Need Design Help

Dear John We are a Spanish Christian Centre located in North Spain near the French border. The nearest town, Figueres, is15km away and Barcelona is a little over 100kms. We are just building a new project recording studio, Rhema Studios, on a budget of 5000 Euros. After building one facility already, 50m2, and giving half the space to the lounge, we are building one with a bigger control room and studio, with a small entrance, machine room and toilet. See attached plan. We produced 2 CDs last year that were released on our own label Rhema Productions. Both projects were mastered in DRT USA via Internet. We are working on a Christmas album at the moment. The studio is to be used for our own musical productions as well as for any other artists. We have KRK 7000 nearfield monitors and we would like to soffit mount a 3 way KEF. System in the hard soffit wall. Later we may replace these with more powerful speakers. We will use a cut down version of our DR Dayner desk for monitoring only and record direct to a PC which will be in the machine room for noise reasons. We have the Focusrite Octapre and Voicemaster pro inputs to the RME Hammerfall sound card on a PC-3.2GHz Asus board with Powercore plugin effects. We have a CME 8 weighted keyboard and the Akoustik Piano plugin. We are located in a forest and there is no air or road noise, neither housing nor neighbours to worry about. No soundproofing is necessary to keep noise in, or outside noise out. The outside walls of the new studio are already up giving a total height of 3.15m from concrete slab. The roof will have a slight 5cm slope for drainage on one of the centre pillars – basically flat. We may build up at a later stage but this will not be used during recording sessions and can be ignored, hence the roof has to be flat. The concrete floor slab is 10cm thick. The walls are built with 20cm thick hollow waterproof concrete blocks. There will be 10cm of floor heating to be added to the slab consisting of 4cm polystyrene, 3cm mortar to cover the plastic heating tubes, then 3cm ceramic floor tile in blue. As the floor is a heavy slab on a light insulation board we thought of keeping from touching the side walls and centre wall with rubber or polystyrene to cut down vibration between studio and control room; The floating sandwich idea. Building materials are relatively cheap in Spain and we can buy at cost price. Wood is expensive. Building and Carpentry is labor free. Bricks sizes 4cm one cavity 4x20x50cm 7cm 2 cavitys 7x20x50cm Regular hollow bricks 9x13x28cm Heavy duty hollow bricks 9x27x13cm Cement rendering is cheap. Basic Plastering is possible False ceiling can be hung on wires from the steel roofing beams We have access to 3cm roofmate tunged and grooved polystyrere, soft rockwool sheets, chipboard, MDF, plasterboard, tunged and grooved pine. The roof will be supported on the 6 heavy brick columns. Three 18cm steel I section RSJs will support the smaller 12cm steel I section. A 4cm hollow roofing brick 100x30cm is then slotted between the metal I section. Afterwards 3cm concrete with reinforced steel mesh, 3cm roofmate insulation board , final 3cm concrete, and a bitumen roofsheet will be stuck ontop to finish it off for now. We have a double parallel plate glass window that we can make into triple-glazed if necessary, and the control side can be angled if necessary.150x80x20cm. We have had problems designing the walk way between the control room and the studio as on the right of the control room it interferes with the soffit wall. By the centre window is possible although it upsets the room symmetry and the soffit wall. There is a 1x1m outside window in the control room and a 0.80x0.6 outside window in the studio. Basically we had thought to put a centre divide 26 cm double brick sand filled centre wall. This gives two equal rooms ratio 1:1.4:1.9. After looking at your designs it occurred to us to angle the centre wall but the centre line is reinforced in the foundation, so a straight wall helps to strengthen the building a little more. We wanted to build a brick soffit wall and mount the speakers on brick pillars behind. The bass cabinet can be mounted in a separate box at a quarter from the wall and floor if possible and a small 12L cabinet for the mids and tweeters at good listening position. These can be upgraded later if finance permits. We have had good results mixing with nearfield monitors in a poor room. So we are hoping to improve things by adding a second system to compare the mixes especially in the bass region. Basic carpentry and building can be done by centre members so cost of materials is our only expenditure. Building materials are available to us at cost price and wood is not and in Spain it is very much more expensive. So if we can build it in brick it’s good news. Double inside walls are normally 7cm brick with 3cm wallmate tunged and grooved polystyrene for heat insulation. As you can see from the plan there is no double wall yet. As we may have to rockwool some of the outside walls it occured to us to save on the double wall insulation as the rockwool is also a heat insulation. The columns make it ideal to angle the walls from column inside to outside wall thus saving somewhat on materials. That’s about all the information we can think of for now. Can you please help us with a design? If you need any more information please don’t hesitate to ask. Neel and Graham

Do I just need to wait for a reply or have I posted on the wrong page?

Sorry guys - you posted when my ISP was down so I missed it. You must break up the parallel walls. You must also provide rear trapping in the control room. I'd build something like this. cheers john

Dear John Thanks very much for the design. We have a few questions please: 1. Is there any way to include the original machine room access, adjusting the rear wall design? We would like access if humanly possible. The new machine room site is obviously better but a bit difficult to add on now. Even if we did build it, access to the old one would be very handy for storage. 2. What do you suggest for the ceiling i.e. material, slope, cavity treatment? There is an 18cm centre steel roof beam to hide. Flat red-brick interior with steel beams visible at the moment. 3. What materials do you suggest for the soffit wall and the rear walls (marked on your plan.) Can the soffit wall be brick? Do we need to rockwool the cavity if it is brick? Can the rear wall be brick? 4. Can a cupboard be built into the front wall to house the amps ? 5. Any side wall treatment necessary? Thanks again. Graham and Neel