Small Studio Build - Australia

[Jndrmn]

Hello!
First off let me say how much of an amazing resource this site is! Studio building is an incredibly daunting concept but this site makes it just that bit easier.
My name is Joe and I co own a small tuition school and soon to be studio with two other people.
I live in NSW Australia and am hoping to build a room to track drums/guitar/bass/vocals in.
db wise I haven't actually tested it but with drums it's usually around 105-110db so for now I'm going to say that's what we are working with.

I've been researching along with my two partners for the past few months as much as possible but as you all know it's a lifetime of research so cramming it all into a few months is not really possible.

Hopefully I am complying with all the rules, if there is anything I've missed or done incorrectly done, please let me know and I'll amend it!

BUDGET: Currently our budget is $10,000. We understand this isn't a great deal of money to work with but we have done the figures and for the plaster, wood and insulation it's about $3,600 and we all have family members who are electricians, builders and aircon installers so we are going to be able to cut some of the labour cost, not to mention we will be doing what we can ourselves. But I still understand this is an incredibly low amount to be working with.

The Room
We currently rent two shop fronts in a small complex which are connected internally as well as both having front and rear external access. One of the shop fronts is the tuition side of the business and the other is the soon to be studio.

- It shares a double brick wall with a neighbour and we have a business upstairs from us, the roof is a cement slab of unknown thickness but we haven't heard any sound coming down through the floor.
- The front of the room is all windows which leads onto a semi industrial area. The back leads to a carpark.
- Floor is a cement slab of unknown thickness but I've played a bass cab in there and I can't feel it in the floor really for what that's worth.

My Plan
To build a room within a room and then treat the remaining space outside the room and create a mixing room (Dealing with that once the live room is finished).

Walls
So this is where I am a bit stumped. Our original plan was to build two stud walls a few inches off the existing brick walls, with 16mm plaster - stud wall with 25kgm3 insulation - gap - stud wall with 25kgm3 insulation - 16mm plaster. Originally I didn't factor in the idea that the double brick wall would count as a leaf and therefor make this whole thing a three leaf system. Another option would be to just build a single stud wall with 2x16mm plasterboard on just the one side but I feel this is almost guaranteeing that we will not get enough sound reduction.


Floor
The floor wont change much, we are going to install floating floorboards to make it visually nicer. After researching, it seems that building a floating floor will not work for us, especially within our budget.

Ceiling
Ceiling we are planning on building exactly the same as the walls.

I have attached two images, one of the room and the walls we are planning to construct. (Measurements are in metric)

Air conditioning
We are just going to be installing a split cycle unit as our budget doesn't extend to ducted.

Doors
Each entrance to the tracking room will have two solid core doors and be sealed.

Window
We plan to have a window between the live and mixing rooms. We aren't thinking a big window. maybe even a 1-1.5m x .5-1m high but we aren't fixed on the size.

[Soundman2020]

Hi Joe, and Welcome!

with drums it's usually around 105-110db so for now I'm going to say that's what we are working with.

OK, but that's just how loud you are: How much isolation do you need? That's the number you really need to start with: How many decibels of isolation do you need?

But I still understand this is an incredibly low amount to be working with.

Definitely! Very, very low. I don't see how that can include the HVAC system, for example.... I'm assuming that is an additional expense that you didn't include in this number? That this number is only for the actual isolation, not including, HVAC, electrical, acoustic treatment, doors, or windows, and you will add on the costs for all of those later? What about other expenses, such as permits, structural engineer, inspections, rubble removal, etc?

we have done the figures and for the plaster, wood and insulation

Did you include the caulk, mud, tape, backer rod, nails, impaling clips, sealant, hinges, automatic door-closers, door seals, etc? It's the loads of small things like that, that add up fast and kill your budget. Not to mention the glass...

To put things in perspective, one of my customers who lives not too far from you just completed a studio that I designed for him last year, roughly the same size as yours overall (maybe a bit bigger). He budgeted around 50k for his build, and still came up short. He did most of the work himself, along with an experienced builder. Food for thought...

we all have family members who are electricians, builders and aircon installers

Do they all have experience in building studios? If not, they are all going to need some "re-training" before they start doing your place. Building a studio is rather different from building a typical house, office, shop, school, etc. same materials, different techniques.

the roof is a cement slab of unknown thickness but we haven't heard any sound coming down through the floor.

Excellent! That bodes well for good isolation.

- The front of the room is all windows which leads onto a semi industrial area.

Ouch! Assuming that those are typical commercial windows (either single glazed or double glazed), that's going to be a big problem. Even more so if they are operable.

- Floor is a cement slab of unknown thickness but I've played a bass cab in there and I can't feel it in the floor really for what that's worth.

Also excellent!

To build a room within a room and then treat the remaining space outside the room and create a mixing room (Dealing with that once the live room is finished).

That would be a mistake! Each of those rooms needs to be isolated: both the CR and the drum booth need to be designed and built properly, as a unit, since their walls work together to create the overall isolation. This is not the case of having one isolated room, and another isolated room next to it: There are resonant interactions between the various parts of those two wall systems that you cannot ignore. They need to be designed and built together, as a single system, because that's what they are. trying to add on a control room later is going to damage the isolation of the drum booth...

So this is where I am a bit stumped. Our original plan was to build two stud walls a few inches off the existing brick walls, with 16mm plaster - stud wall with 25kgm3 insulation - gap - stud wall with 25kgm3 insulation - 16mm plaster. Originally I didn't factor in the idea that the double brick wall would count as a leaf and therefor make this whole thing a three leaf system.

Yep! It is a 3-leaf system, without doubt. And even worse, your diagram shows a very small air gap between the outer leaf and middle leaf, without insulation, so the three leaf effect will be powerful...

Another option would be to just build a single stud wall with 2x16mm plasterboard on just the one side but I feel this is almost guaranteeing that we will not get enough sound reduction.

Why do you feel that? Did you do the math? The equations for 2-leaf walls and 3-leaf walls are not that hard to work through. Anyone with basic high-school math skills can do them.... thus convincing your self that your gut feeling is wrong... don't underestimate the power of resonance.... or you'll end up like the designers of the Verrazano Narrows bridge... Either you can use it intelligently in your favor, or you can ignore it and it will bight you.

Many things about acoustics are not intuitive, until you understand the underlying principles.

The floor wont change much, we are going to install floating floorboards to make it visually nicer.

We normally refer to that type of flooring as "laminate flooring", to avoid confusion with the acoustic concept of a properly floated floor. But yes, that¿s the best solution for your studio. Commercial laminate flooring over a suitable underlay.

Ceiling we are planning on building exactly the same as the walls.

Triple leaf ceiling, as well as triple leaf walls? You really don't like low frequency isolation, do you? You really do want thos drums to bleed through to the outside world!

We are just going to be installing a split cycle unit as our budget doesn't extend to ducted.

Then you had better take out extensive medical and liability insurance, and cut a deal with the local funeral parlour... With no ventilation for a room that is triple-sealed, hermetically absolutely air-tight, there's going to be a lot of healthy living people going in there, and sick or dead people coming out....

The problem is, people have this terrible habit: they like to breathe: That means that they use up the available oxygen in the air that is trapped inside the room, and pour out oodles of carbon dioxide to replace it. For some reason, people don't seem to do well when immersed in an atmosphere that is low on oxygen, and high on CO2...

You might want to rethink your lack of ventilation. Current standards call for 6 to 10 room changes per hour, in order to provide a comfortable breathable atmosphere.

Each entrance to the tracking room will have two solid core doors and be sealed.

That's a bti confusing: how do you plan to make TWO doors work if you have THREE leaves? Which leaf will have no door on it? And how will you prevent sound getting through the enormous hole where that empty doorway is?

Window
We plan to have a window between the live and mixing rooms. We aren't thinking a big window. maybe even a 1-1.5m x .5-1m high but we aren't fixed on the size.

Have you quoted the cost of three panes of thick laminated glass that size? That's going to take a huge chunk out of your budget... call your local glazier, and ask how much it costs per square meter for 8mm+8mm laminated glass with acoustic PVB... then ask about the installation costs for that...


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I'm also wondering about the overal shape of that room: Why do you want to have it like that? You are on a very tight budget, so it does not sound like a food idea to use complex shapes with multiple corners, some of which are angled, especially when you are going to have triple leaf walls, triple-leaf ceilings, and no experienced building contractor...

I'm not trying to discourage you: Just pointing out the realistic large issues that are evident in your current plan. I would seriously suggest you need to do a "reboot" here, and start over, firstly by learning about the acoustics of isolation walls, then by designing both rooms together, as a complete system, then by calling an experienced local building contractor to quote for actually building your design. Take his number, chop off about 30% if you really do have people who are fully able to build the place for nothing, and that will give you a realistic budget. Then work backwards from there.


- Stuart -

[Jndrmn]

Hey Stuart! Thank you for your brutal honesty. I think it helped kick start us into a more realistic idea haha.

Ok so this week we are going to buy a db meter to test how much isolation exactly we need.

After going over our original design and realising how unnecessarily complicated it was, (especially for our needs), we have simplified it a bit.

In this new diagram we have two rooms being built together instead of trying to attempt the mixing room at a later stage.

I've been reading the Home Recording Studio Build It Like The Pros book and I think these new rooms fit into good ratios or at least come very close.

For the mixing room which is at the top it fits in the L.W. Sepmeyer 1: 1.28: 1.54 ratio and the live room at the bottom fits into the M.M. Louden 1: 1.30: 1.90 ratio. So I think this is a good sign?

HVAC
With the air conditioning, the mixing room already has an air conditioning unit mounted on a temporary wall that is in the studio and we are planning to modify that wall to be inside our wall.

The live room though we are having issues as the shop is a rental with an ownership committee for the building and they are very unkeen on the idea of adding an extra entire unit to the building so this is our next hurdle. (I know it's very unpleasant but if it meets safety spec it might have to do if we cant install another split system) We install a portable free standing air conditioning unit in the room and exhaust it into the hall way and have the front door open for circulation. We are also planning to install intake and exhaust baffles (I cannot think of the right word at the moment) and have a fan either on the exhaust or intake hole that transfers air into the hallway which is then circulated out of the front door. Is this a really terrible idea or is it possible to make it work at all? or is there another solution we are missing entirely?

Also because the existing brick walls count as a leaf, I have modified the wall idea to just include 2 layers of 16mm plasterboard on the insides of the rooms and have nothing on the external walls except the hallway where we could install another layer of 16mm or potentially thinner for aesthetics so the hallway doesn't have a wall of wood and insulation on one side. I figured putting another layer of 16mm might not serve any purpose as the other walls won't have said plaster?

We have also scrapped the idea of a window in favour of a camera and screen monitoring system. As we aren't planning on being a full time studio and instead we will do it among other services we figure we can cut that cost out.

Currently we are planning on having a 30cm gap from the brick wall and 60cm from the existing roof.

Thank you for correcting me on all my mistakes and taking time out of your life to answer my questions. It's fantastic that a place like this exists.

Joe

[Soundman2020]

Hey Stuart! Thank you for your brutal honesty.

We seem to be sort of good at that, here on the forum. No sugar-coating, no kid gloves...

Ok so this week we are going to buy a db meter to test how much isolation exactly we need.

Great! Set it to "C" weighting and "Slow" response for all of your tests.

After going over our original design and realising how unnecessarily complicated it was, (especially for our needs), we have simplified it a bit.

Much better.

For the mixing room which is at the top it fits in the L.W. Sepmeyer 1: 1.28: 1.54 ratio and the live room at the bottom fits into the M.M. Louden 1: 1.30: 1.90 ratio. So I think this is a good sign?

You do need a good ratio for the control room (=mixing room), and that Sepmeyer ratio us one of the good ones, but it isn't so necessary to worry about that for the live room. Control rooms (CR) need to be neutral, not adding to nor subtracting from the sound, and basing the room on a good ratio helps with that. But Live Rooms (LR) can be whatever you want them to be. You can tailor the acoustics to by "bright" or "dead", "sharp" or "dull", "warm", "zingy", "boomy", "thin", or whatever other adjective you'd like to use. So looking for a good ratio isn't as necessary, as the modal response can actually help you with that, if you want it to.

With the air conditioning, the mixing room already has an air conditioning unit mounted on a temporary wall that is in the studio and we are planning to modify that wall to be inside our wall.

Ummmm,.... HVAC for studios is a bit more complex than that... and window-mounted air conditioners are often rather noisy...

We install a portable free standing air conditioning unit in the room and exhaust it into the hall way and have the front door open for circulation.

That just isn't an option, realistically. It just isn't. Apart from the fact that it won't work, why would you go to all the trouble of carefully isolating and treating a room, then never be able to use the isolation or the treatment? With the door open, there is no isolation, and the treatment will be incorrect for the "double-room", which will have the acoustic characteristics of both the room itself, and also the room that the door leads to...

and have a fan either on the exhaust or intake hole that transfers air into the hallway which is then circulated out of the front door.

It's probably not legal, and certainly isn't recommendable. You should never exhaust the stale air from one habitable space into another habitable space. Most building codes don't even allow that.

Also because the existing brick walls count as a leaf, I have modified the wall idea to just include 2 layers of 16mm plasterboard on the insides of the rooms

Correct!

and have nothing on the external walls except the hallway where we could install another layer of 16mm

Incorrect! You need to complete the fourth side of the outer leaf by having a single-leaf wall running down the right side of your rooms, to enclose the actual is9alted area where your rooms are.

We have also scrapped the idea of a window in favour of a camera and screen monitoring system.

That will work, except that you need two cameras and two screens.... you need to see both ways, not just one way. The musicians need to see the engineer, just as much as the engineer needs to see the musicians...

Currently we are planning on having a 30cm gap from the brick wall and 60cm from the existing roof.

That would be good, but you can probably get by with a smaller gap. But you need to do the math to be sure...

Thank you for correcting me on all my mistakes and taking time out of your life to answer my questions. It's fantastic that a place like this exists

- Stuart -