NONprofit University seeks your expertise on a ISO Room

All, First off thank you for any help you provide. This is my first post. I have read through some old topics and I am amazed at the amount proffessional information on this page. I was just refered to this page over at gearslutz and the timing couldnt be better. I have to design a drum room and control room in one existing space. The drum room needs to be built well enough so that drums do not bleed outside of the studio. This iso room is going inside a Drexel University building and needs to be isolated from the rest of the academic activities. Unfortunately, as you can see below the space is square. The wall that comes up from the bottom is the 10' mark. The room is 18'8"x 10'. I basically want to build an 8 foot by 8 foot floating room with a window. One problem is that the ceiling is only 8 foot tall. Do you have any suggestions for the design that will stop a small drum kit (or come close to it). The construction is going to be union work. My only thought is to build a room in a room, but I have no idea where to start. Do you have any better or more creative suggestions for this space? This will only be a small project studio for students to do their work in. It will be a small Pro Tools room with a 16 channel mixing board a quicklock studio desk with one rack of pres. Due to space our biggest concern is isolation, then functionality, then acoustics. So what do you studio design gurus suggest? I appreciate any advice, comments or direction you may give me. I am a little concerned cause i need to provide the union construction manager with legitamate design guidelines so that we can get a reasonable and honest qoute. Not to mention the contruction workers/managers may or may not have any sound isolation experience. We have a very small budget, but we certainly have enough to get the job done. Does anyone have specs or drawings that could be used as a start? Again thanks, I will post any additional info in the coming days. I still have to go and see the space this week.

First, welcome to the board - we too are a non-profit organization :cry: - One thing I would strongly suggest - do whatever you can to get away from building an 8' cube - I doubt if there's a way to control all the peakiness you'll run into with all three dimensions the same - there will be serious peaks at 70, 140, 210, and 280 hZ, also 350 hZ - the 280 (and possibly 350 hZ) modes will make your drums sound like crap, since the modal fundamental of a typical kick drum is around 300 hZ - If you can possibly change the interior dimensions of your drum booth to 8 x 9 x 11 feet, it would help your sound tremendously. Now, the downside - in order to successfully contain drums you will need a fully floated room-in-room construction as you said, and there can be no mistakes in construction - if you're using union carpenters, they are likely familiar with steel stud construction; if so, you can build double steel frame walls, putting two layers of 5/8 wallboard on the outside of the outer frame, and the inside of the inner one - then, using the proper weight insulation between the wall surfaces will keep your isolation optimised - this has been tested and insulation between 2 and 3 PCF density is best. NOT foam insulation; because it's closed cell it doesn't work for sound. The floor will need to be floated, check out the REFERENCE materials in the Construction forum - there's a long thread there on floating floors, and a few hundred other posts around as well. I'm starting to not off (just got off 12-hour graveyard shift) so will have to continue this later - any further info you have on the space would be helpful... Steve