New Studio in Wagga Wagga Australia - Part of New House

Hi. I am looking at constructing a room for practice and recording. I would like this to be sound proof to prevent bleed into other rooms of the house and outside as much as possible. Can I treat the walls to allow a full band playing rock/pop so that sound will not bleed into the outer rooms or is this not possible. I have attached the part of the house showing dimensions and surrounding rooms. It will be of brick construction for outer walls with colourbond roofing and on a concrete slab. The room marked home theatre is the room I plan to use as a live room for recording and practice. I plan to mix in this room as well as I would prefer to have a large room to track in and also to mix - thus not split it down into two rooms. If needs be I can use the room marked as a study as a control room for tracking drums etc - I run a 16ch firewire to Mac type setup. Been doing mainly remote location recording so I can move recording gear around if needed. My main worry for the moment is how to get this constructed as a sound proof room?? Attached also is a soec sheet from a company in Australia that make a product called barrier board. - Do I need to go to that extent using layers of 16mm Gyprock and Barrierboard. Do I need to float the floor? Or just sit the wall studs on a rubber type decoupler. I am trying to allow for around $10,000 extra on top of the house cost for sound proofing. I hope the attached files are enough to get me started here. Regards Anthony

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

Can I treat the walls to allow a full band playing rock/pop so that sound will not bleed into the outer rooms

It is possible, yes, but it is complex and expensive. Your budget probably won't go far enough for that. However, you can still be very good isolation on a low budget.

My main worry for the moment is how to get this constructed as a sound proof room??

The basic concept for doing that is known as "room-in-a-room", or "fully decoupled two-leaf MSM isolation" in more technical terms. If you search the forum for those, you'll find numerous references about how to do it.

Do I need to go to that extent using layers of 16mm Gyprock and Barrierboard.

It's not that simple, unfortunately. If it were so easy, then this forum would not exist! :) Attaining high levels of isolation is not as easy as some manufacturers would have you believe. There are no "magical" materials that can beat the laws of physics...

Do I need to float the floor? Or just sit the wall studs on a rubber type decoupler.

Both of those would be a bad idea. For details, read here: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8173

I am trying to allow for around $10,000 extra on top of the house cost for sound proofing.

If the house is not yet built there there are a number of things that can be incorporated into the design itself that will cost you little to nothing at all! If you design in the isolation on the original plans, then the cost is very low. If you try to modify something that is already built, that's a whole lot more expensive... - Stuart -

Hi Thanks for the information. - I did read the forum rules. I didn't mention ceiling height because I am still looking into my options there. This house is only in design stage so I am trying to work out the best options to put into this room.

If the house is not yet built there there are a number of things that can be incorporated into the design itself that will cost you little to nothing at all! If you design in the isolation on the original plans, then the cost is very low. If you try to modify something that is already built, that's a whole lot more expensive...

This is encouraging - can I enlist some help on this one - where do I start to get a design for this room. The basic size is listed on the plan but could be changed slightly I guess as long as it fits in with the house plan. Roof height recommenations would be greatly appreciated. I thought a skillion style of ceiling might be a good option? Anthony

I did read the forum rules.

... but you seem to have missed the paragraph with the big blue letters... :)

The basic size is listed on the plan but could be changed slightly I guess as long as it fits in with the house plan. Roof height recommenations would be greatly appreciated.

There's concept you should look into, called "room ratio", which is basically about the relationship between the length, width and height of your room. There are "good" ratios, and there are "bad" ratios. This is all related to the modal response of the room, or how the natural resonant frequencies of the room are spread across the audio spectrum. With "good" ratios, they are spread around evenly, not too close to each other, and not too far apart. They are also musically related in the best cases. Bad ratios have the modes spread around haphazardly, with several bunched together, or even right on top of each other (worst case), and large empty gaps between them, where there is no modal support. So the very first thing you should do is to look for good ratios in the general area of the possible dimensions that you have to play with, and decide on what ratio (and therefore what dimensions) you will have for the final inner walls and inner ceiling of the room. Starting from that point, you then work "outwards" to figure out where the outer walls and ceiling of the room will be, and you do that by deciding on how much isolation you want for your room, then allowing for the necessary thickness of the air gap and the building materials. With those two sets of dimensions in place, you can then get your architect to draw up the plans correctly, with the two sets of framing (inner wall and outer wall) properly set in the right positions. Then you can figure out the best places to put your doors, windows, HVAC ducts, and suchlike, based on the acoustic goals for the room and the layout of the rest of the house. Since this is just basically "lines on paper" at this point, there is no cost at all to trying out many iterations until you get the best fit. You can try different things, play around, re-orient the room, etc., and all it costs you right now is the time to do it. The only additional cost that you will see in the actual construction of the room, is the extra cost of materials and labor for the inner wall and inner ceiling, but since they are designed in from the start, it is a whole lot easier (and much cheaper!) than trying to modify an existing room. Search the forum for "room ratio" and "modal response", and you'll come up with a ton of references that you can work through to get an idea of what you'll need to do. Also, plug in the likely dimensions to Bob Golds' calculator (here: http://www.bobgolds.com/Mode/RoomModes.htm ) and take a look at the results. Play around with the numbers until you get a good result.

I thought a skillion style of ceiling might be a good option?

It's probably better to stick to a plain rectangular room for your first attempt at designing a studio. You can go for more complex shapes if you want, but that just add unnecessary headaches: room mode calculations only work for rectangular room with size sides. As soon as you start angling one or more sides, or adding more sides, then the calculations become vastly more complicated. What you COULD do, is to hang angled ceiling clouds inside the finished room, which can give the same effect visually, and are very useful, acoustically. Search the forum for "ceiling cloud", and you'll find many examples of how people have built them and used them in their rooms. - Stuart -