need to do that.

I feel like its overkill four our purposes.

Not only overkill, unnecessary and expensive. Floating a floor correctly would eat up pretty much all of your budget, and floating it badly (as per the usual YouTube idiot videos) is not only pointless, but also detrimental to isolation and acoustics.

Instead we will frame up the floor and fill it with sand.

Why? If you already have a great concrete slab, why would you want to put a sand-filled deck on it? For what purpose?

What do you think?

I think that's a bad idea... :)

The side if the room that faces the tracking room has a 64"x24" window in it.

That is going to be expensive! Two panes of thick laminate glass that big, is going to take a huge chunk out of your budget. Do you really need something that big?

My main concern is if I should build the room to be set up with the monitors firing down the long side of the room or the narrow side.

Down the long axis, always. The only time you could reasonably have the firing across the room, is if the room is big enough to allow that: Yours isn't.

I am leaning towards LEDE treatment with an emphasis on the DE

LEDE is a concept from 30 years ago that has long since passed from favor as a good design for control rooms. LEDE rooms turned out to be uncomfortable to work in, fatiguing, and even unpleasant. It has been replaced by the far more useful RFZ and CID concepts, which are somewhat similar, and are often considered to be extensions of LEDE, but without the drawbacks. Also LEDE is not just about treatment: it is about the entire room design concept, of which treatment is just a part.

with an emphasis on the DE

Dead is not good for a control room. That's part of the reason why LEDE was abandoned: the dead sound was unnatural. AES, ITU and EBU specs for control rooms all agree pretty much on the decay characteristics, and they are not close to "dead". I would suggest using one of those as the basis for your design.

the space I have allows for one main tracking room, an ISO booth (both already under construction)

How are those being built? Also "room-in-a-room", I hope! What materials and techniques are you using? It is unusual to build part of a studio before the whole thing is designed, since you never know what you might need to change in the LR and booth until the CR design is complete. Some things you didn't mention that are also very important: Existing ceiling. Existing roof. Plan for doors. Plan for HVAC. Plan for electrical. Those are often overlooked in the early stages of design, so now would be a good time to start planning them. HAV especially: it's not easy to do HVAC for studios. It would also help us to understand better what you are doing if you could post photos of the space you have, and what is in it already. - Stuart -

Ouch. How thick? Fixed or operable? Well sealed?

Well sealed, fixed, looks like about 1/4"

That is going to be expensive! Two panes of thick laminate glass that big, is going to take a huge chunk out of your budget. Do you really need something that big?

Already have the glass, actually I got the glass for free, believe it or not!

How are those being built? Also "room-in-a-room", I hope! What materials and techniques are you using? It is unusual to build part of a studio before the whole thing is designed, since you never know what you might need to change in the LR and booth until the CR design is complete.

Yeah, ideally this would have been the case. However, the tracking room was a preexisting room with concrete walls on two sides, we added decoupled walls on the other two walls and slapped another two layers of drywall up with insulation lightly put in. The iso booth is a room within a room, and a pretty standard size and design. Details: Ceiling: Open Rafters Roof: wood underlay and standard flat roofing (not quite sure what this is made of) Doors: Solid Core doors reinforced with green-glue and an extra 5/8ths of high density MDF (SUPER HEAVY) lagged to the studs with massive bolts and heavy duty hinges HVAC: Heating is forced air, running through a maze style fiberglass silencer box. Cooling is going to be an evaporative cooler...The extra humidity should not be an issue as it is very dry in Colorado. In fact, it rarely gets over 90F in the summer here so cooling is not a major concern...Silencing for this is still under consideration...probably a maze of flexible duct. Electrical: Tracking room has two circuits, one for lighting and one for guitar amps and such, both 20 amps. Same in Control room. so far we have been running 1000w in floodlighting, a mid sized air compressor, a rotary arm/chop saw, and one or two electric drills all at once without flipping a breaker. Here are a couple pictures to start off note the door you see was a second door to the now tracking room...we removed the door and covered it with drywall

Hi. I ran across this design http://www.weslachot.com/new/articles_eq.html I have exactly the right amount of space to do this design, and I am thinking about going with it. A quick question, Wes seems pretty firm on the dimensions, I can build the ceiling at 8 ft, but I have 11 ft, should I raise the ceiling height or stick with his math?

Wes seems pretty firm on the dimensions, I can build the ceiling at 8 ft, but I have 11 ft, should I raise the ceiling height or stick with his math?

Wes is very big on tuning room dimensions to exact relationships on the musical scale: pretty much everything he does in a room is tuned musically, sort of like a series of related chords. He's been very successful following that design philosophy. However, there are many other very successful designers that do not follow this philosophy, since there really isn't much research on how the musical tuning of a room relates to its actual effectiveness as a studio: Is a room tuned to a major fifth any more successful over its life than one that is not tuned to anything in particular? Is a musically tuned room more usable? Do the mixes translate better? Does it make more money? Nobody has studied that, as far as I know, so nobody knows for sure. And there are very large number of successful big-name studios out there whose control rooms don't meet this tuning. So it seems that even if it does help, the effect might not be that big. With no research, it's hard to say if it works or not. On the other hand, there is a large amount of available research on room volumes, floor areas, room ratios, dimensions, shapes, frequency response, time-domain response, usability, and subjective analysis by experts, all of which indicates that higher ceilings and greater room volume are practically always desirable and useful. So if you have the option to increase your ceiling height from 8 feet to 11 feet, I would most definitely say:Go for it! Make the room as big as possible, as high as possible, then check your ratios, volume, area and dimensions, and adjust as necessary to get the best relationship. Maybe even tweak an inch here or there to get closer to Wes's philosophy, if you so desire. Personally, I think there are many other aspects to a room, other than just ratios, that can be "make or break" factors, so I wouldn't be too concerned if you come up with an otherwise good design but that doesn't follow Wes's tuning exactly. My $ 0.02. - Stuart -

Here is a rough sketuchup I did. I am not very good at sketchup, please forgive me! Thoughts?