Acoustic treatment required for small home 'studio' space

[TerryFalafel]

Hi!

After plenty of reading and reviewing of this and other resources, I'm ready to seek advice on acoustic treatment for my music room.

I've just bought a house so I'm able to make the kinds of modifications and additions which I have never previously been able to in rented accommodation.

The room is pretty small, so I'm going to to be making the best of a non-ideal situation, but it's all I have to work with.

I make electronic music mostly, with some occasional vocal recording. My speakers are Genelec 8040A so it's by no measure full range monitoring, but there are clearly points in the room where the bass collects, and also some null points. By far the worst issue is the high frequency ringing and flutter though. This makes it unpleasant to even listen to music, never mind write or mix.

In terms of a general idea about what I can do, I need to keep the room structurally intact, safe for a little kid to be in, and not so overwhelmingly weird looking that it becomes wife-unfriendly cos this room connects the garden to the rest of the house so it will be visible to the whole family.

Volume-wise, I hope to be able to borrow a meter to make an accurate analysis, but for now I have to give a subjective answer to 'how loud?' and that is 'not that loud'. I need to be conscious of the neighbours, and given the size of the space, being mindful of the volume is the only option really.

On to the specifics of the room, and my sketchup drawing...

The listening position is at the front of the room (opposite end to the turntables)

The walls are concrete slab, and insulation between neighbouring properties (the house is a 20 year old mid-terrace) is pretty good. At least, no complaints so far!

The floor is a marble type tile which I don't like, so I will cover it with decent laminate floor.

The ceiling is that popcorn type bumpy stuff. Underneath it I think is solid though (again concrete?) so I can hang stuff from the ceiling if necessary.

The one major downside is that the entire external wall (LHS in the sketchup) is glass, pretty much. You can see from the sketchup that there's a glass door, and then a floor to ceiling pane of glass on one side, and a slightly smaller sized pane on the other side which has a radiator at the bottom. The issues with this are twofold. It makes mounting any acoustic treatment trickier. I guess I'll have to use battens between the window frames which roun round the windows, then mount any treatment to those.

The other problem is that this is a residential house and the music room is on the ground floor, so being conscious of security I want to be able to have blinds / curtains to stop people seeing into the room.

The doorway on the RHS leads to the house. It's currently just a normal internal wooden door with glass panes in the top half. I'm not bothered about trying to prevent sound getting out of the room in that direction.

The back wall where the turntables are placed is again solid concrete. No windows or anything of note.

Budget-wise, I can spend €1000 - 2000. Spending a bit more would be possible if the results warranted it.

So really I'm looking for advice on how to best treat this room to remove the horrible HF issues, and then hopefully be able to control the bass somewhat.

Ideas on how best to mount acoustic treatment over the windows would be very useful

Also, how best to manage bass problems in the room. I've been reading a lot about VPR panels which seem like an excellent choice where space is limited, and in my room it definitely is limited!

Another important note : I can make acoustic treatment myself, so it's customised and hopefully cheaper. I know that people have had mixed success with DIY VPR panels, but certainly for HF absorbers and so on I should be able to DIY them quite easily I hope.

I think that covers the basics. I hope it's enough info to start the ball rolling!

Cheers.

TF

sketchup_ss.png

Edit : Here are a few photos of the space.

Front L.jpg

Front R.jpg

Window frames.jpg

Back wall.jpg

Floor.jpg

[TerryFalafel]

So in addition to the info already supplied, i bought an ECM8000 to try to get some extra information on the room.

I calibrated based on the instructions in the software and took sweeps from 17Hz - 22kHz from both speakers and L & R independently.

The only thing I did not do was calibrate the SPL to 86dB because this is ludicrously loud in the room I'm in. I can do this if absolutely necessary, but it's much louder than I will ever monitor, and I'll need to do it at a more sociable hour. Please let me know if the attached info needs to be re-measured at 86dB.

There seem to be some fairly massive swings in the bass department. 40Hz (roughly where the Genelec 8040As' frequency response start) is very loud, but around 88Hz is about 40dB down from 40Hz! Then there's another big peak at 180Hz and a big dip at 203Hz. I also notice that things start to roll off from about 10kHz, which is strange because when I take music written in this room onto other systems it sounds very dull, and I have put that down to the ringing and honky, brittle sound of the room always making me roll the top end off my mixes.

Anyway, the results are here :

https://we.tl/s8QQEpnsKO

Cheers

TF

[TerryFalafel]

Hi Stuart.

Would it be possible to answer a couple of specific questions?

1 - What's the calculation you use to determine the correct speaker position in these threads? I see that you give precise measurements for peoples' speaker placement but I can't find anywhere how you actually make those calculations

2 - I can see that the first thing I need to do in my room is put floor to ceiling superchunks on the front LHS and RHS of my room. I was planning on making those 60 x 60 x 85 cm, but as you can see from my Sketchup, on the LHS there's a radiator which prevents one side of the superchunk being 60cm deep along the LH wall.

I can easily make a frame to make the superchunk start just above the height of the radiator, but my question then concerns the RH superchunk. If the LH superchunk is not floor to ceiling, should I make the RH superchunk the same? Or will it adversely affect the stereo image if the LH superchunk starts above the radiator but the right hand superchunk is floor to ceiling?

When I get home I will upload my REW mdat file again as I see that the link has expired.

Many thanks

TF

[TerryFalafel]

Hi Stuart,

Would it be possible to just have a look at my questions about speaker placement and superchunk symmetry?

With this info i have enough to get going. The other stuff can wait...

I do realise how busy you are and how many people are requesting your assistance. Sorry to pester you...

Thanks

TF

[TerryFalafel]

One month bump.

[Soundman2020]

1 - What's the calculation you use to determine the correct speaker position in these threads? I see that you give precise measurements for peoples' speaker placement but I can't find anywhere how you actually make those calculations

There's no simple calculation. It's a series of several calculations, plus a good dose of experience, adjusting for specific issues in the room. And even then, it's not perfect. These are just meant to be starting points. Theoretically, they are good locations to start from, then try out small incremental adjustments in positions and angles, to see if there's a better spot close by.

2 - I can see that the first thing I need to do in my room is put floor to ceiling superchunks on the front LHS and RHS of my room.

I can easily make a frame to make the superchunk start just above the height of the radiator, but my question then concerns the RH superchunk. If the LH superchunk is not floor to ceiling, should I make the RH superchunk the same? Or will it adversely affect the stereo image if the LH superchunk starts above the radiator but the right hand superchunk is floor to ceiling?

It's OK to have them asymmetrical. In fact, its best if the RH one does go floor to ceiling, even when the LH one does not.

- Stuart -