I apologize in advance for my lack of technical terms and knowledge (This is my first attempt at anything like this and it will take me time to learn).
No problem! And no apology necessary. That kind of is what the forum is all about: helping out people who aren't sure how to approach a studio build.
What is the best way for me to measure this?
With a sound level meter. You can find basic ones on e-Bay, Amazon.com, and places like that for around US$ 50 to 100 or so. Then you set up a sound system in the room, playing at the loudest level you ever expect to be producing, measure that level both in the room and in other places around the house and outside too, including the old lady's flat, if possible. Then you progressively turn down the volume on the sound system while checking at all of those points until every is happy that the level is quiets, and all legal requirements are met. (Call your local municipality and get a copy of their noise regulation to make sure). The difference between the loudest level inside the room and the quietest level that you have to hit, is how much isolation you need. Based on that, you can determine the type of construction you'd need to attain that level.
I have been told i can make as much noise as i like (e.g. my landlady's granddaughter used to practice drums in the flat and it didn't bother the old lady downstairs).
Cool!
Sounds like a real nice neighbor to have! Wish all my neighbors were that understanding...
So it looks like you don't need much isolation at all. However, there may also be legal requirements that you have to meet, and other future neighbors might not be so cool about it, so it's worth getting a meter (or maybe borrowing one), just to check how you are doing on the legal front. But it does sound like you are OK on isolation, which is good, as isolation is hard to do right, and costs money!
I am afraid taking off the plasterboard on the walls is out of the question as it is a rented flat and i would not get permission to do that. I will just have to try to treat the room to the best i can without it
Could you at least find out how thick the plasterboard is, how deep the cavity is behind it, and if there is any insulation in the cavity? With that info in hand we can at least predict what the problem frequencies will be.
As for the carpet, i can take that up as i believe that the wood underneath is indeed laminate
Not so fast! The carpet is already in, and you also said: ...
... it has a very resonant sound when something is dropped on it and makes the room more echoey.
... which makes it sound like you have another resonant cavity under/in your floor, so it might be best to leave the carpet in place and follow the "Plan B" that I suggested: Lay 16mm plywood over the carpet, and put some type of finish flooring on that.
And yes, the room would have been echoey with the original floor, because you don't have treatment anywhere else in the room! The general rule of thumb is to have absorption opposite reflection. So for a hard floor, you do a soft ceiling. An easy way to do that is with a "cloud", which is just a wooden frame with acoustic absorption in it, hung from the existing ceiling on wires. There are other options that you see in pro studios, such as angled ceilings, diffusers, and suchlike, but the simplest and cheapest for a small room like yours on a tight budget, is a couple of clouds. That will take care of the "echoey-ness" (I think I just invented a new word....) of the floor.
One of the reasons you want a hard floor is psycho-acoustics: the way the human ear and brain interpret sound. For your entire life, the distance from your ears to the floor is well known by your brain, and it can easily figure out directions, distances, and angles of sounds, simply by using the floor reflections as a reference. But the distance to the ceiling changes wherever you go: outside, there is no ceiling. Offices, malls, shops, cars, houses, buses, trains, planes, etc. all have different height ceilings, so your brain doesn't use ceiling reflections much. But if your floor is soft and non-reflective, while the ceiling is highly reflective, your brain has no choice: it has to use the ceiling reflections to help figure directions, angles and distances from acoustic clues. Your brain isn't so good at that. And if the ceiling is also angled, it confuses things even more.
In other words, your brain's ability to figure out a clear sound stage and precise stereo image depends to a certain extent on the floor, and the ceiling can mess it up. If you close your eyes in a well set up studio, and listen to a good recording, you should clearly hear the "phantom center", an apparent "virtual" speaker located directly in front if you, exactly in the middle between the two real speakers. You should also be able to easily point to the apparent position of each instrument and voice on the sound stage between the two speakers, with your eyes still closed, and in some cases the sound stage can extend beyond the real speakers, with some instruments seeming to come from a location further to the left than the left speaker, and further to the right than the right speaker. That's your goal: to set up your room and speakers so you get all of that. Sure, the floor only plays a small part in getting that right, but the ceiling plays a big part in getting it wrong! So the ceiling needs to be taken out of the equation with absorption, diffusing, angling, or all three. In your case, the only option is absorption, which indirectly implies a hard floor.
There are other reasons for a hard floor to, but that's a pretty darn good one, right there!
The reason i did this is that i was originally told to carpet half of the room (where the equipment is) and then leave the rest wooded (the seating area back).
Hmmmm.... sounds like some sort of LEDE design (LEDE= "Live-End/Dead-End")... which hasn't been used as such in studio design for about 20 years! The more modern approach is an extension of LEDE, called "RFZ (="Reflection Free Zone"), where the concept is to prevent early reflections from reaching your ears too soon or too loud. Hence, the absorption on first reflection points and the rear wall.
The reason i carpeted all of it was to help when recording acoustic guitar and vocals (so there was far less high end reflection) as i do not have another space to record.
That's another reason to have a hard floor and a soft ceiling! The mic you use to record acoustic guitar also picks up the "signature" of the room, and that is kind of embedded in what you record. People understand floor reflections: it sounds natural. Ceiling reflections don't, especially in small rooms with low ceilings. So any acoustic instrument recordings should really be done either in rooms with very high ceilings (ever been in, or seen photos of, great recording studios? The live room ceilings are HIGH, many meters up), or in a room where the ceiling is "disguised" acoustically, so it isn't apparent in the room sound picked up by the mic.
Having said that, sometimes you do want to damp the specular reflections from the floors or walls, and simple throw rugs or movable gobos are used for that. But you don't want those in place permanently, as you only need them very occasionally. And once the rest of your room is treated, I'm sure you'll find that acoustic recordings done in it will sound pretty darn good, even with the hard floor!
I will have a go at removing the carpet (I just hope my wife isn't too annoyed with me for wasting the money lol).
Maybe that's another reason to leave it in place? Tell here that it was all part of the plan, and you need it under the plywood to damp the resonance and acoustically decouple the plywood from the original floor. All of which is true!
"WAF" is the most important single parameter in studio design! If you don't have good WAF numbers, then you are sunk before you start. WAF= "Wife Acceptance Factor"
Ok thanks for that. I can only go back as far as the slant will allow (and with enough space to put something behind it) but it will buy me a bit of space.
A couple of pointers here: The speaker height should be 1.2 m above the floor, but that refers to the height of the
acoustic axis of the speakers, which is normally on a line between the mid point of the woofer and the tweeter. In must speakers it is closer to the tweeter. So that's how high your speakers should be: set them up so that the tweeter is just a bit more than 1.2 m above the floor. Why 1.2m? Sit down on your chair with a tape measure in hand. Measure the height of your ears above the floor... 1.2m is roughly the average ear height of a seated person, so that's the "standard" for studios and critical listening rooms.
Another option worth think about is to lay your speakers on their sides, so they don't extend up too high. Depending on the actual speaker geometry that might let you get them another inch or two closer to the front wall. And you could also drop your chair height a bit, and adjust the speaker height to match....
About the speaker stands: They need to be MASSIVE, as in very heavy. Many people use concrete blocks to build their stands, or buy hollow metal stands and fill them with sand. You also need to decouple your speakers from the stands: you can probably do that by cutting a piece of your famous foam about the same size as the speaker base, and putting it between the speaker and the stand. Try it out, and see if you can feel vibrations in the stand when playing loud music with lots of low content on the speakers. If you don't feel vibrations in the stand when gently touching it with your finger tips, then you are probably OK. If you do feel vibrations, we need another plan...
Hmmmm.... As you say, not much to go on there! And a lot of "curious" info in the "specs". Such as:
In situations where low frequency boom and flutter echoes hardly exist there is little point in paying for unnecessarily thick tiles.
Ummmm.... Well, I'd like to find a room like that!
Typically, it is the low frequency end of the spectrum that needs the MOST treatment in about 99.999999% of home studios....
Acousticheck tiles use a cost reduced lower density foam of 26kg/cu metre which is still higher than many competitive types of foam.
Density isn't the point! What matter for acoustic absorption is gas flow resistivity. There is a vague relationship between the two, but it varies between types. For example, the ideal gas flow resistivity characteristics of fiberglass is found in products with a density of around 30 kg/m3, but for mineral wool the optimum characteristics are find in products with a density about 50% higher, at around 50 kg/m3. Density is only a rough pointer, not the actual parameter that you are looking for.
Other suppliers have addressed the problem by providing a very thin lightweight packing foam which is cheap but practically useless for sound control
At least they got that part right! Spot on...
We talked a lot to engineers involved in acoustics who generally agreed that many studios primarily required attenuation at the higher frequencies only.
Really? Wow! That kind of flies in the face of the science of acoustics! By far the biggest issue in any small room is the modal behavior, and the part that really matters most is below about 300 Hz. That's where the REAL issues are in small rooms. Simple physics shows that smaller rooms have terrible modal spread, and it only ceases to be a problem in rooms where the dimensions are comparable to the lowest audible frequency. So what they say would only be true for rooms where the dimensions are longer than 17 meters....
The amount of mid and low frequency attenuation is primarily a function of the tile`s thickness,
Ahhhh... no it isn't! It's a function of gas flow resistivity, location in the room with respect to the wavelength, and also thickness!
They do not contain the graphite fire retardancy compound.
Anyway, enough of them, and on to your room...
(Again i hope my wife doesn't kill me for wasting money)
Hmmmm.... this is a little harder to justify!
You could still use them on the front of your panels, as decoration, proved that they are quite "breathable", meaning that you can easily breath right through them, with little resistance, if you hold them to your mouth. If that's the case, then they won't do any harm as decoration on your REAL treatment! They might even do a little bit of good.
My problem i am faced with here is that one of the rear corners has a radiator in it but i guess i can make something that is portable.
Many people have similar problems, with doors, windows, closets, radiators, etc. Build something on wheels, same idea as a gobo, and just wheel it into place for critical listening.
Also, for covering the window i was going to make a wooden panel that i could remove when the room isn't in use and use some of the foam (as i am afraid that i am stuck with it now) to cover it.
That's the right general idea, for isolation. It's often referred to as a "plug", and there are many examples of how to do that here on the forum. But you say that you don't need isolation, so is it really necessary?
i will try to get the REW software and try to analyze the room somehow.
It's not that hard to use: it sounds pretty intimidating, but is fairly intuitive. Just take readings for each speaker individually (not both at once), and post the results here. But I predict in advance that your problems will be the exact opposite of those nameless "engineers involved in acoustics". I predict major modal issues below 200 Hz, uneven mid-range response, and fairly flat high-end response, more or less following the speakers themselves, but with many, many sharp dips due to comb filtering of reflections and other fun stuff. Let's see who wins the prediction game here! The "engineers involved in acoustics " or REW.
The monitors are Alesis M1 Active MK2 (Quite cheap but good). They have no bass roll of though
They aren't too bad, yup. But maybe you can roll off the base in your DAW, or get a cheap external crossover and roll it off there. That's not ideal, but you'll need to do that anyway, in a small room with the speakers close to surfaces. There might be a way to insert a permanent EQ in the final output path of your DAW to your monitors, but that does NOT affect your actual bounced audio files. You only want it applied to the speakers.
Anyway, post the REW results here, once you get that far, and we'll take a look.
- Stuart -
diffusers 