Guestroom studio conversion

OK. Been lurking round these corners for at least a year now. And it´s time to redo my home studio "control room". I don´t really track anything but acoustic guitar and vox and occassional foley sound here, so the main purpose is really songwriting and mixing. I´m monitoring through Dynaudio BM5A´s but I can´t seem to be able to trust entirely on what my ears tell me. Mainly the problem seems to be low end. Could you help me out what kind of treatment to put where? Furniture I have in the room is console (1.0meter high, 1.3meter wide, 0.9m deep) with monitors sitting on the meterbridge dockhouse. A 2 bay slanted rack, a 14U rack with doors. A couch. The room dimensions are 478cm wide, 386cm deep and ceiling at 246cm. BUT, the problem for me at least when TRYING to calculate the modes is the bloody slanted ceiling. Check the accompanied sketchup file to get a better picture. I´ve kept the mixer on the higher wall, I used to have it against the window but that didn´t work soundwise. Walls are concrete, ceiling gypsum board. I´m willing to spend some 500 EUR on the treatment. Please, help me out here, what do I need to do to be able to trust my monitors and my ears? Oh yeah, I´m not afraid of a saw and a hammer :wink:

Man, what an acoustic nightmare; short of cramming as much rockwool in the square ceiling corners and vertical corners of both the dormer section and the other corners of the room, I'm not sure what can be done. With your speakers on the high side of the room, you're getting reflections off the ceiilng and back into the mix position - I bet an ETF plot of that would scare me to death... I guess besides the above suggestions on rockwool a ceiling cloud will be mandatory - also absorbers between your speakers and the wall will help; 3 or 4" rockwool again, using foam will just make the room WORSE. It doesn't absorb to low enough frequencies to tame the wierd modal and SBIR things that must be going on in there - check out this idea http://www.recording.org/ftopict-26889.html And if you wanna get fancier - http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... 1&start=90 Short of moving to a different space, dunno what else to suggest... Steve

Thanks for the reply, sorry if the room caused you distress :lol: Would you say that it would be better to move the mix position to the window wall, and use absorbers on the walls next to the window? or Build bass traps on both sidewalls? Like 40cm of the wall, 5cm hard rockwool face (with cloth of course) and hangers behind it? and Diffusors on the slanted ceiling?

Wow. What a challenging room. The short answer is to put as much absorption in as many places as possible. What I would probably do is put the desk on the window wall; the ceiling that angles upward should go up behind you as you sit at the mix position. But obviously the wall shapes will be a problem. If you are willing to give up the window, probably the best thing you could do would be to partition off the entire window area with a false sloped ceiling, fill the area behind the partition completely with rockwool, and cover it with cloth. In addition, you would need to treat as many corners as possible in the room, either using the superchunks method or having 4" panels straddling the corners. You will also need absorption on the side walls and the rear wall to take care of the first reflections. A room this size needs LOTS of absorption. I don't think diffusion will help you in a room that small. In short, spend nearly all of your budget on rockwool (or rigid fiberglass or maybe acoustical cotton), with enough left over to get framing lumber and cloth to cover things with. Good luck.

I´ll start building supertraps and see how much they actually help by adding gradually.