Help me build my barn studio

[thejook]

Hi folks,

New to the forum here. Posted another thread about a specific question, but I think I need more input on the project in general. Here's what I'm doing:

1. Buying a pre-engineered barn from BarnPros.com (the 24x36ft version of this model: http://www.barnpros.com/barn-plans-prod ... temid=1551)

2. Having the general contractor and his team who is building our new house also build this and 'attach' it to the house with a hallway (zoning guidelines prohibit us from having it be a free-standing building). He'll take isolation into account when he pours the slab for it; it won't be connected physically to anything in the main house and it will still be some distance away. They'll add all the HVAC, electrical, plumbing, flooring, etc. as those things aren't accounted for in the pre-engineered kit.

Sound isolation from the main house isn't a huge concern, given that it won't be physically touching the house or share any infrastructure with it. My main concern is how to best utilize the space to have:

-A control room that sounds as true (and enjoyable) as possible, while accounting for enough space to house a large format analog console one day
-A live room with tons of vertical space and cubic feet of air to track drums in
-A loft on top of the control room that can be a living space / lounge

Here's a floor plan of the barn without anything built in it (except the loft, which is 24x24), and one that has a rough outline of where I think I'd put the control room and booths. Using the Amroc room mode calculator, the 'best' ratio that seems to work with the space I have available (and assuming a 9ft 6in ceiling height, which I can get up to 10ft if I need to) is 18ft length and 14ft width. The largest console I think I'd put in there is 108" long. I know HVAC is going to be an issue I need to address, but since we're building from scratch, we can move stuff around to accommodate. The only immovable objects are the posts holding up the load of the barn, and they're indicated in the drawings.

Thoughts? Does this look like a good way to use the space? Am I screwing something up with my control room dimensions? I'm new at this!

[Soundman2020]

Hi there "thejook", and Welcome!

Posted another thread about a specific question, but I think I need more input on the project in general. Here's what I'm doing:

Try to keep all of your questions and build-related posts in one single thread. It makes it easier for yourself (and others!) to keep track of your design and build process.

2. Having the general contractor and his team who is building our new house also build this and 'attach' it to the house with a hallway (zoning guidelines prohibit us from having it be a free-standing building).

Don't you just LOVE the silliness of zoning regulations! What possible difference could it make to them, if your house is connected to your barn or not? Red tape.... Sigh!

He'll take isolation into account when he pours the slab for it;

Hmmm... are you SURE? Not many contractors are clued up on acoustic isolation. Having a separate slab is great, but connecting the walkway to the house creates a flanking path.... How does he plan to decouple that? I'd hazard a guess, and say he probably never even considered it...

it won't be connected physically to anything in the main house

Confusing: If they have to attach it to your house, then how can it also be "not connected" to the house?

They'll add all the HVAC, electrical, plumbing, flooring, etc. as those things aren't accounted for in the pre-engineered kit.

... and all of those are major headaches for studio design! Doing those while also keeping the needed acoustic isolation in place, is not so easy. I often spend as much time on the HVAC design as I do on the entire rest of the studio. HVAC for studios is nothing at all like HVAC for a house, office, school, shop, etc. Not even close. If your contractor has never done HVAC for a studio before, then that's a big red flag....

-A control room that sounds as true (and enjoyable) as possible, while accounting for enough space to house a large format analog console one day

Take a look at the ITU BS.1116-2 document. That pretty much defines what a control room should be, acoustically. It lays out everything you need, in terms of technical specifications. With a properly designed studio in a big enough space, it is entirely possible to meet those specs. Here's a link to one such case: www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=20471

If the room is large enough, then there should be no problem fitting in your console. However, do take into account that whenever you change something substantial in your studio, it will probably need re-tuning. A big console will very definitely change the acoustic response, so you will need to compensate for that, when the time comes. Large consoles are not good for acoustics in small rooms. If you think you might want a large console, then make your CR as big as you possible can right now, even though you might not yet have the console for a long while.

-A live room with tons of vertical space and cubic feet of air to track drums in

-A loft on top of the control room that can be a living space / lounge

What about storage? Bathroom? Kitchenette? Those are all things I commonly recommend for people doing outbuilding studios. When you have to run up to the house every time you want to warm a pizza, or get a cup of coffee, or go to the bathroom, or grab another cable/mic/guitar/whatever, it gets old pretty fast. Far better to have those facilities in the barn itself.

and one that has a rough outline of where I think I'd put the control room and booths.

The layout looks reasonable, but you are wasting space unnecessarily by splaying the side walls of the control room. It's a myth that you need to do that. It is not a sin to have parallel walls in the room. Yes, splayed walls can help to eliminate flutter echo, but you need to splay them much more than you are showing to do that (total of 12°, at least). There are no other valid reasons for doing that (unless you consider "it looks cool" as a valid reason.... )

If you are doing a proper RFZ style room (as you seem to be, based on the front wall shape), then you do need to splay the front part of the side walls, but that's a different issue entirely.

Using the Amroc room mode calculator, the 'best' ratio that seems to work with the space I have available . . .

If you do not have a perfectly rectangular room, then modal calculators are not much use! Those only work for rooms that have exactly six surfaces (4 walls, one floor, one ceiling), arranged as three sets of parallel pairs that are mutually perpendicular to each other. As soon as you splay one wall, or add another surface, the prediction is no longer valid, since you have change the modes associated with that wall. For example, if you splay one side wall so that the room width is 12 feet the front but 15 feet at the back, the there is no longer an sharp axial mode associated with that wall. There is still a semblance of a mode, but it is no longer where the calculator predicts it will be. Ditto for the tangential and oblique modes that are associated with that wall: they all shift to different frequencies. There might even be new tangential modes. And if you add a wall to the room, then all bets are off. If your room has eight or ten sides, instead of just six, then you have a whole bunch of other modes that aren't accounted for by the simple calculators.

I know HVAC is going to be an issue I need to address,

Yup! Studio silencers are big, and there0s lots of calculations ahead for you to figure it all out! HVAC is "fun and games"...

The only immovable objects are the posts holding up the load of the barn, and they're indicated in the drawings.

They are not completely unmovable: They could be moved if necessary, provided that the structural support was provided in some other way. I have had to do that on some occasions. But you'd need a structural engineer to do that, and you don't need to do it anyway! With your current layout, all of your posts can end up in the air cavity between the outer-leaf walls and inner-leaf walls.

Does this look like a good way to use the space? Am I screwing something up with my control room dimensions? I'm new at this!

Before you lock yourself in with a a layout try a few more. For example, try moving the booth to the far corner of the live room, moving the CR over a bit, and putting a storage room / machine room on the other side of the CR. Also, what are your plans for the space under the stairs? Harry Potter probably won't need it... So you can use it for something...

When I'm designing a studio, I often run through a dozen or so rough layouts before two or three of them catch my attention, and I work on those a bit more, until I narrow it down to "The One".

Don't lock yourself into anything too soon. It takes months to design a studio such as this completely anyway, so take your time and make sure you get the best layout.

- Stuart -

[thejook]

2. Having the general contractor and his team who is building our new house also build this and 'attach' it to the house with a hallway (zoning guidelines prohibit us from having it be a free-standing building).

Don't you just LOVE the silliness of zoning regulations! What possible difference could it make to them, if your house is connected to your barn or not? Red tape.... Sigh!

Yeah, I think the notion here is that the town doesn't want folks building appurtenant structures over 12ft tall because they worry they'll turn into guest houses that get rented out to tenants. We live in a rather bucolic suburb with large plots, and they really don't want any of them subdivided.

He'll take isolation into account when he pours the slab for it;

Hmmm... are you SURE? Not many contractors are clued up on acoustic isolation. Having a separate slab is great, but connecting the walkway to the house creates a flanking path.... How does he plan to decouple that? I'd hazard a guess, and say he probably never even considered it...

You're right- I thought maybe I'd sit with him with the requisite sections of the Rod Gervais book to instruct him specifically on how to isolate the slab. Per someone's suggestion on this forum, I ran out and bought that book and read it cover to cover before posting here. It's really helpful!

it won't be connected physically to anything in the main house
Confusing: If they have to attach it to your house, then how can it also be "not connected" to the house?

That part I'd love some guidance on - I imagine there's a best practice for connecting a hallway to a structure in such a way wherein the studs aren't actually touching the new structure; I seem to recall some of that from the Gervais book.

They'll add all the HVAC, electrical, plumbing, flooring, etc. as those things aren't accounted for in the pre-engineered kit.

... and all of those are major headaches for studio design! Doing those while also keeping the needed acoustic isolation in place, is not so easy. I often spend as much time on the HVAC design as I do on the entire rest of the studio. HVAC for studios is nothing at all like HVAC for a house, office, school, shop, etc. Not even close. If your contractor has never done HVAC for a studio before, then that's a big red flag....

Again hoping the book will be helpful in instructing him on what to do.

-A control room that sounds as true (and enjoyable) as possible, while accounting for enough space to house a large format analog console one day

Take a look at the ITU BS.1116-2 document. That pretty much defines what a control room should be, acoustically. It lays out everything you need, in terms of technical specifications. With a properly designed studio in a big enough space, it is entirely possible to meet those specs. Here's a link to one such case: http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... =2&t=20471

If the room is large enough, then there should be no problem fitting in your console. However, do take into account that whenever you change something substantial in your studio, it will probably need re-tuning. A big console will very definitely change the acoustic response, so you will need to compensate for that, when the time comes. Large consoles are not good for acoustics in small rooms. If you think you might want a large console, then make your CR as big as you possible can right now, even though you might not yet have the console for a long while.

I did a search and couldn't find the ITU BS.1116-2 document you reference. Can you point me in the right direction? As far as 'big enough,' do you think that 18x14x9.5 is big enough to fit an 8068 or the like?

-A loft on top of the control room that can be a living space / lounge

What about storage? Bathroom? Kitchenette? Those are all things I commonly recommend for people doing outbuilding studios. When you have to run up to the house every time you want to warm a pizza, or get a cup of coffee, or go to the bathroom, or grab another cable/mic/guitar/whatever, it gets old pretty fast. Far better to have those facilities in the barn itself.

Yes! Due to the scope of this project (we're essentially knocking down our house and building from scratch in addition to adding the barn studio), we'll have a bunch of appliances from the old kitchen that we intend to add to the barn loft. We're also considering a bathroom up there for the reasons you cite. The issue is property taxes- we have to balance building the house / barn we want and not going overboard such that the property tax bill is unsustainable. More bedrooms and bathrooms = higher tax assessment.

and one that has a rough outline of where I think I'd put the control room and booths.

The layout looks reasonable, but you are wasting space unnecessarily by splaying the side walls of the control room. It's a myth that you need to do that. It is not a sin to have parallel walls in the room. Yes, splayed walls can help to eliminate flutter echo, but you need to splay them much more than you are showing to do that (total of 12°, at least). There are no other valid reasons for doing that (unless you consider "it looks cool" as a valid reason.... )

If you are doing a proper RFZ style room (as you seem to be, based on the front wall shape), then you do need to splay the front part of the side walls, but that's a different issue entirely.

That just blew my mind. Literally every drawing I've seen in my research has some version of splayed walls, and I always just assumed it's a huge requirement. Why do they all do it? Because of that same myth?

I am interested in the RFZ style room, and I think I know how to get the angles right? If there's a resource you know of, however, that is a good primer on this I'd love to read up on it.

Using the Amroc room mode calculator, the 'best' ratio that seems to work with the space I have available . . .

If you do not have a perfectly rectangular room, then modal calculators are not much use! Those only work for rooms that have exactly six surfaces (4 walls, one floor, one ceiling), arranged as three sets of parallel pairs that are mutually perpendicular to each other. As soon as you splay one wall, or add another surface, the prediction is no longer valid, since you have change the modes associated with that wall. For example, if you splay one side wall so that the room width is 12 feet the front but 15 feet at the back, the there is no longer an sharp axial mode associated with that wall. There is still a semblance of a mode, but it is no longer where the calculator predicts it will be. Ditto for the tangential and oblique modes that are associated with that wall: they all shift to different frequencies. There might even be new tangential modes. And if you add a wall to the room, then all bets are off. If your room has eight or ten sides, instead of just six, then you have a whole bunch of other modes that aren't accounted for by the simple calculators.

Interesting. Do you still recommend using them as a good starting point for room dimensions? For instance, if I'm doing a RFZ, are the dimensions I've chosen for my room kind of irrelevant now?

I know HVAC is going to be an issue I need to address...

Yup! Studio silencers are big, and there0s lots of calculations ahead for you to figure it all out! HVAC is "fun and games"...

This I'm learning...yikes.

The only immovable objects are the posts holding up the load of the barn, and they're indicated in the drawings. They are not completely unmovable: They could be moved if necessary, provided that the structural support was provided in some other way. I have had to do that on some occasions. But you'd need a structural engineer to do that, and you don't need to do it anyway! With your current layout, all of your posts can end up in the air cavity between the outer-leaf walls and inner-leaf walls.

This part confused me. Since the posts are every 12 feet, there's really no way to make an 18x14x9.5 room without at least one of them in the room itself. I think I've put it in a place where it won't bother me (and if symmetry is an issue, I can always put a 'dummy' post on the other side to balance it). As far as having the post removed, I'm sure I could do it but of course everything comes at a cost. The barn is pre-engineered, which saves us a ton of $$, and the more we ask the architect to deviate from that plan the more it's gonna cost. He did suggest burying the barn a bit to give us more flexibility with the ceiling height, and he said that won't add much cost. So maybe I'll run this idea by him just to see...

Does this look like a good way to use the space? Am I screwing something up with my control room dimensions? I'm new at this!

Before you lock yourself in with a a layout try a few more. For example, try moving the booth to the far corner of the live room, moving the CR over a bit, and putting a storage room / machine room on the other side of the CR. Also, what are your plans for the space under the stairs? Harry Potter probably won't need it... So you can use it for something...

Oh for sure - I'm totally in the mode of playing with different configurations right now. A machine room under the stairs is a great idea. I also need somewhere to put the furnace, other guts of the HVAC...

[Soundman2020]

I thought maybe I'd sit with him with the requisite sections of the Rod Gervais book to instruct him specifically on how to isolate the slab. Per someone's suggestion on this forum, I ran out and bought that book and read it cover to cover before posting here. It's really helpful!

You should probably get "Master Handbook of Acoustics" as well (by F. Alton Everest), affectionately reffered to as "MHoA". That gives you the acoustic background behind what Rod does in his book. It's always better to understand WHY you are doing something, rather than just do it blindly. If you understand the acoustic theory behind decoupled walls, then you can apply that to your own walls, and make adjustments as needed by your specific situation, rather than just do things "cookie cutter" style from Rod's book.

That part I'd love some guidance on - I imagine there's a best practice for connecting a hallway to a structure in such a way wherein the studs aren't actually touching the new structure; I seem to recall some of that from the Gervais book.

That's what I figured with my comment about your contractor not having thought it through. If he hasn't done that, which is rather basic, I'd be concerned that there are many, many other aspects of isolation and acoustics that he hasn't thought through either, any one of which could have serious repercussions for your studio. I'd suggest that you might want to hire someone like John to design your place for you, then just give the plans to the contractor so he can build it. It's far better to let an expert designer do what he does best, rather than someone whose field of expertise is entirely different, and his only connection with acoustic design is a book that you bought him, which doesn't even deal with acoustic design theory!

Again hoping the book will be helpful in instructing him on what to do.

See comment above!

I did a search and couldn't find the ITU BS.1116-2 document you reference. Can you point me in the right direction?

Did you google it? It's not hard to find... https://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/re ... !PDF-E.pdf

It turns out there's an updated version, ITU BS.1116-3. Only minor differences, though, but here it is if you want it: http://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec ... !PDF-E.pdf

Yes! Due to the scope of this project (we're essentially knocking down our house and building from scratch in addition to adding the barn studio), we'll have a bunch of appliances from the old kitchen that we intend to add to the barn loft

Great! But that implies plumbing, and plumbing implies water noise, which you will need to account for in your isolation design. You don't want to be recording a beautiful soft, perfect vocal for some classic ballad, then have the wound of the toilet flushing and tank refilling get into your mic... There are ways of dealing with that, but you do have to be aware of it from the start, and that's probably something else your contractor has not considered. He would likely just install the sinks, toilets, pipes, drains, and vents the same way he always does, and you'd end up recording: "Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling... FLUSSSHHHHH GURRGLLLEEE SLOOOOSH GLONK GLONK GLONK!!!"

That just blew my mind. Literally every drawing I've seen in my research has some version of splayed walls, and I always just assumed it's a huge requirement. Why do they all do it? Because of that same myth?

Glad that got your attention! There are numerous studios out there with pure rectangular shapes. Many people consider Abbey Road to be one of the best studios on the planet, yet every single room in Abbey Road is rectangular...

Here's the thing: There are valid reasons why a design might want to splay walls, but if you dont' know what the reasons are, or how much to splay them, then you are wasting your time, your money, and your studio space! You are paying a LOT of money to build this barn/studio, without any doubt. Each square foot of floor area is costing you $$$$$ So why would you put a whole bunch of those $$$$$ inside a wall, where they are no use to you, unless you really need to do that?

The only valid reasons for splaying your walls, are:

1) If you are using a design concept that requires it, such as RFZ, NER, CID, or one of the derivatives. It that's the case, then your speakers will very, very probably be flush-mounted (a.k.a. "soffit mounted"), and parts of the side walls and front wall will be splayed carefully at precisely set angles that accomplish the purpose of the design.

2) To deal with flutter echo. In which case you need to angle your walls by a total of at least 12°, since that's the smallest angle that deals with it effectively. However, there are other methods for dealing with flutter echo that do not involve wasting so much space.

3) If there is some structural impediment or other layout issue that forces you to do so.

4) If it is needed in order to provide more space in an adjacent room (eg, to make a vocal booth, iso booth, machine room, bathroom, office, etc. big enough to be practical, where it would have been too small without that.

5) Purely for aesthetic reasons: ("Because it looks cool")

I can't think of any other valid reason. And certainly, the reason "Because everybody does it that way", is not valid! Once again, it comes back to understanding the acoustic principles behind the design, so that you can make intelligent decisions, rather than just doing a "cookie cutter and resize" or "cut and paste" approach.

In fact, Rod is a big proponent of rectangular studios. If you read his book, be mentions that in a couple of places. He normally does rectangular rooms, unless he has a good reason not to.

Yes, a lot of modern rooms do have splayed wall, but that's because the predominant design concept today is RFZ, or variations of that, which requires that the walls be splayed by specific angles. But there's no such thing as "one angle fits all". Each room is different, and will need a different splay angle in order to work. You cannot just copy the floor plane for a room you saw that you liked, and scale it up or down to fit your space: angles do not scale. Neither do ratios. Neither does acoustic treatment. If you want to take a design and scale it, then you need to recalculate the angles, and re-design the treatment.

I am interested in the RFZ style room, and I think I know how to get the angles right? If there's a resource you know of, however, that is a good primer on this I'd love to read up on it.

Wow! Ummm... that's sort of like saying "I think I understand the basis of playing the guitar. If there's any resource that you know of to make me play like Peter Frampton in a few minutes, then I'd love to read up on that!" I think you get my point. Designing an RFZ room is quite an undertaking! It's not something you can learn to do in a brief time. First, you need a decent background in the basics of acoustic theory ("MHoA"), then you need a decent background in construction design (with some basis in structural design), then you need to learn a good 3D modelling tool, such as SketchUp. Then you put all those three together, to come up with the basic layout, and you adjust the angles and dimensions and layout and geometry as needed, until you arrive at the optimum compromise.

You can learn how to do it yourself, for sure: It takes time, but it certainly is possible. When people ask me about that, I estimate about 3 to 6 months to learn what you need to know, then another three or four months to actually do the design. That's realistic. I don't know of anyone who has done it faster than that: Like most skills, it takes about 2,000 hours of study and practice to get to the point where you are able to do basic things well, and about 10,000 hours to get to the point where you really dominate the skill and can use it well, in most situations.

In other words, it takes about as long to learn to design great studios, as it does to learn to play the guitar like Peter Frampton, or the drums like Phil Collins.

Interesting. Do you still recommend using them as a good starting point for room dimensions? For instance, if I'm doing a RFZ, are the dimensions I've chosen for my room kind of irrelevant now?

Room ratios are a starting point, not an end point, and there's no need to go crazy about trying to find "the perfect ratio", because no such thing exists. Small rooms will ALWAYS have lousy modal behavior, no matter how hard you try to finesse your ratio, for a very simple reason: There are not enough modes to go around. In order to get smooth modal response, the room needs to be large enough that there are at least three or four modes for every note on the musical scale, all the way down to the bottom end. In other words, your Schroeder frequency needs to be around 20 Hz, or lower. That's physically impossible in a small room. So the best you can do is to choose a ratio that is not terrible (no two dimensions related mathematically, nor within 5% of being related, plus the others listed in BS.1116-3), and that is reasonably close to one of the known good ratios. Hopefully inside the Bolt area, but even that is not an absolute requirement: there are a few good rations that are outside that area...

In other words, there's no point in spending hours and hours trying to make your ratio "perfect", simply because that is not physically possible. There's no such thing as a "golden ratio" that makes your room sound spectacular. There are no magic cuboids, or esoteric incantations that will make the modes go way. So just start with a reasonable ratio, and work from there.

OK, that does not really answer your actual question! So here goes with that: For non rectangular rooms that still have some parallel surfaces, the axial modes associated with those will still be as predicted, and so will the tangential modes that ONLY involve the surfaces that are parallel and perpendicular. So in your case, if the the ceiling and floor are parallel, then the axial modes shown by a calculator for the vertical direction will be valid (all of the 0,0,x modes). Since part of the front wall is parallel to the rear wall, there will be some modal activity in that direction too, so the front-back axials will also be valid, to a certain extent (all of the x,0,0 modes), as will any modes that involve both of those (all of the x,x,0 ) modes. But the horizontal axials will not be valid, since the side walls are splayed, so none of the tangentials that involve the side walls wil be valid either, and all of the obliques will also be invalid.. However, you can do one test with a calculator using the largest width, and another with the smallest width, and another with the average width, to get a rough idea of how those will play out. If all three of those give promising results, then you are probably OK. However, your front wall is also partially splayed, to you will need to do the same for that one, and then you'll need to do series of nine more that are the combinations of the largest, smallest and average width, with the largest, smallest and average length, the work through all that to make sure there is nothing terrible.

So yes, sort of, kinda, somewhat, a little bit, to a certain extent, you can still use a modal calculator to get an idea of how your room will perform, if you understand what you are doing, and what you are looking at with all that data you will produce. It does give you a pretty good impression of the final behavior, but it won't be accurate for the obliques, or the tangentials that involve splayed or partially splayed walls.

And once again, there's no need to go nuts over a perfect ratio. It's far more important to correctly predict SBIR artifacts from the walls (especially the back wall) and set up the room geometry to minimize that.

This I'm learning...yikes.

Yup. And that's just the "V" part of HVAC. When it comes to the "H" and "AC", you need to start figuring out the latent heat load, and the sensible heat load for full occupancy and minimum occupancy, to make sure that your AHU can keep the relative humidity constant at around 40% all the time, in addition to keeping the temperature around 22°C all the time, so that your instruments don't need constant returning as the humidity and temperature change, and that your condenser mics don't suffer tonal changes for the same reason... HVAC is fun!

This part confused me. Since the posts are every 12 feet, there's really no way to make an 18x14x9.5 room without at least one of them in the room itself.

Yes there is! You put them inside the wall cavity! Or rather, you design your walls around them, such that the posts end up in the cavity between the walls. You are not yet showing your Live Room inner-leaf walls, but as soon as you put those in place, you'll see what I mean. You CANNOT have any posts inside the rooms themselves: They would be flanking paths, conducting sound in and out of the room. The inner-leaf is sacrosanct: Nothing can violate it. No mechanical penetrations, and no mechanical contact. Not even a single nail or screw can connect the outer leaf to any part of any of your inner-leaves.

As far as having the post removed, I'm sure I could do it but of course everything comes at a cost.

I don't think it is necessary to do that in your case. You picked a decent basic layout concept where the only problematic posts can easily be positioned inside wall cavities. Or rather, where the walls can be designed such that the posts are in the cavities.

A machine room under the stairs is a great idea. I also need somewhere to put the furnace, other guts of the HVAC...

All of that can go in your machine room. But you do need to have an access door to get to it! And since the machine room does not need to be inside the isolation shell, you could put it anywhere. Of course, you could put it inside the shell if yo u wanted to. For example, if you have rack gear in there that you need access to all the time, then you might want to have it next to the CR, with a direct door into it. But that's an operational, or functional, decision, not so much an acoustic one.

- Stuart -

[thejook]

I'd suggest that you might want to hire someone like John to design your place for you, then just give the plans to the contractor so he can build it.

Cool- what's the best way to get in touch with him?

[Soundman2020]

Cool- what's the best way to get in touch with him?

You can PM him from any of his posts on the forum, or you can e-mail him directly, : john@johlsayers.com If you don't get a response, or need more help, then PM me.


- Stuart -

[thejook]

Cool- what's the best way to get in touch with him?

You can PM him from any of his posts on the forum, or you can e-mail him directly, : john@johlsayers.com If you don't get a response, or need more help, then PM me.


- Stuart -

Thanks!

Also, with regards (again) to putting the posts within the cavity between the inner and outer leaf, I still don't really get how I'd be able to have a decent sized control room AND manage to contain the post within the cavity. Here's all I could come up with as a non-designer, but logically the room couldn't be 14ft wide without having to splay the wall pretty drastically which would create an only 6ft-wide back wall if the length is to remain 18ft or so. See attached.

I'd say also that my first priority is how the room sounds acoustically, a distant second is how much isolation it gets from the live room. That's not to say it's not important, but in the world of compromises I'm willing to make here, that's one of them.

[Soundman2020]

I still don't really get how I'd be able to have a decent sized control room AND manage to contain the post within the cavity.

Ooops! I hadn't noticed that post. I was looking at the other ones. It's still possible to get a room nearly 12' wide with that one where it is, and I'll bet a structural engineer could figure out how to move that over a couple of feet without too much hassle.

but logically the room couldn't be 14ft wide without having to splay the wall pretty drastically

Ahh, but it is possible! I just completed the design fora mastering studio where there's a bunch of steel poles 159" from the opposite outer-leaf wall, and I ended up with a room that is 145" wide, even though the inner-leaf walls are each 4-3/4" thick, and there's a 8-3/4" air gap in there too.... Do the math, and it does not work out... but it's all true and correct, . . .you just have to think a bit creatively. (The walls are not splayed in this studio: they are parallel to each other, and parallel to the outer leaf wall... )

You do not need to splay your walls, and you still have that strange shape inner-leaf that is wasting so much space... You really should fix that.

I'd say also that my first priority is how the room sounds acoustically, a distant second is how much isolation it gets from the live room. That's not to say it's not important, but in the world of compromises I'm willing to make here, that's one of them.

You do not need to compromise here. There's plenty of space to get good isolation and good acoustics, in both rooms (or all three rooms, counting the booth).

Is John going to do your design?

- Stuart -

[thejook]

I still don't really get how I'd be able to have a decent sized control room AND manage to contain the post within the cavity.

Ooops! I hadn't noticed that post. I was looking at the other ones. It's still possible to get a room nearly 12' wide with that one where it is, and I'll bet a structural engineer could figure out how to move that over a couple of feet without too much hassle.

but logically the room couldn't be 14ft wide without having to splay the wall pretty drastically

Ahh, but it is possible! I just completed the design fora mastering studio where there's a bunch of steel poles 159" from the opposite outer-leaf wall, and I ended up with a room that is 145" wide, even though the inner-leaf walls are each 4-3/4" thick, and there's a 8-3/4" air gap in there too.... Do the math, and it does not work out... but it's all true and correct, . . .you just have to think a bit creatively. (The walls are not splayed in this studio: they are parallel to each other, and parallel to the outer leaf wall... )

You do not need to splay your walls, and you still have that strange shape inner-leaf that is wasting so much space... You really should fix that.

I'd say also that my first priority is how the room sounds acoustically, a distant second is how much isolation it gets from the live room. That's not to say it's not important, but in the world of compromises I'm willing to make here, that's one of them.

You do not need to compromise here. There's plenty of space to get good isolation and good acoustics, in both rooms (or all three rooms, counting the booth).

Is John going to do your design?

- Stuart -

Thanks Stuart. I wound up hiring Jeff Hedback to do the design. So far he's been great to work with!