Students need help on project studio design.

[DirkB]

Hi,

I' ve been drawing plans for my future dreamstudio for quite some time now. My current plan fits almost perfectly in your dimensions so I thought I share...

Good luck,
Dirk

[Jai]

Lowdbrent has a good good point. The drawing you have posted is for a stereo room. and my post about angles in the front of the room are geared towards stereo rooms, even though I asked in an earlier post about surround. Sorry. If you like the feel of the room you can always run a sofit across the back middle of your room at ceiling height. You can then sofit mount your surrounds at the 110 degree, etc. points. But remember, do not make the front (facing front speakers) flat. You do not want flutter from your front wall and sofit. you can make it look cool by angling the sofit from flat at ceiling to what ever height your speakers are going to be, then flatten out just where your surrounds go. Or someone here can help you design a true 5.1 room. I am willing to throw some designs out, but they would only be in theory. i have built a surround room but the judges are still out on weather it works correct or not. (Just finished last week)

Good luck,,

jai
www.themixstudio.com

[VintageAudio]

Thanks to all of you for posting replies and ideas to our ongoing post.

Many thanks also to the man from Down Under, Mr. John Sayers, who kindly provided us with the most recently posted suggested floorplan!

As far as Lowdbent's comments are concearned, we fully understand the point he has made to us. We are asking around and trying to get more feedback and some independant opinions about his strong suggestions that we revert back to our initial control-room design using non-splayed walls (with the appropriate acoutical treatments) to design the shape of the control room. Of course we would prefer to build simple straight double walls, as framing it would cost us 30% less than walls with all these complex angles.

Our only issue with Loudbent's suggestion is that John Sayers' splayed wall approach (also using similiar types of resonators, absorbers, traps, hangars, diffusers) has been tried and tested by many studios out there, with many positive reviews. PLEASE REMEMBER THAT THIS STUDIO WILL INITIALLY BE USED FOR 2 CHANNEL MIXING!!!, SO EVENTUAL 5.1 MIXING CAPABILITY WOULD BE NICE, BUT IS NOT THE PRIMARY GOAL!

As far as DirkB's design goes, it looks quite good, but in our specific case we have decided to have the control room's front window directly facing the tracking area (as this is the viewing and working position we favour by far!).

In terms of Jai's reply, I will reinterate the point that we are designing for a stereo mixing environment, and if the need comes up for 5.1 at a later time, we will either design a retro-fit for an additional set of 6 soffit mounts or 6 stand mounts for a completely seperate 5.1 system with it's own amps and independant monitors. If the front soffit angles as shown in John Sayers' sketch are incorrect for 2 channel mixing, we will adjust them and repost an updated floorplan, (but they look correct to us!). Any comments???

Jai, could you please post any design ideas kicking around in your head, and also please further explain your point about the soffits.
If I correctly understand you, should we curve or angle the soffits' front face in all directions where it intersects the main monitors???

We do have one question for all those more experienced designers and engineers out there. We have a set of really good passive 2 way studio monitors (Dynaudio BM15) which were designed as either near-field or mid-field montors. As these monitors don't have backfiring bass ports, soffit mounting in general should be fine, but the question is.......
Will a distance of about 9' from the soffit mounted BM15's to the mixing position be too long to create a wide enough and relatively accurate sweet-spot when tracking and mixing????

If so, we may have to stand mount the BM15's closer to the console and use them strcitly as near-fields (we also have a closely matched pair of Dynaudio BM6's for any future 5.1 rear channel needs), and eventually get something larger (perhaps JBL or Urei) to use as our stereo tracking mains.

I know many of you out there using huge coaxial mains, but I would like to know if it is pratical for us to just use the BM15's for tracking and stereo mixing for now, if it's OK to place them in soffits 9' away from my ears!
We also have smaller Tannoy PBM 6.5 monitor speakers and a matching Tannoy active Sub which we would prefer to use as just regular nearfields on stands behind the console but closer than 9' away.

Finally, in terms of running snakes and cables between various areas of the control room and tracking/iso rooms, under the control room's floated floor and between the tracking rooms and iso areas' double walls, should we use a few runs of simple 4" pvc piping or similiar as the conduit, and stuff them with insulation once the cables have been snaked through to avoid them resonating???? Any suggestions of helpful hints about laying cables in this setting???

Anyone who has opinions/ideas/comments about any and all of the above are urged to post them here, that way we can have a better view on which paths to take for the next design stage.

RON
Ron/Jon/Simon
Students/Novice Studio Designers
Montreal

[AVare]

I was surprised by this remark

If the front soffit angles as shown in John Sayers' sketch are incorrect for 2 channel mixing, we will adjust them and repost an updated floorplan, (but they look correct to us!). Any comments???

The dimensions, as you wrote, are correct for BOTH 2 and 5.1 mixing. What technical are you using as guidelines for your control room design? Several that will help, and they are inter-related, so once you read one the rest become easier to absorb. Unfortunately I have lost the URLs, but the titles should be enough with a search engine to find most of them on the web. The EBU documents are not up last I checked. I can e-mail them to you.

In mostly alphabetical order:

AES TD1001
EBU tech t3276
EBU tech t3276 s1
EBU tech t3286
EBU tech t3286 s1
Tonmeister SSF 01.1E 2002c v2a

If you study the documents closely (assuming that you haven't already), you will sense that their isn't much more to design for 5.1, but could be very expensive to redesign later.

I am trying to keep to generalities right know so that your creative ideas are not stopped.

[VintageAudio]

Thanks AVare for putting us back on the right path, your help has been superb!, as has been the advice of several others on the forum!

To respond to your surprize over a comment made by us a few hours ago, we were actually basing our original control-room floor plan concepts using our readings from sources such as AES TD1001, but had not found the EBU technical papers on this subject until you so helpfully pointed them out today.

I only raised doubts about our monitor placement because of comments in both public and private messages left by several other forum readers. Although we have read much (but by no means all) of the currently available technical material out there, when someone challenges our ideas or our logic, we often assume (not always correctly!) that they might know much more than we do, especially since we are really new to all of this. It's amazing how little acoustics theory and training was provided by any of our pricey multi-year recording arts programs!!!

In any case, after the 3 of us read most of the EBU technical papers on the subject this morning (although it does go over our heads in some sections!), we have concluded that the angles for speaker placement as shown in the current draft floor-plan seem to be 100% correct, as AVare has already stated, for either 2 and/or 5.1 channel mix scenarios.

Your point about designing for both formats now, instead of an expensive retrofit later, is quite well taken, and we will do so as per your advice!

Thanks AVare!!!, no need to link us to the EBU website, but for anyone else out there, here is the master EBU index address...

http://www.ebu.ch/en/technical/publicat ... /index.php

ANY ADDITIONAL ADVICE OR SUGGESTIONS FROM FORUM USERS AND EXPERIENCED DESIGNERS WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED

Simon & Ron
Ron/Jon/Simon
Student Audio Engineers
Montreal

[lowdbrent]

To clarify my position. I am familiar with AESTD1001. In it, no parrallel surfaces are specified, just as they would be for any studio. But, the specification also dictates that all boundaries be uniform in absorption and reflection. This puts a new spin on an LEDE design, as half of the room is absorption and the other reflctive/diffusive. That was my point.

In addition, these guys have like zero money compared to a real install, so it was my opinion that they check out the other main-stream designers who are designing the most successful studios to date, and see what they have to say.

Based on my conversations with some of them, as I am building now myself, the point has been made that sometimes it would be better to build parrallel surfaces and treat those walls, in order to get in on budget. NOT that it is a perfect room solution, but it will be in on budget, and easier to tune than a splayed wall room.

I like this site, I like the design help, but I think that surround is COMPLETELY wrong for an LEDE room, and so does the AES.

[John Sayers]

well firstly a LEDE room is traditionally one where the front of the room is dead and the rear of the room live, hence Live End Dead End. It was popular during the 80s and died in the 90s.

What is happening in 5:1 applications is DEDE as the rear speakers now add a projection from the rear and you don't want it bouncing around the front of the room. Obviously the glass windows play a part in this also as do the doors, but unlike Lowdbrent I like to be able to see who I'm recording as did a client I was talking with today who's main concern was the visual aspect from room to room.

Take a look at the following studio and you'll see what I mean but note that the geometry is still as I've proposed. There is variation on the angles of the rear speakers.

The ITU-R1 has a specification for listening room layout intended for critical evaluation of
multichannel programs. These recommendations also appear to be a good starting point for
mixing room setup, and have been informally adopted as such. Aside from time alignment, a
specific geometry is described. With the center speaker directly in front, the L/R speakers are
each positioned 30 degrees away from center, forming a 60-degree angle. This angle may be
reduced somewhat (say, 45 to 50 degrees) and give equally successful results. The surround
speakers are each positioned 110 degrees off center. This puts the surround speakers to the
sides and somewhat behind the listener, which is not only what often happens in typical
homes, but has proved to be a good way to achieve overall front/back soundfield integration
and envelopment. If the surrounds are too far to the rear, the listener finds himself lost
somewhere between two separate soundfields, rather than wrapped inside one cohesive
soundfield.

I personally find 110 too tight and tend more towards 115 or even 120. George Massenburg has mentioned playing with up to 125 degrees in the experimentation he's been up to.

For 2T stereo there has always been two ways. One is the standard 60 degree splay with the speakers at 30 degrees and aimed behind the engineer. The other is to have the speakers with a 90 degree splay and at 45 degrees and aimed directly at the engineer. Music Farm which I built and worked at in 1980s was a 90 degree monitoring system.

I believe to match the home listener more the 5:1 layout should have the LR speakers at 90 degrees making them wider apart and leaving more "room" for the center speaker as it were.

cheers
john

[Jai]

hey guys,

I can throw some ideas out this week, But john has some great plans on this site that might work for you as well. Be sure to take a look at his studios in progress. They give great details that none of us can explain in words.

As far as the sofits. If you re-read my original post I am talking about a way to put surrounds in a "Stereo" room later with out having a huge cost to do so. Its sofit mounting them to the ceiling. Making sure your sofit is not flat sending reflected sound waves right back at your head. I have angled the face of this really sharp to avoid this. I will dig up a pic of an examle for you today or tomorrow.

As far as front wall degree, hands down listen to John. His last post explains things much, much better than I can. But I will say that i prefer a 90 degree splay. The rooms I have worked in that have 90 degree fronts seem to have a better stereo image. Maybe I am crazy, hell I am crazy, but it's just my opinion.

Surround placement degree. Since your not doing it now it doesn't matter. I think there are a lot of new ideas that are sounding great. What I have learned from my studies and actual hands on experience is this: Start at 110 degree and play with it. Go as far as 130 degree. What sounds good to you. What translates from your room to a home theater better. yes, there are "Rules" but those rules are changing daily with new experiences. I think we are all trying to go by AES and dolby standards, but finding what really works best for us in the field. So, in my opinion, go by published specs to get a proper setup, then move things around as you need them. But remember, this will take stands in YOUR room moving around and listening before you build the rear sofits.

I missed the comments about front window vs side view. My only thing here is you will need that center space eventually for surround mixing. plus you need your computor monitor right there in the center. This is a huge debate in the industry right now. Go with taste. But I can tell you that i love a left side full window or glass sliding door. Carefull with the sliding glass doors from home depot. They have no sound containing properties. The cool thing about a glass door on the left, you get from floor to ceiling viewing. You can see everything in the room, and you dont have to look around a monitor or speaker.

As I have said before, these are only my personnal experiences. John and Kase are two of many here that have studied long and hard to know the nuts and bolts and whys of how we build these rooms. Always defer to there wealth of experience and book knowledge. But, of course, the rest of us have done it alot and are always willing to tell ya what we know, and I think John and the others will step in when we get a little too deep.\

jai
www.themixstudio.com

[VintageAudio]

Once again thanks Jai for all your superb input.

We have decided to work with both John Sayers and a local acoustical engineering firm to delve deeper into specific design and layout issues, and we will post any new revisions when they are completed.

We are still open to ideas and suggestions, but now we finally have a good basic understanding of the elements needed to conceptualize and create a reasonably good small studio environment which we can afford to build in our somewhat limited price range.

Many thanks to all of you that have assited us, and whom have brought up issues which we were more than a bit ignorant about...

Ron/Jon/Simon
Montreal

[John Sayers]

The rooms I have worked in that have 90 degree fronts seem to have a better stereo image. Maybe I am crazy, hell I am crazy, but it's just my opinion.

I agree with you on that point Jai - me too.

A 90 degree surround would look like this

Just one other point - we currently are working on 5:1 as it applies to theatre surround where most of the info is in the front three speakers and the rear is basically for effect and ambience - no big deal really

BUT

just wait till the hip hoppers etc discover putting the kick in the center of the room and use the full surround for instrumentation - then the rear will need to be equal to the front. It won't happen overnight - but it will happen

cheers
john

[lowdbrent]

John that is happening now with what I mix, and that was my point of not using a LEDE room.

It has been a while since I was into consumer electronics, but I am not sure if all current A/V receievers even output the same wattage as the front L and R, or even if the front C channel gets the same wattage. I know the older ones did not.

But I know that there are some interesting mixes going on now. I did a mix for a band that wanted the listener to hear the band from the drum throne. Very time consuming, but very cool. I have heard a mix where a group of intimidating Harley motorcyle riders are circling. It was wild.