Building Tracking Room in Germany

Hello John and all the rest ! My name is Heiko and I am currently in the process of building a tracking room in our little studio. I thought it would be nice to show how the progress is going from the empty room to fully treated one. Maybe some would like to use some of the information here for their own design. And maybe some of you have suggestions how to improve the room. And additionally its for other german residents, I will try to tell every material I used and where to get it here in Germany. So they dont have to search as long as I did. Most things I am doing have to be removeable later cause I have this rooms only floor rent. Cause of this I am using some designs like Johns corner and backwall absorbers.At the moment its just about the tracking room,the control room is another story. It´s all about acoustics within the room, no sound proofing needed cause its already good enough for our purpose. It will be used mainly for Vocals,drums, eguitars,bass guitars and some other acoustic instruments. The facts of the are the following : - Room has a width of 16,4 feet - Room has a length of 19,7 feet - Room has a height of 9,84 feet (without suspended ceiling) - Room has a suspended ceiling (its hanging 8 inch under the real ceiling so inside room height is about 9,19 feet) - One wall is painted concrete. The others are sheetrock - floor is some kind of industrial carpet.Sadly dont know its exact name The Floor The Ceiling Chapter One : With this empty room I have reverbs and flutter echos like a chamber :-) Far from what I would like to have in the end. In general my personal taste would be a deader room and adding reverb later while mixing. I feel like with a room with this dimensions I am not able to get a nice room ambience. So first I want to remove reverb times and those flutter echos. Most of this will be done with broadband absorbers and some simple kind of diffusors. I am not familiar with calculating slot depths for specific frequencies and most people said you can make room much worse with wrong calculations. Chapter Two : I buyed some rigid fiberglass panels. They are Isover SSP2, 2 inch thick. Got them from a supplier called "Taxis GmbH" which has dealers in different locations around germany. The price seemed to be the cheapest for this product, was 6,40 Euro per Square Meter.Absorption data is already written somewhere here in the forum.They should be similar to OC703. Now the testing began.. I placed 4 panels (one behind another and same on top so it has a thickness of 4 inch) in every corner of the room. They will be later the bass absorbers in every corner. Then I simply laid some panels on every wall of the room. The result was a big reduction in the reverb times (dont take this to detailed, I didnt test it over the whole frequency range. Just clapped in my hands and heard how it sounded). But still a massive amout of flutter echo was present... Panels laying on wall The room Chapter 3: I walked around in the room and clapped hands to listen where flutter echo is worst. Seemed to me it was in the middle of the room. I also clapped where the floor was messy with books and cables laying around and oops.. the flutter echo was reduced at that specific place. So I thought it must be the echos bouncing between floor and ceiling. So I began to remove the ceiling panels one by another. The ceiling was filled with standart wall insulation. The more ceiling panels I removed, the more less flutter echo is getting. As I removed most of the ceiling panels and now most of ceiling insulation exposed.Flutter echo is mostly gone,only a little present if you listen dedicated to it. But It seemed like its already too much absorption.It felt like a little pressure in my ears when I shouted and listed to the room, so I removed some of the wall panels and it got a little better. I am not sure if there will always stay a little of flutter echo as it is a rectangular room or if its gone after adding some angled wood in the places where no wall panels are. We will see... exposed ceiling insulation /sorry for bad picture only cellphone cam Next chapter soon... cheers, Heiko

Heiko, welcome; sorry for the delayed response, I'm "up to my ass in alligators" even more than usual. Thanks for your input, this could be a very interesting addition to the forum. I didn't see any actual questions in a quick read, if you have any be sure and post them at the end of your posts. Looking forward to more... Steve