Whats my best option when ceiling slopes from right to left?

I need help understanding my best option inside a rectangular room with sloping ceiling.. Am i better off setting up so iv got a narrower studio with more space behind me and ceiling sloping right to left? or would it be better to rotate 90degrees so i have a much shorter studio but a ceiling that tapers down at the front? Im pretty much building a room inside a room but would like to keep some aspect of angle in the roof of the internal room.. any ideas?? All building supplies have been purchased and ready to start so would appreciate feedback asap so i can get started without making any major bad decisions!! thankyou

Hi. Please read the forum rules for posting (click here). You seem to be missing a couple of things! :) - Stuart -

sorry iv updated my location.. i think thats everything yeah?

Yup, that was it! :) That's actually a very difficult call: You are probably already aware of this, but I'll recap, in case someone else finds this thread in the future: The reason for not wanting a ceiling to angle across the room, is symmetry: A control room needs to be as symmetrical as possible at the front, to ensure that the acoustic balance between the left and right speakers, and between your left and right ears, is as close as possible. You don't want your left ear to hear things differently than your right ear, and you don't want your left speaker to sound different then your right one. So this is a key, even critical aspect, of control room design. On the other hand, you also don't want your head to be too close to the rear wall, since that would mean that the reflections coming off that wall, back to your ears, would arrive too early, and be at a level that is too high, for good clarity. There's a time difference, called the "Haas time", that affects the way our ears and brains interpret sounds: if an "echo" (or reflection) of a sound arrives at our ears more than about 20ms after the direct sound, then our brains are able to interpret it as actually being a separate sound, but if the reflection arrives earlier than 20ms, our brains cannot do that, and instead we hear both the direct sound and the reflection as being the same thing, just "merged" together, muddied up, and spread around. So you lose clarity, and the ability to accurately determine where the sound is coming from. Then there are also other more subtle things going on, such as comb filtering between the direct sound and its delayed version, and even direction shifts or apparent frequency shifts, due to the difference in timing. So the ideal situation is to have the rear wall far enough behind you that the reflections coming from it do not hit your ears until well after 20 ms, and also at a much lower level (ideally -20 dB or more). Then there's also the issue of geometry and modal response: room modes imply a pattern of standing waves in the room, which is at its absolute worst right in the middle, 50% of the distance from front wall to back wall. In a small room where there is only a short distance between the front and rear walls, it is not physically possible to keep your head away from that bad location at the 50% point: you need desk space for the console and/or DAW, and you need distance between your ears and the speakers. The theoretical ideal point is 38% from the front wall, or somewhere around there. With a small room, you can't get there. So those are the main reasons for recommending that the room should be set up to have the speakers firing down the longer axis (unless the room is big enough that the short axis still allows the above conditions to be met). So those are the issues here, and juggling them is not easy, since all of them are important. I would suggest playing around with possible locations for the speakers and mix position using the "short" orientation, to see if it is possible to get a usable location for everything. If there's no way that it can work, then you are stuck with switching to the "long" orientation, and either building an angled section of ceiling on one side of the room to match the other side, or just going with a flat ceiling. However, the ceiling is already so low that this introduces other issues, too. This is one of those cases where there are no good options, and no simple rules that you can apply definitively. So you just have to come up with the best compromise. - Stuart -

thanks heaps for your timely response :) thats pretty much what my theory was but i had no idea of the specifics so your details have been most helpful.. please view my updated plans (sorry so basic) and let me know if there are any major issues with design.. thankyou again!

It would be a lot better if you did the design in SketchUp. It will make your life a lot easier! (and ours too...) :) It's hard to tell from that simple line drawing, but it looks like the room is set up backwards. Assuming the triangular things at the top of the page are superchunk bass traps (that's what they look like), and that the angled "thing" at the bottom, of the page is supposed to be soffits in an RFZ design (which it very much resembles, and would be great), then the room is backwards: the couch should be at the back where the bass traps are, facing forwards, and the mix position (desk and chair) should be in the center of the actual RFZ created by the walls and soffit. Having said that, I'm not certain that what I'm seeing is what I think I'm seeing.... Apart from that: yes, your plan for the ceiling makes perfect sense. That is, indeed, the way to do it. And the triangular section above can be used for your HVAC ducting and silencer boxes, so it won't be wasted. - Stuart -