Angled walls... Always better??

Hi everybody, Originally posted this in the construction forum but guess it is more of a design question... New here and just have to say what an awesome site and resource for information. Thanks to everyone who has contributed and built this up over the years! I'm in the process of building a studio in Berlin, Germany. What we are working on expanding our rehearsal room/demo studio into another room next door thus creating a control room & live room. The rooms are on the 4th floor of a warehouse building and based on an outside wall - so we have a window and a VIEW! - quite a luxury in this city!!! The building is an old building from around 1900 and of very solid concrete construction and the good news is that we are the only people making music in the entire place and are completely surrounded by storage above, below and around us on our floor! We have been playing LOUD blues laden rock there for well over a year and have only had one complaint from a nearby open air bar when playing with the windows open (which is fair enough!) I'm in the process of drawing up proper detailed plans with proper construction details etc but for the time being just had a quick question regarding the layout of one wall... At the current moment, the space that will become our control room only consists of three walls with the forth opening out into the enormous storage space. What we are wondering is whether to build the wall straight, and add acoustic treatment later, or to angle the wall to improve the acoustics of the room? Where the wall will go is shown in red on the picture... As we are building the wall from scratch I don't want to miss a trick and create more work for ourselves fixing acoustic issues we created ourselves later on. I have read differing views on this. Is it better with small rooms such as this to conserve as much space as possible by having a straight wall + treatment? Or would the room be much improved by having a more acoustically suitable structure? Any help or opinions are much appreciated! I will post some more detailed plans very soon! Cheers, Matt

I answered this in your other thread, so I'm just copying that answer here:

What we are wondering is whether to build the wall straight, and add acoustic treatment later, or to angle the wall to improve the acoustics of the room?

That depends somewhat on which design philosophy you are going to follow for your control room. If you want to use a true RFZ design, then angling your side walls is a must. Or at least angling the front half of the side walls. It can be advantageous for CID and NER designs too, and even for plain old LEDE, to a certain extent. But if you don't want to go with any of those, and just want a basic low-end control room without the benefits of those more advanced acoustic concepts, then you can just leave it rectangular, and treat accordingly. However, regardless of which design philosophy you decide to follow, you should always start out with room dimensions that are close to one of the good ratios, such as Sepmeyer, Louden, or Bolt, and stay far away from the ratios that are known to be terrible for acoustics. Such as a square room.... :) Right now yours is practically square, meaning that all your room modes in the width axis will line up with all the modes in the length axis, making them twice as loud and also leaving large gaps between modal frequencies. So I'd suggest that you should adjust the position of that wall until you get a good ratio, independent of which design philosophy you decide to use. Right now you show one wall at 4.4m, and another at 4.5. That's practically square! If the height also happens to be close to 2.25m, then you have pretty much the worst possible scenario....

As we are building the wall from scratch I don't want to miss a trick and create more work for ourselves fixing acoustic issues we created ourselves later on.

The room is small, so it will need a lot of acoustic treatment anyway, mostly in the form of bass trapping, regardless of how you angle the walls. Angling helps (considerably!) for different reasons, depending on the design philosophy, but it won't make a lot of difference in terms of total room treatment.

I have read differing views on this.

Right! It all depends on which design concept you follow. There are pros and cons with all of them. That's just part of the entire studio design thing: since "small room" and "great acoustics" don't go together, designing a studio is really all about compromises. There are many, many things that can be adjusted in a studio to improve one aspect, but doing so practically always has a detrimental effect on another aspect. So design is all about finding the best compromise between all of the factors. - Stuart -

Hi Stuart Many many thanks for this reply and sorry that it has taken me so long to get around to saying that! Newborns, otherwork etc kind of slowed down the studio project for a while but its now back on track... In the end, due to lease constrictions and budget, we decided to build the wall straight as we figured it would give us the most clear idea of how to treat the room using mode calculators and the like. The lease constrictions came in the form of that as we rented the warehouse space in units the wall has to fit within the boundaries of said unit which are defined by the position of structural beams and pillars of the building. So even if we wanted to angle that wall we would have only had a very little leeway in which to do so as the wall had to fit beneath a beam only 25cm wide... We did however manage to pull the wall in a little which I hope improved the ratios somewhat... There is more info on this in my new post in the Acoustic section titled "Effect of ceiling beams on room modes" if you fancy taking a look! All the best and thanks again! Matt