Hi guys, we have been researching here for a few months now on how to build recording studios. Everyones advice on here has been amazing and has actually saved us (and more than likely will save us more) from making huge mistakes on the design and construction of our studio. We would like to thank everyone who has contributed their useful knowledge here.
Last week we acquired a space that was within budget and not too small. All together is around 1000sq ft over 2 floors. We plan to use upstairs for a live room and control room and downstairs as chillout/Waiting area/kitchen/jam rooms.
We will be using the room within a room technique for the control room to try and achieve the best isolation we can (within budget) between live room, control room and down stairs. Upstairs floor is huge concrete slabs and we have read that if they are not on the earth they can become resonant which is bad, but the reason we chose upstairs and not downstairs for the studio is our roof height we have upstairs, it is 15ft high and we would like to take advantage of this acoustically.
We plan to float the control room floor and/or the drums on neoprene pads (or something similar) to combat the resonance problem with the mechanical connection between control room and live room made by the concrete slab. There is also a layer of poured concrete on top of the slabs around 2 inches thick which covers the whole floor, we dont know if this will help or hinder us with isolation.
Our pitched roof peak reaches 15ft although the wooden structure holding the roof up only allows us to build a control room at 9ft high and it will be considerably smaller on the inside as this is a 2 leaf system. On both east and west walls brick is used all the way the peak.
We tried to keep it a 2 leaf system all round but as you can see in the pics, 3 walls of the control room have 3 leafs. We have read somewhere that 2 leafs are better than 3 but have also read that more mass is better and unless we are missing something (which we probably are) there seems to be a condradiction there.
The reason we designed it like this is that when the live room leaf meets the control room leaf it would seem a huge waste of space to build the live room leaf all the way to the top of the pitched roof so we essentially wrapped the wall all the way around the control room like a lid over a box and as the control room has its own floating floor, walls and ceiling it essentially creates an air gap the whole way round the control room making it a true room within room. And leaving the pitched roof open and wood showing in the live room will add so much character and sound to our studio.
We also realize that our design has parallel walls which are not good in studio as they cause standing waves and things so we will be angling and treating some walls to combat this.
There is only 1 wall in this building that is joined to another building and that is the western wall beside the stairs, it is a beauty parlour, and we are around 50 yards down an alley from a main street in belfast city centre. Although we haven't took any db readings yet the outside noise is not that bad by ear with window closed. There will also be a sealed door at the bottom of the stairs as well as the top.
We will try to get the best rockwool slabs, plasterboard, acoustic caulk, treatment materials etc. that budget will allow. All stud walls and both control room ceilings will be insulated with rockwool and plasterboard as will the angled pitched roof all the way to the top. Also on the pitched roof plasterboard will not be used, just rockwool and a fabric.
We are also concerned about the weight of upstairs on the slabs but downstairs is already split into 2 rooms and a load-bearing wall is directly under the double patio doors spanning the whole width so we hope this will help with the weight upstairs but we will get a structural engineer to confirm this first obviously.
Now, we have not came across this type of design in our research before and wonder if its even a viable option and we welcome any advice and constructive criticism anybody can give us. And any advice on how we would install a ventilation system in this design would be greatly appreciated.
We are a small group of sound engineers and musicians who are throwing our resources together and this will be more of personal space than a commercial recording studio and we have some construction and electrical experience and friends who are fully skilled tradesmen so labour cost will be very minimal.
Our budget is £10,000 GBP for building materials and already have most of the equipment needed for recording.
Our skp. file was too large to post so we could only post jpg's. The design is not 100% accurate as im still trying to figure out sketchup and the pics do not depict the floating floor or ceilings of the control room and some joins are uneven.
Any and all comments are welcome and thanks in advance
Gerard. :D
A little more messing around with sketchup and came up with this design. This way keeps 2 leafs all the way round. The exterior brick wall is not present in this quick design.
Control room and live room design
Originally posted at johnlsayers.com, topic 18691.
Hi Gerard,
If you haven't read Rod Gervais' book, then start with that. With 3 leaves you raise the resonant frequency of the structure (below which you have no isolation), so 2 is best. Additional mass and/or distance between leaves will decrease the resonant frequency and increase the isolation.
In terms of achieving a two leaf design, perhaps the floorplan attached will help.
I don't quite understand what you mean with the ceilings, but each leaf needs to be complete (caulked and sealed) and of equal mass on all sides for optimal performance.
Floating floors: Read the sticky on this site, and http://prorecordingworkshop.lefora.com/topic/4239676/Floating-floors-how-to-avoid-common-mistakes. You may not need it.
What are you looking for / what do you need in terms of isolation?
Colm
Hi Colm and thanks for the reply. I realize that 2 leafs are better than 3, I couldn't figure out how to do it with only 2. But I think I have found way that might work. See attached skp. file above. What we want is to achieve a nice sounding live room with good isolation in the control room. We will be using drums so the best isolation possible with our budget will be all we can do. More mass is better but mass=money so we will have to compromise somewhere. For the ceiling we would like to have the whole attic area open in the live room with all the wood showing, I think our latest design would allow us to do this. Thanks again Gerard.Hi Gerard, If you haven't read Rod Gervais' book, then start with that. With 3 leaves you raise the resonant frequency of the structure (below which you have no isolation), so 2 is best. Additional mass and/or distance between leaves will decrease the resonant frequency and increase the isolation. In terms of achieving a two leaf design, perhaps the floorplan attached will help. I don't quite understand what you mean with the ceilings, but each leaf needs to be complete (caulked and sealed) and of equal mass on all sides for optimal performance. Floating floors: Read the sticky on this site, and http://prorecordingworkshop.lefora.com/topic/4239676/Floating-floors-how-to-avoid-common-mistakes. You may not need it. What are you looking for / what do you need in terms of isolation? Colm
Hi Gerard, and welcome to the forum! :)
As Colm said, that would be a bad idea, unless you have a big budget and can afford the huge amount of mass you need to do that correctly. Colm already gave you a link to one interesting thread about floating floors, but here's another one that would be well worthwhile reading: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8173 Basically, the conclusion of both of those threads is simply this: Floating a floor correctly is not easy, and cannot be accomplished with rubber pads and plywood, despite what you see in so many YouTube videos. It just doesn't work that way. Floating a floor requires mass, and very careful calculations. Getting it wrong makes matters WORSE than doing nothing at all, so unless you have the budget and the knowledge to do it right, it just isn't worth it.We plan to float the control room floor and/or the drums on neoprene pads ...
I see that, but I don't understand why you did that. It makes no sense. The inner frame is not needed at all: Just cut the outer frame where it meets the framing for the live room, and build the fourth side of the framing across there.We tried to keep it a 2 leaf system all round but as you can see in the pics, 3 walls of the control room have 3 leafs.
There's no contradiction, since that is two entirely different and separate things. One is mass, the other is three-leaf. If you need more mass, then just put it on one (or both) of the two correct leaves. The three-leaf issue arises due to resonance issues, not the need for more mass. In simple terms, any wall with mass on the outsides and an air gap in the middle has a natural resonant frequency, which is determined by the amount of mass on the leaves, and the size of the air gap. At the resonant frequency, the wall does not isolate at all. In fact, it actually amplifies! In the range from about an octave below the resonant frequency to 1.4 times the resonant frequency, the wall makes the sound louder on the other side, since the wall itself resonates in sympathy. So for example, if your wall is tuned to 36 Hz, and you play that note on a bass guitar, then it will be heard very loudly outside the room. Zero isolation. That wall would only isolate frequencies above 50 Hz, and would not isolate well until about 90 Hz (and higher) So obviously, that's not what you want! Clearly, you have to tune the wall so that it does NOT resonate at any of the frequencies that you need to isolate. You need to tune the resonant frequency so low that the wall isolates for the entire audible spectrum, or at least for the part that you are interested in isolating. You tune it by changing the air gap: a bigger gap means a lower frequency. You also tune it by adding mass: more mass means a lower frequency. OK, so not think if your 3-leaf wall: instead of having one large air gap, you have two small ones! You already know that large air gaps mean low resonant frequencies, while small gaps mean high resonant frequencies. So a 3-leaf wall with thin air gaps will resonate at high frequencies, even if it has more mass! It is those thin gaps that force the resonant frequencies up the scale, into the part of the spectrum that you wanted to isolate. Even though you might have a lot of mass in the wall, it still resonates at a frequency that is higher than it would have been if there were only two leaves with a much larger air gap. Sure, it is possible to compensate for this by adding even MORE mass to the wall, to drive the resonant frequency down again, but why waste money on buying twice as much drywall as you need, when air is free? :) If you have the option, use the free air, rather than the costly drywall...We have read somewhere that 2 leafs are better than 3 but have also read that more mass is better and unless we are missing something (which we probably are) there seems to be a condradiction there.
You can still do that very easily, without making it a 3-leaf system Build each room separately, as a SINGLE leaf, within the shell of the building itself, which is the SINGLE outer leaf...The reason we designed it like this is that when the live room leaf meets the control room leaf it would seem a huge waste of space to build the live room leaf all the way to the top of the pitched roof so we essentially wrapped the wall all the way around the control room like a lid over a box and as the control room has its own floating floor, walls and ceiling it essentially creates an air gap the whole way round the control room making it a true room within room. And leaving the pitched roof open and wood showing in the live room will add so much character and sound to our studio.
Welll.... Yes and no... Standing waves do not need parallel walls to form. They can form any time there is a path around the room that guides the wave back to its original starting point, in phase with itself. That happens in ANY shape room, regardless of whether or not the walls are parallel. So you will ALWAYS have standing waves in a room, no matter how you angle the walls, floor or ceiling. Those represent "modes" of resonance inside the room, and predicting the modal response of the room is a big part of studio design. Unfortunately, you can only predict modes easily for a purely rectangular room: There are very simple equations, and numerous on-line calculators ans spreadsheets for doing exactly that: Plug in the length, width and height of your room, and instantly you get a list of the modes, plus often graphs and other information. But that only works for rectangles. As soon as you angle one of the walls, those simple (and free) calculators no longer work, and you have to resort to much more complex (and expensive) FEM/FEA software to do the calculations, and you need an operator who knows how to set up the boundary conditions for the software based on your room shape, and then knows how to interpret the results. For rooms that are slightly off rectangular, the errors are not that great, but for big angles, well, you have a problem. So you'll always have modes in your room, and by making it non-rectangular you just make it far more difficult to calculate. Angling walls might be needed for other reasons, such as RFZ or CID design, for example, and that would be a very valid reason for angling walls. It is also useful for preventing flutter echo, for example, but there are other ways of dealing with that, with acoustic treatment. And finally, some people angle their walls just because it looks cool! That's also a valid reason, provided you are aware of the issues and deal with the accordingly. So that's my long, convoluted way of saying that you can angle your walls if you want, but you should do so intelligently, not randomly, and with understanding, not guesswork.We also realize that our design has parallel walls which are not good in studio as they cause standing waves and things so we will be angling and treating some walls to combat this.
That should be the very next step, then. Before you can design the isolation system for your studio, you first need to understand how much isolation you need, in decibels. The only way to do that is by measuring levels: "How loud are you?" and "How quiet do you need to be?". Based on the answers to those two questions, you can then design the isolation.Although we haven't took any db readings yet
so you don't actually need any isolation at all then? :) Without the second leaf provided by the drywall (plasterboard), you are limited to an equation known as "mass law", which describes how a single leaf isolates. Hint: not very well! :)Also on the pitched roof plasterboard will not be used, just rockwool and a fabric.
... and very wisely so! Once you have done your initial design for the isolation system (based on the decibel questions above) then you need to hire a structural engineer to take a look at what you have and what you plan to do, and sign off on that, or alternatively tell you how you need to beef up the structure to handle the extra load. For this type of build on an upper floor, a structural engineer is not a luxury: he is an absolute necessity.We are also concerned about the weight of upstairs on the slabs ... but we will get a structural engineer to confirm this first obviously
Excellent! It's good to see that you guys are thinking this trough up front! You'd be surprised at the number of people who try to build studios without giving a thought to HVAC, until it is too late... HVAC design for studios is a huge subject on its own, but basically, you need to calculate how much air you need to move through the room per hour, then design duct work that can handle that volume of air flow at a low enough speed (under 300 fpm), then design silencer boxes that will allow that to happen while also maintaining the level of isolation you need. That's the "V" part of HVAC. The "H" part probably isn't too much of an issue, but hte AC part is. You also need to calculate how much heat will be put out by all the people, equipment, lighting and electrical stuff in the room, and also how much humidity the people will put out, then design the AC system to be able to deal with that amount of heat and that amount of humidity, given the climate where you live. It's a bit more complicated than that, but that gives you the basics.And any advice on how we would install a ventilation system in this design would be greatly appreciated.
post it on a file sharing site, such as DropBox, then post the link here.Our skp. file was too large to post so we could only post jpg's.
so you don't need a good sounding control room, or isolation for the live room? :) Normally, you need "both for both". It's really hard to isolate only the control room, without also isolating the live room. And normally the control room should be designed to have neutral acoustics, so it sounds as flat as possible in terms of frequency response and also time-domain response (RT), so the "sound" of the control room is important too.What we want is to achieve a nice sounding live room with good isolation in the control room.
As I mentioned above, there are two ways of reducing the resonant frequency of a wall (and therefore improving the isolation). You can either add mass, or you can increase the air gap. Mass costs money. Air is free... :!: By the way, I love your signature! "Failing to prepare is preparing to fail!". Very, very true for studio design. - Stuart -More mass is better but mass=money so we will have to compromise somewhere.
Hi soundman, thanks for reply and advice.
yes, came across this in my research which is what convinced me that we that we need a floating floor. We have an empty shell at the minute and from upstairs I can feel vibrations, through the concrete slabs, from an ipod dock downstairs. Now, there are holes drilled through from the last tenants electrical work and the ipod dock has a subwoofer. Is this the slabs resonating? Or is this happening due to the drilled holes?As Colm said, that would be a bad idea, unless you have a big budget and can afford the huge amount of mass you need to do that correctly. Colm already gave you a link to one interesting thread about floating floors, but here's another one that would be well worthwhile reading: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8173
https://www.dropbox.com/home?select=Latest%20design.skp Here is a skp. file of our latest design, it keeps 2 leaves all the way around the control room. Is this what you meant in your advice?I see that, but I don't understand why you did that. It makes no sense. The inner frame is not needed at all: Just cut the outer frame where it meets the framing for the live room, and build the fourth side of the framing across there.
This is great info, we really understand 2 vs 3 leaves a lot more. Thanks. Is there an easy way measure the resonant frequency of our walls without buying a ridiculously expensive gadget?There's no contradiction, since that is two entirely different and separate things......
Ok a little more knowledge is needed in the physics of sound. :oops:Welll.... Yes and no... Standing waves do not need parallel walls to form. They can form any time there is a path around the room that guides the wave back to its original starting point, in phase with itself.....
Our location is good, we are surrounded on 3 sides by abandoned buildings and a beauty shop is joined at the wall nearest to the stairs which will not be a problem as we will rarely be working business hours. I will post our readings as soon as i can.That should be the very next step, then. Before you can design the isolation system for your studio, you first need to understand how much isolation you need, in decibels. The only way to do that is by measuring levels: "How loud are you?" and "How quiet do you need to be?". Based on the answers to those two questions, you can then design the isolation.
Yes and no. Where we are is pretty quiet, even when there is zero insulation, from outside. We are worried that not plaster boarding the pitched roof will effect our isolation between control room and live room. So we need good isolation between live room and control room but not so much from outside. Would this new design accomplish this? Or are we misunderstanding the laws of physics again?so you don't actually need any isolation at all then?
Yes, we viewed a few other local studios which didn't have proper ventilation and the smell was terrible, so proper ventilation definitely needed.Excellent! It's good to see that you guys are thinking this trough up front! You'd be surprised at the number of people who try to build studios without giving a thought to HVAC, until it is too late...
Sorry let me re-phrase....We would like the best isolation possible between LR and CR while also trying to keep the LR as large as possible.so you don't need a good sounding control room, or isolation for the live room? Normally, you need "both for both". It's really hard to isolate only the control room, without also isolating the live room. And normally the control room should be designed to have neutral acoustics, so it sounds as flat as possible in terms of frequency response and also time-domain response (RT), so the "sound" of the control room is important too.
Ok air is free, good, we will take this into consideration in the final design. I like your signature too, made us laugh. Brilliant advice Stuart, thanks very much GerardAs I mentioned above, there are two ways of reducing the resonant frequency of a wall (and therefore improving the isolation). You can either add mass, or you can increase the air gap. Mass costs money. Air is free...