Live room rescue!

Ok, I am going to attempt to post a drawing of the live room at the studi oI am doing alot of work out of.. I really need to get some ideas so that I can present them to the owner and hopefulle make this space useful.. it currently has a boatload of 2" auralex on one wall, and sounds horrible, mr flutter echo lives here and the entire room seems way hot in the mids.. really ugly. here goes, sorry for the drawings! The sliding glass doors go into smaller iso booths that are about 9 x 6 with a sloping 7' - 5.5' cieling, they are dead rooms and are ok for now so i left them off the drawing, They may or may not go for replacing the doors, my thought is that they will not..

here is the side profile, the cieling height is approx 14', and the sides are 8" up to the soffit, the flat part of the ceiling is 6 ft wide... in the first picture, the top wall is 21'6", the west wall is 19', and the bottom wall is 23'6 to the insidle of that little alcove in the corner.

This is a nice space. It certainly looks like it has potential. How much are they willing to spend? Is sound isolation a big consideration, or is the room pretty good as far as that goes? Thomas

I am not sure of the budget.. as usual! Isolation is not so big an issue, we are free standing, back in the woods so to speak, and the CR to live room iso is pretty good. One thing I had thought abotu was dumping the sliders that lead into the iso booths eventually, maybe this will provide a good excuse :D

bumpity, bump. :D

I would keep the iso booth doors the way they are. Most importantly you want to break up those parallel walls. Diffusion would also be helpful. This room would be an excellent candidate for John's and my Diffusive Slot Resonator design!:D http://johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic ... 3&start=15 I would modify the room similar to the layout below. Angled internal walls could be covered with diffusive mid band absorbers. The grey areas behind the walls are filled with acoustic hangers. http://www.saecollege.de/reference_mate ... encies.htm Openings to these rear volumes should be positioned at the floor and ceiling intersections. Thomas

interesting.. looks cool.. Couple of questions: 1.how much depth from the existing wall for hangars? 2. Any treatment for the ceiling? 3. speaking of the ceiling, should the diffusion/absorbition fillow the angle of the ceiling as high as possible, or just up to a certian hieght? ( I assume all the way up? ) Thanks for all your help with this, I know everyone is swamped with work and getting the site moved, I really appreciate your time!

I drew it approximately to scale, so the deepest wall "peak" would take about 4 ft from the room (from the face of the diffuser/absorber back). The hangers would fill whatever space is left behind the absorbers. Yes, the new wall sections would extend all the way up until they intersect the ceilings. Thomas

I calculate that you loose about 10% of the floor space. Not a bad tradeoff for a now "useful" room.:) Thomas

Ok.. my user name went bye bye for some odd reason, so audio hobbit is now fathed, sorry for the confusion.... How should I treat the flat aera of the ceiling? Also, what type of insulation do i need for thehangars? 703? and how rigid does the board it is glued to need to be? I could not figure that out from the SAE page... Thanks again!

bump.. sorry for the bumps..

I would probably put DRSs on the flat part of the ceiling as well. Oh, and did I mention that all the auralex should be removed as well? This is a live room and a nice, smooth, lively reverberant field is desirable. First modify the room to ameliorate the modal, interference, and flutter issues. Then listen to a variety of instruments, ensembles, and vocals in the room. If the room is still too bright, then you can start... sparingly... hanging high frequency absorption on the walls to warm things up. Acoustically, I like the idea of using a dense flexible material like linoleum for the hanger panels. I also like the idea of attaching the insulation to the panel only at the very top. This way the panel and insulation can rub against one another and dissipate more energy through friction. 703 is a good choice. John or Steve might have different ideas about building hangers. Thomas

barefoot wrote:

I would probably put DRSs on the flat part of the ceiling as well. Oh, and did I mention that all the auralex should be removed as well? ..Thomas

don't worry, the Auralex is on the way out for sure.. thanks again for all your help, I wil be pitching this to the owner on friday.. wish me luck!

John or Steve might have different ideas about building hangers.

Not really - that sounds like a reasonable idea - I've always used fibreboard but - linoleum sounds cool to me. cheers john

Hi there, me again, sorry for dragging this thread back from the abyss, but I have been moving house and making records.. not having an internet connection at home is a killer! I am curious as to weather or not I can do a "wall" of 703 behind the slats as opposed to hangars to save on construction costs? I dont want to shoot myself in the foot, just looking for alternatives.

ok... sorry to dig this thread out of the abyss! Thnak all of you again forr your help, I have attempted a couple times to get the owners to go this route, and they are very concerened about the loss of floor space.... are there any ther options you guys can think of? Thanks again, this forum has been invaluable to me, lots and lots of well spent time lurking here!

Threads from the grave are always welcome.:) They own a nearly square studio space. That's BAD. Other than knocking out the walls, you have to angle them to get any meainiful improvement. You can angle them horizontally or vertically, but either way you're going to loose usable floor space. They just need to ask themselves if having 415 sqft of bad sounding space is more valuable than 375 sqft of good sounding space? Thomas

Hey, I am right there with you.. just wanted to make sure I was exhausting all the options before I present it to them that way 8)

Ok once more this thread shall rear its ugly head.. I have yet another screen name, sotrry for the confusion, and thank you John for getting be back online.. The powers that be here want to be able to do more live band recording, and have still ( mercifuly as it turns out ) not done any acoustical treatment to the room, since it would be getting torn out now :) I have quickly done a drawing in Qcad ( I am on a mac) that I am going to try and post as a PDF, showing a rough idea of waht they need to accomplish, essentially , they need to gain 2 iso botths, one at least 7 x 8 and one large enough to fit a singer in, 4 x 8 maybe ( these are not hard and fast dimentions, just rough guidelines ) the red lines are the existing control room windo, and the two sliders, that will probablly be replaced with walls and doors to make amp rooms ( the sliders, so you can treat those as walls if need be) the CR glass will stay, they do not want to change anything in that room. the Blue lines are the "new" walls, agasin, these are just ideas, they can def move, but they need to be on that side of the room, and there needs to be at least 2 of them. The green lines are where there would be windows to allow communnication, not large. There would need to be solid doors added obiviously.( most likely double doors and double walls I imagine, they are wanting to track a vocal in there and a kit in the larger portion to the left. help! Thanks!

maybe this needs to go to the construction forum now? Thanks again.

bump, as per Johns message in the design forum... not trying to seem pushy, Thanks!

Steve - I agree with thomas in breaking up the angles in the room but if you want the room to be a LIVE room I wouldn't add any absorption at all. The more angular you can make it and the more diffusive surfaces you can add the better IMO. So I wouldn't have anything behind the diffusors Thomas added. cheers john

John, thanks for the Reply, I am now just realizing ( DOH!) that the pdf I uploaded need to be down loaded and as such isnt really visable readily.. they want to "cut" up the room and make 2 more iso booths, and I am at a loss as to how big these rooms can/should be, or how to then make them acoustically sound, both for transmission from each other and sonically. Sorry if I appear anxious, and thank for very much for your time.

that's fine to aqdd the iso rooms but why all square? use the additions to angle tha walls from each other. here is the pic. cheers john

I thought the original room already had two iso booths? Now they want to add more small rectangular booths? Seems to me they're hell bent on making this space completely useless for its intended purpose. Thomas