Hi Carl. Welcome (back!).
Please read the
forum rules for posting (click here). You seem to be missing a couple of things!
:)
In fact, it's be so successful, that I've outgrown it
Cool!
:thu:
one thing I did in my old space was to splay the walls to make a trapezoidal room. This helped tremendously with keeping standing waves to a minimum on the sides of the room.
That's a common misconception, actually. Splaying the walls doesn't do much for modal response, but it does help for flutter echo if the total splay is more than about 12°, and it does help even more if you are trying to achieve a proper RFZ design. So from those two points of view, splayed walls are a good thing, but not for modes. Sure, if you angle a wall enough then the axial modes associated with that wall disappear, but by the very same act you create a number of tangential and oblique modes to replace the axials! That might or might not be useful, depending on many factors.
Is there a room size where this technique would start to have minimal ROI in terms of reflections? I am building in a new space that is 19' x 17', and can't decide if I should splay the side walls or not, and if so, at what angle to splay them.
Maybe you are actually asking the wrong question! It's more important to decide on which design concept you plan to follow for your room, then design the room around that concept. For example, if you decide on RFZ (which I strongly recommend, personally), CID or NER, then you pretty much have to splay your side walls (or part of them, at least), since that's the only realistic way of attaining the goals. But if you are going with some other design concept, such as the outdated LEDE design, or something entirely different, then you might not need to splay them.
There's also the issue of speaker mount. If you go with the (highly recommended) method of flush mounting your speakers (aka "soffit mounting"), then splaying part of the side walls is just a good idea, as it blends the speaker soffits into the room better, both acoustically and visually.
Finally, there's the issues of practicality, space, construction ability, etc. There might be other reasons why it would be good or not good to splay your walls, depending on the rest of the building, your building skills, etc.
So I'd suggest that you should first decide on the basic design criteria for your control room, along with any other rooms that might be around it, or associated with it, then based on that decide if you want to splay (or not splay) your side walls.
- Stuart -