Studio Layout

Hello, I'm looking for some advice on studio layout: I'm embarking on a home studio build (for mixing/mastering/recording music, voiceovers etc., but perhaps not for tracking full bands live, given the space limitations). The home is a house in London, UK, semi-detached, in a quiet residential area with very little noise pollution. There is a general renovation of the house happening at the moment being done by a building contractor, but I'm planning to do the studio build separately afterwards, hopefully doing most of the construction myself or with specialist contractors. However, there are some aspects of the studio build that are going to involve the contractor who is doing the main renovation; for some of it, it makes sense to have it done now, and for other aspects, there are building control regulations that must be met. I'm looking for advice at this stage to inform the work that the building contractor will need to do in the next few weeks. The image attached shows the prospective studio space. Two rooms, the larger room (A) is existing and detached from the main house except for the wall on the right, which adjoins the residential part of the house. The smaller room (B) is an extension being built now in what is currently a garden; when built it will also be detached. Room B has external access and room A has access to the house. There will be two large windows in each room, along the walls facing the garden. Not marked in the image is a ceiling height of 2.3m. The walls are brick (to be soundproofed later), room A's ceiling (with flat roof above) is currently roofing felt>plywood>wooden rafters, room B's ceiling is to be similar but newly built. The ceilings will be insulated by the building contractor as will the left hand and bottom walls of room B (for building regs). I need to research on the forum what insulation material to use. I want to include a WC in the design, to make the studio self-contained. Initially it was planned to be installed in room B, but due to floor height and access to waste pipes that has been ruled out (barring installing a loud and problematic Saniflow macerator). A normal flow WC can be installed anywhere in room A. So my thinking now is to install the WC as marked in the plans, in the top left corner of room A, and building a wall running to the edge of the window, enclosing the doorway between A and B, giving a sound lock between the two rooms and room for a small kitchenette in the remaining space. The design of the studio (live room, control room, booths, ventilation, treatment, etc.) is all still to be done, and will be impacted by the size and shape of the WC/kitchenette. As I need to make a decision on this soon, I would appreciate all and any advice from you beautiful people, on this particular decision and, going forward, any thoughts you may have on the studio build in general (how to best soundproof that external door and those windows, which room for control room, which room for live room, orientation, etc.). But for now: 1. Where should the toilet live? 2. Does losing ~1m from the length of room A (which is potentially the control room) outweigh the benefits of not installing a macerator toilet? 3. What are your general thoughts on the size of the rooms and their potential use for live/control room? 4. Without asking a question about insulation material which I'm sure is covered on the forum already, any precautionary advice on ceiling and wall insulation with very limited space, as we have here. Thank you

...bump? I have to make a decision ASAP, so here's another go, in the very simplest of terms (I know how I'm going to isolate the room (details at the bottom, if they make a difference)): The height from floor to bottom of isolated ceiling is 2285mm The width from isolated wall to isolated wall is variable with a maximum of 3315mm (the above dimension was misinformed) The length from isolated wall to isolated partition is variable with a maximum of 3985 and a minimum of 3340. I have looked into ideal room mode ratios. Given the ceiling height, it seems as though I have very few options. From this http://bit.ly/1jeJl8F spreadsheet (which uses Salford.ac.uk data), it seems as though a ratio of 1:1.44:1.48 is the best I can do. In other words, reducing the length of the room to 3380mm (resulting in 2285:3290:3380, or 1:1.44:1.48). Ideally I would like as big a space to work in as I can get, for comfort reasons and fitting equipment in. My question is whether it's advisable to sacrifice 605mm of length to match a room ratio? Is it worth it or am I best to build something comfortable and deal with the issues after the fact? Any and all advice very much appreciated. * isolation is: WALLS: (from existing brick walls) 12mm air gap, 70mm stud with acoustic mineral wool in-fill, 40mm genie clips and resilient bars, 2x 12.5mm plasterboard/drywall. CEILING: (from existing chipboard which I've been told is very dense and rock solid (as gleaned form a similar build by my contractor)) existing joists filled with AMW, 40mm genie clips and resilient channels, 2x 12.5mm plasterboard/drywall All decoupled from eachother at the joints.

Hi there "seaweednylon", and WELCOME to the forum! :) Sorry about the looooonggg delay in getting a reply to your thread, and thanks for bumping it! For some reason, I didn't have it on my list of threads to reply to: it completely slipped past! :) Sorry!

the larger room (A)

I don't see where the rooms are marked "A" and "B" on the plans, so based on the description, I'm assuming that "A" is the room at the top of the drawing, measuring 5m by 3.8 m, and "B" is the smaller room on the lower left, measuring 4m by 2.19m. Correct?

and building a wall running to the edge of the window,

Window? What window? I don't see any windows marked on the drawing! I saw them mentioned in the description, but it would help a lot if everything was marked on the plans.

1. Where should the toilet live?

It's hard to say without seeing more detailed plans, but if that's the only place that makes sense, and where it actually can be installed and hooked up, then that's probably where it will have to go!

2. Does losing ~1m from the length of room A (which is potentially the control room) outweigh the benefits of not installing a macerator toilet?

That's not an easy question to answer, since there are so many variables. For example, if this is going to be a commercial studio, then you would probably want to aim for meeting the ITU/EBU/AES specs for control rooms, which specify a minimum floor area of either 20 or 30m2, depending on the purpose of the room. If it is just a hobby studio, or for your own private use, then you could make it smaller and still have a really good studio. Then there's the issue of room ratios: You should plug in your room dimensions to one of the room ratio calculators on the internet, and see what the results are. Try these two: http://amroc.andymel.eu/ http://www.bobgolds.com/Mode/RoomModes.htm See if you can improve your modal response by playing with the dimensions a bit. But there's no need to go crazy! As long as you are inside the Bolt area, pass all 3 BBC critical tests, and are far away from the bad rations, then that's fine. However, those dimensions refer to the inside of your inner-leaf, not to the actual building shell (the outer-leaf), so you'll first need to decide how much isolation you need for your studio, in order to figure out how thick your inner-leaf walls will be, which defines where the final inner-leaf surfaces will be.

3. What are your general thoughts on the size of the rooms and their potential use for live/control room?

They are usable for a typical home studio. You don't provide much information about the purpose of the rooms, but you'd probably be able to get a small band in the live room (3 or 4 people with their gear and instruments). It's a bit small for larger groups, or for great acoustics, but it can work for small groups, and close-mic'ing. For professional studios, the live room is normally several times larger than the control room, also for acoustic reasons (not just band sizes!), but for project studios, your type of layout is typical.

The design of the studio (live room, control room, booths,

"Booths"? What booths? You don't seem to have enough space for booths in there. Will they go some other place, in a different room?

... design of the studio (live room, control room, booths, ventilation, treatment, etc.) is all still to be done,

To be honest, ALL of that should be in place before you start building ANY of it! Normally in the design process, you find you need to change things, move them around, enlarge, reduce, modify angles, heights, positions, thicknesses, etc. several times, as you play the "juggling game" of trying to fit everything in in the best possible way, while compromising the sound and functionality as little as possible. Once you commit certain things to being "written in stone", so to speak, then you severely start limiting your options, and usually end up with a less functional or worse-sounding room than could have been the case if you left all options open until the end.

(how to best soundproof that external door and those windows,

Answer: you cannot sound proof only your doors and windows. Soundproofing (more technically know as "isolating") is an "all or nothing" situation. Either you isolate the entire room, or you do nothing at all, because just doing some parts is pointless: it is a waste of money, and will not achieve anything useful. I often use the "fishtank" analogy: If you want to build an aquarium in your living room, to hold water and have some fish in it, then you have to build all sides of the aquarium fully water-tight. You cannot decide "Well, I only want to look at them from the front, so I'll only put glass on the front, then I'll put cardboard on the sides, and carpet on the back". You can imagine the results.... :) Water leaks out and splashes everywhere, and your fish die. Your studio is exactly the same. Sound acts like water in many ways, so if you don't make your entire studio "sound-tight" just like you need to make the aquarium "water-tight", then sound will leak out all over and splash around the neighborhood and the rest of your house. Isolation is an entire process that covers the complete room, not just the windows and doors. It involves the walls, floor, ceiling, doors, windows, HVAC and electrical system. All of those must have the correct mass on them to get the amount of isolation that you need, and they all need to be sealed air-tight (except for the HVAC, obviously!). That is generally done as a 2-leaf fully decoupled MSM system, which is not as complex as it sounds. So there's nothing that we can say about how to soundproof your doors and windows, until you also soundproof all the rest of it.

which room for control room, which room for live room, orientation, etc.)

It might be better to consider using the smaller room as the CR, especially if you need to track large groups. On the other hand, that would be a very small control room, and by the time you add the inner-leaf for isolation, it will be tiny. It all depends on what your priorities are: you mention "mastering" in your first post, which implies a large control room, well isolated and very carefully treated to be as totally neutral acoustically as the room allows: I doubt you could build a mastering studio in that small room, so if mastering is a key objective, then go with the larger room for the CR. On the other-other-other hand, if your main objective is tracking live drums or large bands, then you'll need the larger room for your live room, since you can't do that in the smaller room. So basically, we need to know a lot more about your goals, plans, intentions, etc. in order to be able to help you decide. There are pros and cons all around.

4. Without asking a question about insulation material which I'm sure is covered on the forum already, any precautionary advice on ceiling and wall insulation with very limited space, as we have here.

"Insulating" is all about stopping heat getting in or out. "Isolating" is about stopping sound getting in or out. "Insulation", in the form of fluffy slabs of mineral wool or fiberglass, is used in both, but for very different purposes, and in different ways. Contrary to popular belief, putting thick acoustic foam on the walls of your room does nothing at all to isolate it. It might help a bit with thermal insulation, and it will help some with acoustic treatment inside the room (making the room sound better), but it will do about zero to stop sound getting in or out. Insulation can be PART of the isolation system, but insulation by itself does zilch. Nada. Zip. There are only a handful of things that you can do to stop sound getting from one place to another: You can build a barrier so massive (heavy) that the sound waves cannot make it vibrate. You can build a barrier so rigid (stiff) that the sound waves cannot make it vibrate: You can build a barrier so viscous (absorptive, damping) that the sound waves cannot make it vibrate. Or you can remove all possible paths for vibration to get there, including air ("In space, nobody can hear you scream"). In physics, those are the only methods for stopping a waves. That's it. Applying an inch or two of foam to the walls does not accomplish any of those: foam is not massive, it is not rigid, and it is nowhere near viscous enough. You'd have to make it many, many meters thick in order to get enough mass, stiffness or damping. The problem with all of those, is that there is no single material that can do that! There is no know material massive enough to stop all sound waves, or stiff enough, or viscous enough. Even half a meter of solid concrete will only get you about 50 dB of sound attenuation. But there's one final method, if you relax the "block all sound waves" parameter, and make it "block most sound waves": you can build a barrier that acts as a tuned filter, and actively blocks some frequencies while allowing others through: That is much more feasible, and is easily achievable using the principle of physics knows as "mass-spring-mass", or "MSM" for short. Think of a weight hanging on the end of a spring: if you pull it down and let go, it will stay there bobbing up and down for a long time, and one specific rate, and there is nothing you can do to make it "bob" at a different rate. No matter how hard you try, pulling harder or softer, it will not want to bob at any other rate, because it is a tune system. It actively resits "bobbing" at all other frequencies, except the one it is tune to. The same principle can be applied to studio walls: design them so that the will only vibrate at one specific frequency, and they will active resist all other frequencies. If you choose that frequency so that it is outside the range of human hearing, then you can isolate the entire audible spectrum. That's what "fully decoupled 2-leaf MSM" is all about. Building your room so that the walls themselves are tuned, and provide the isolation you need. You can do that at much lower cost, and with a lot less materials, and in a lot less space, than by trying to do it with mass alone, or stiffness alone, or viscosity alone. So that's where you should start: design the isolation walls around your rooms correctly, so that they provide the level of isolation that you need. Once you have that in place, then you can figure out how much space you have left inside your rooms, and do the layout based on that. Use the "standard" generic layout for your control room, with the "standard" treatment, and you'll be fine. You can then refine that, both in the design stage and also after the room is built and tested, by adding or removing additional treatment. And the same applies to your live room, to a lesser extent, since the two rooms have very different design goals. I'd suggest two books for you: "Master Handbook of Acoustics" by F. Alton Everest (that's sort of the Bible for acoustics), and "Home Recording Studio: Build it Like the Pros", by Rod Gervais. Those will get you started on understanding the principles behind acoustics (how sound REALLY works, not how most people THINK it works), and also the basics of how to actually design and build the studio optimally, from the "nuts and bolts" point of view: materials, techniques, pitfalls, etc.

Ideally I would like as big a space to work in as I can get, for comfort reasons and fitting equipment in. My question is whether it's advisable to sacrifice 605mm of length to match a room ratio?

Probably not. I would suggest trying the other two calculators I linked to, since they are interactive and easy to follow, then try playing around with combinations of dimensions until you get away from the "bad" areas and reasonably close to the "good" areas. That's all you need to worry about: Don't go overboard on ratios! There is no need at all to nudge walls by mm, or even by small cm increments: just get away from the bad, close to the good, and you are done.

s it worth it or am I best to build something comfortable and deal with the issues after the fact?

Build it as big as you can, while still staying away from "bad". That's all you really need to do, unless this is going to be a world-class mastering studio: that would need far more attention to design, and you'd probably be better off hiring someone to design it for you in that case. You can save a lot of money (and heartache!) like that. - Stuart -