Not satisfied with Vocal Booth Performance

Hello again all, been a while. While I am quite pleased with the overall performace of my studio build (thanks to the help on this forum) I am a but underwhelmed by the accoustic performace of my booth. Here are the relevant stats: 9.75' wide 4.5' deep 8' high While I know that this is almost an ideally wrong dimension ratio, it is what I am forced to use. I am currently using a combination of 703 panels covering the walls with rock wool bass traps in the four corners of the room. Additionally there are smaller 703 pieces directly attached to the ceiling and there is an area rug on the hardwood floor. The room is dead as dead can be, and I know that is the problem. There is very little high end reflection, save the glass panel on the door. I am thinking that I need to use the hermaholtz slat resonators to allow for low-mid absorbtion, but keeping the high frequency. The room sounds almost like it is compressing the vocal... My question is this: Where should they be placed in the room? How many should I construct, and what other treatments should I augment with? In the meantime, I have an album in production...should I take some of the 703 out? Any help on this is greatly appreciated.

Aloha, Here's a drawing that John had done awhile ago. There are 2 slot resonator panels, 1 cloth over 703 panel and what appears to be a sliding glass door. You could perhaps start by adding slats on only two of your walls at about just over head height and down to about 3 feet off the floor, all the while carefully listening to the "recorded" change in response, and stop when you reach a point where your vocal tracks are satisfactory and sitting well in your mixes. Hope this helps, Aloha 8)

cburke737 wrote:

Where should they be placed in the room? How many should I construct, and what other treatments should I augment with?

A small room needs to be mostly dead sounding. But please don't make the mistake of using only thin absorbing materials. I suggest 703 or 705 at least two inches thick for the walls. Even if you're recording voices only, and not guitar or bass amps, you still need bass trapping in the corners. Those corner traps should be at least four inches thick. --Ethan

Kendale & Ethan Thanks for the great (and timely!) responses. As I mentioned, I do have 2 inch 703 panels (2'x4') ringing the room with 4' rock wool bass traps. It is indeed dead, but too dead? What would you gentlemen suggest, if anything, to treat the ceiling and floor? The are perfectly parallel to each other and currently the ceiling is treated with varying pieces of 703 and the floor has an area rug on top of hard wood. I will indeed move forward with the slot resonators (currently will plan to construct 2) at varying angles on the two opposing shorter walls to break up standing waves and to increase the effectiveness of the resonator. Again, thanks for the time...I'll make sure to mention you both in my grammy acceptance speech.

cburke737 wrote:

It is indeed dead, but too dead?

Probably not too dead. As I often say, "Small room ambience is always bad ambience." No matter how you tweak and tune a small booth with treatment, even a mid-level outboard reverb unit added afterward will give you a better quality of reverb and ambience. --Ethan

It is common practice for the singers to remove one ear off the hearphones to ear their voice "naturally"... if the room is too dead you endup with a depressed singer (another one :wink: )

maybe you can add some rev in the headphone ?