Plans for building studio from scratch

Started by max on 16 December 2004. 3 replies.

Originally posted at johnlsayers.com, topic 2820.

Hello everyone. I’m planning on building a single freestanding room in my backyard (residential area) as a recording/rehearsal area. It will be connected to the control room (already built in the house) via a video link, so at this point I’m looking for the best possible sound insulation on a budget. The area I have to work with is W 4500 x L 6000 x H whatever I want… I hope you guys post in metric! I was planning on building all the walls with besser concrete blocks W 190 x L 390 x H 190. The inside wall sitting on a concrete slab, the outside one sitting on a separate concrete strip footing, with a gap of 150 between them to be lightly packed with rockwool insulation. I’m unsure what to use for my inside ceiling. I’m going for a tiled roof. Is a 5 degee splay of the south wall, east wall, and ceiling enough? Would I be better off varying my materials more to stop a wider spectrum of frequencies escaping, or does it not matter because of the immense mass of besser bricks? Is a 150mm gap between my walls enough? How the heck do you keep a ceilng of great mass up? Any info would be greatly appreciated. Apologies if this has been covered in previous threads. Max
max wrote:
The inside wall sitting on a concrete slab, the outside one sitting on a separate concrete strip footing...
I strongly suggest against this. If you do, you'll end up with differential settlement...(your exterior walls will settle more than the slab due to less of a bearing).
ok, i hadn't anticipated how the bearing would sink the footings. In that case, how would you recommend i go about reducing sound transmission through the floor inbetween the walls (unless of course you think a floating floor with drum riser and suspended bass rig would be sufficent in stopping low feqs escaping)?
My building is all one slab - there is no floor isolation, but my drums are on a riser filled with sand floated off the floor on neoprene pucks. The sound proofing is close to perfect - you cannot hear anything outside when inside the volume is as loud as you can possibly get it. If you want to float the floors - then there are many posts on the forum that explains how to do it.