Thanks to Stuart (re: Studio over Garage)

[riprowan]

Stuart, thanks for your many doubts. You have successfully infected me with doubt as well, and so the decision has been made to find / make space on the ground for the studio and not to try to build it on the second floor of the garage. A heavy slab and concrete walls are now possible for much better iso.

A small donation has been made to this forum as a token of gratitude for "talking me down" off the second story.

Thanks,
Rip

[Soundman2020]

Thanks for the kind words, Rip! Glad I could help.

And I'm 100% certain that you'll be REALLY glad you made this decision: The studio will be much better than it would have been: better isolated, and also better acoustics, since you can design the whole thing from the ground up, to specifically be a studio.

Right now I'm working on designs for two "ground up" designs for paying customers (one already under construction, one about to start in a few weeks), and it's so much easier when there are no limitations from existing walls, doors, ceilings, beams, posts, HVAC, or anything else. You can let your imagination go, and play a lot of "What if?" games, moving things around for acoustic reasons, or aesthetic reasons, rather than just because there's a damn water pipe, structural column, or roof truss in the way!

So yeah, I think you made a really smart choice, and I am so looking forward to seeing your design thread and your build thread for the "Rip Rowan Ground-Up World Class Super Studio"!




- Stuart -

[riprowan]

"Rip Rowan Ground-Up World Class Super Studio"

lolz. My expectations are far more humble.

Right now the builder's architect has the best rendering, so I've attached a scan if you'd like to have a look at what I think we're going to build. The new design provides a useful entry / kitchenette / makeshift 2nd iso room, entrance to the tracking room w/out having to go through the control room, plenty of room overhead for well baffled HVAC, room to soffit-mount the JBLs and angle the control room glass inward, and a nicely oblique set of interesting roof angles in the main tracking room angling up from the corner to a max of 14' on the left wall. We did some walkthroughs and it has a really great feel I think, especially given the constrained space. If I can get him to send me some renderings I'll post them here.

Thanks for all your input and nudging.

[Soundman2020]

That's sort of similar to what you were planning before, but your architect is still not isolating the rooms correctly. For example, you have proper MSM walls between the CR and vocal booth, and between the CR and live room ("tracking room"), but none of the rooms has complete MSM shell around it, so none of them is isolating well.

I often use the "fish tank" analogy to explain this concept, since water is a lot more intuitive than sound: Imagine that you want to build an aquarium to put in your living room, so you can have some fish swimming around. But then you figure: "Well, I'll only be looking at the aquarium from the front, so I'll use glass for that side, but since I don't need to see in from the other sides, I'll just use cardboard on the sides and at the back, since it is much cheaper".... How well do you think your aquarium will hold water?

You have exactly the same situation with your CR: the walls to the vocal booth and live room are like the glass wall of the aquarium, because that's where you think the problem is, but all your other walls are "cardboard" (acoustically speaking), and that's where the real problems will be. Just like with your aquarium, once the water leaks out through one side, it also runs around the front and goes everywhere, so too the sound that leaks out the back and sides of your rooms will "run around" and "splash everywhere": there will be no sound isolation with your studio, just as there is no "water isolation" with the faulty fish tank design.

People don't realize that sound takes the easiest path out, bypassing the hard paths, and this effect is most notorious in the low frequencies, which are the most difficult to isolate anyway, and are also the most annoying. Have you ever walked past a disco or night club late at night? What do you hear? The "boom-boom-boom" of the drums and bass guitar. Not the vocals or guitars, not even the keyboards: it is the low frequencies that get out, and travel far. Even a couple of blocks away from the disco, you still hear the "boom-boom".... And since low frequency sound is not directional, it does not matter which way you walk from the disco, you will hear roughly the same level and sound in all directions! The same with your rooms: once the low frequencies get out, they go in all directions and will be heard easily in the other rooms. Sound waves are only stopped by barriers that are larger than the wavelength of the sound, and considering that the longest waves are over fifty feet long, there's not much that will stop that once it gets out of the room.

In other words, you need to properly complete the full MSM isolation shell around each room, in order to have isolation. If you don't do that, then you don't get isolation.

I know you think that you have this covered with the partial staggered stud walls in somce places, and different things in other places, but you are not showing a proper decoupled 2-leaf MSM on the drawings, so I have the impression that your architect does not understand it well. If you compare what he has done to what John did on the original plan that you used as the basis for yours, you will clearly see the 2-leaf system: That outer blue line on John's design is not just a decorative border around the page: it is the outer leaf! The inner leaf walls on that are all gray colored, and the outer-lea wall is dark blue. Take a closer look at the overlay you posted last Friday, with John's superimposed over yours... John's has a fully decoupled outer leaf: yours does not.





The other thing I would re-think is having the bathroom door opening into the control room. Not a good idea, for several reasons. One is odors: I don't know if you have ever worked with musicians that have, shall we say "dietary issues"... You don't want those guys bathroom habits escaping into your show-case control room, every time you open the door! . Another issue is sound: since there is no isolation at all there between bathroom and CR, while you are tracking and mixing you'll never be certain if that strange sound you heard was in the mix or in the bathroom: You'll forever be going back and playing things over again, to make sure... Another big issue is humidity: bathrooms have lots of it, especially when you have a shower in there. So you will have wild swings in humidity inside the control room, each time the door is opened and closed, which is no good for instruments that you might have in there, or mics that you might have stored there, or your equipment, and certainly not for your HVAC system. You will have to drastically oversize the HVAC system to be able to deal with all that sudden latent heat load, plus the sensible heat load, but that means that when the bathroom is not in use at all, the HVAC duty cycle will be too short. So you'll be paying for a bigger system than what you actually need, then only using it partially and inefficiently most of the time...

In other words, switch the bathroom door around to the lobby side, and seal it off from the control room. The you can just do normal bathroom ventilation, totally independent of the HVAC system.

and angle the control room glass inward,

You do not need to do that for acoustic reasons: it's a myth. Yup, I kid you not. In fact, if you angle the glass, then you reduce isolation, since the two panes are closer together along one edge than they could have been if the glass was vertical. Less air gap = less isolation. The reason why some studios do have angled glass is not acoustics: it is visuals. There can be light glare and visual reflections in the glass from some places in the room, if the lighting is not done correctly, but angling the glass downwards helps to reduce that. Then, to compensate for the lost isolation, they then have to use thicker glass and wider air gaps in their walls....

Some people think that the glass is angled so that reflections from singers and speaker don't get back to you, but that's the myth. Take a look:

angled-windows-dont-work.gif

Reflections still happen just the same, only at a different point on the glass.


And also:

angled-windows-dont-work-#2.gif

(I think those both come from Rod Gervais book, but I'm not 100% certain).

Surprising, but true. Many people think that you MUST have angled windows in studios, because that's what they see: but in fact it is not needed at all for acoustics. It's only real purpose is controlling light glare. But it is much better to just pay close attention to lighting design, so that angled glass is not needed in the first place... designing smarter is a lot better than buying materials and equipment you don't need, and wasting space...

If I can get him to send me some renderings I'll post them here.

That would be cool! I'd love to see that.

- Stuart -

[riprowan]

That's sort of similar to what you were planning before, but your architect is still not isolating the rooms correctly. For example, you have proper MSM walls between the CR and vocal booth, and between the CR and live room ("tracking room"), but none of the rooms has complete MSM shell around it, so none of them is isolating well.

Yeah, that isn't my architects fault, it's mine, and also the fact that we're working in haste at this moment to re-do plans in time to still get things permitted in order to meet a number of hard deadlines, so the plans as drawn are what's getting permitted. The good news is that these are interior walls we're talking about so we can still do double-stud / double sliding glass instead of the staggered studs as shown. We are just in a hurry on the bureaucratic side.

The other thing I would re-think is having the bathroom door opening into the control room. Not a good idea, for several reasons.

You don't have to tell me. I've spent the last six years mixing in a control room adjacent to a bathroom that didn't even have an exhaust fan. #notmyfault

In other words, switch the bathroom door around to the lobby side, and seal it off from the control room. The you can just do normal bathroom ventilation, totally independent of the HVAC system.

Not sure what "normal bathroom ventilation" is where you're from, but here in Texas, bathrooms have an A/C register but no A/C return, instead they have an exhaust fan. They're never independent from HVAC. A good fan will take care of 95% of the odor issue and most of the humidity issue (on those rare days that someone stays over in the studio and needs to take a shower).

Re: layout, I agree with your bathroom concepts but I can't change the ingress to the bathroom to be on the "lobby side" - it may not be apparent from the drawing, but the "lobby side" of that bathroom wall is actually a patio. Due to constraints the patio must remain a patio and the bathroom needs to stay where it is (I'm saving about $5K with the bathroom on that corner).

Re: angled glass - this is a head-scratcher. I'm not sure about your angled glass issue. It adds almost no cost to angle that front wall and it's well worth it to me - if only to provide a space for HVAC, not to mention the glare and - yes, acoustic issues. It's kind of a no-brainer, really. Honestly, I'd pay the few hundred extra bucks to angle the wall just to make it more professional looking. Clients know that when your front wall is angled, you mean business. Kinda like having a U47. Even if it's busted, it's instant trust.

Also your diagram and arguments regarding flat glass is somewhat misleading, BTW. It flies somewhat in the face of real world experience -- and assumes that the mic is placed within the angled window's reflection path.

If you take a drum kit and put it 10-15' in front of a 6x4 piece of flat glass and stick some condensers up over the kit - I promise you - you will absolutely hear that reflection in the overheads, especially if you compress them. If you angle the glass 10%, with the drum kit 10-15' back and the condensers up over the kit, you will absolutely NOT hear that glass. At least not the same way, with the phasey, comb-filter-ey highs. With side walls or sliding glass doors that produce reflections, you can move some gobos around to stop HF reflections, but it doesn't really work to stick a gobo in front of the control room window :/

- Rip