Studio/listening room design in Belguim

[Dirk]

Hello,

Some progress in the treatment of the room. I have been building 'VPR's after reading several threats on gearslutz. These VPR's consist of 10cm of Isover multimax (41kg/M³) + some metal plates of thickness 1mm. I've painted these first and then glued them to the isover. That did work for the little ones, but not for the big ones. So I made some "hooks" to keep them in place. These VPR's are in the front and Back wall. You can no longer see the once in the back-wall because of the other treatment in front of it . Then I started to add the insulation for the "superchunks" in the rear corners of the room. Some pics of them:

frontwall.JPG

detail VPR.JPG

backwall.JPG

backwall 2.JPG

Today I did some measurements to see what this all is doing. In the pictures here-under the comparison empty room vs vpr's :

all SPL sw 60 empty room vs vprs.jpg

waterfall sw 60 empty room vs vprs.jpg

Here's the complete mdat file :
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-GyUY ... sp=sharing

I think I'm on the right track here !
When I played some cd's I can already hear a lot of difference. The bass is much tighter than before !!

For the backwall : in front of the treatment that's now in place, there will be closets. Closets with all cloth backing and with door's with rockwool in it and also covered with cloth. All this to have as much trapping as possible, even with these (necessary) closets. I'll post some pics when they are done and installed.

About the soffit mounting, I'm very much interested in the design from barefoot, also with the Vpr's that are already in place. I Hope I will have some time to put it in sketchup, so I can post my idea... I'll be back on this

Because I'm already in the construction phase of the treatment, maybe it's better to move my topic to the construction part of this forum ?

That's it for now. Again, thank you for any reply on this !!
Dirk.

[Soundman2020]

You are getting some pretty impressive results there, Dirk, considering the small size and unusual shape of the room. You certainly are on the right track!

I'm looking forward to seeing your soffit design.

- Stuart -

[Dirk]

As promised, my design of the flush mounting.

First my speakerstand:

speakerstand.jpg

The idea is to make them out of 2 layers of 18mm OSB. The green things are for the decoupling of my speakers. It's a kind of open-cell foam of 1cm thickness. If I'm correct these things should be compressed to about 10% to 15% of the thickness to decouple (learned that somewhere from the mighty Eric Desart). So I will do some tests to see how much I have to use. Or I'll put a construction around my speakers to force that compression... or can the speakers sit directly on the speakerstand without this decoupling ?
I will also make sur that the speakerstands and speakers do not touch the framing and leafs of the "infinite" baffle.

In the next pictures you can find a rough sketch of the design idea. So it's based on barefoot's design. For the left speaker it's the same as for the right, but I already spent several houres to do the right baffle . For the wooden beams, I think to use 4cm * 6cm. The baffle (2 * 18cm thickness) extends to 15 cm above the floor, to have as much baffle area as I can have. The bottom 15cm will be just covered with cloth to let the sound enter so that it also acts as a huge basstrap. I know that this will cause problems for the reflections from the desk, but I can also make the back off the desk (facing the soffits) absorptive as a solution to this...

03-12-14 soffit design 1.jpg

03-12-14 soffit design 1 isolation.jpg

03-12-14 soffit design 1 first layer finish.jpg

03-12-14 soffit design 1 second layer finish.jpg

Some questions :
1) If I don't use hangers and just fill the space behind the soffit wall with fluffy insulation, am I okay with this ? I mean, I will not create seperate parts, but it will be just a frame to support the infinite baffle.
2) Speaking of the hangers, can I use them in my design instead of the fluffy insulation ?
3) For the wall between the 2 speakers, I don't know if I should also put 2 layers of wood (to extend the horn effect of the infinite baffle as Stuart mentioned before), or just insulation with cloth... And maybe afterwards slats when I have to much absorption in the high frequencies... But I guess this will be the outcome of the measurements when the baffles are ready to be tested ?
4) Is it ok to think that leaving the 15cm gap at the bottom, I will have additional bass-trapping ? Or am I creating a problem there ?

As always, a big thanks already for the answers and replies !!
Dirk.

[Dirk]

Anyone please ?

[Dirk]

Hello,

Been working some more on the room. I have almost finished the closets I was talking about. I have some pictures of them to give an idea of well ... the idea. I sawed off the corners of the left and right back to fit to the "superchunk". The back of the closets are covered with cloth (stapled) and the front is a door where I have some rockwool in it to absorb some more bass. These doors will be covered back and front with cloth. The cloth is held in place with profiles I have stapled on the doors. I think it will give a nice finish. see picture of the inside door.

stapling the cloth to the back.JPG

a door with isolation in it.JPG

all closets in place.JPG

inside of a closet.JPG

I don't know why 2 of these pictures are on their side ! When I open them on my computer they are ok...

Then I took some more measurements to find out if this works as I thought it would, and I'm very pleased with the result. Up to 90Hz Hz there's just one more dip of 6dB, the dip of 109Hz has moved to 100Hz and is about 5dB less ! I now have a pretty massive dip at 331 Hz. Don't know where that one comes from... The length of that wave is 1m... It's very narrow, so maybe I don't have to worry to much ?

The proof :

all spl vprs vs vprs + closet.jpg

waterfall vpr vs vpr + closet.jpg

The mdat file :https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-GyUY ... sp=sharing

That's it for now. Still waiting on comments on my post about the soffits, as always, I much appreciate the replies !!

For everybody reading this, already a happy christmas. Maybe I'm the first
Dirk.

[Soundman2020]

Dirk, there was a glitch on the forum that screwed up some photos that were posted between December 15 and December 22. Including yours. Please could you post those photos again. Just edit your post and add the photos in the same way. Sorry about that, but John's hosting service moved the forum to a new server, and they screwed it up, leaving out some attachments.

Anyway, I've been looking at the MDAT file, and the improvement is very obvious. There's a big difference in the way the room is responding now, compared to how it was before. The low end is much smoother. However, you stall have some ringing going on at about 215 Hz, and you still need more bass trapping in general. The overall decay time is still a bit high, and uneven, so I'd suggest more bass trapping!

- Stuart -

[Dirk]

Hey Stuart,

No problem, I've reposted the photo's ! Seems ok now for the photos !

Yes, you are right about the ringing. Thanks for mentioning it, I hadn't seen that. And indeed, more basstrapping to add.

In the meantime, I have started with the construction of the wall for the soffits according to the sketchup photos I've posted and started with the isolation of the inside of the soffits. I have ordered the wood for the finishing layers (2 layers of 18mm MDF) and for the speakerstands (also MDF). I have already taken some photo's, but I have to get them on my very slow computer upstairs, before I can post them . So I'll post them in a few days when I have more time, and maybe already some more, because next thursday and friday I have 2 holidays to continue this quest .

That's it for now.

[Dirk]

Hello everyone, it's been a while since my last post, but now I can give a major update !!

Let me start with the construction of the soffits. The pictures say it all I think... I just want to say that drawing out the lines where the framing should come was really very difficult with these angled walls, but after several attempts, I finally managed !

frame soffits.jpg

Right frame soffit.jpg

Stuffing the soffit with isolation.jpg

Frame isolation finished.jpg

soffits filled with isolation left and right.jpg

[Dirk]

Next is the speaker stand, two layers of MDF 18mm. I'm happy with these. It's the front side that is shown. They turned out nice :

Speakerstand.jpg

[Dirk]

And some more. Fitting in the speakers and mounting the first and second layer of the soffit. Both MDF of 18mm. As already said before, the speakers are resting on decoupler and then the speakers are held in place via a self made system to keep them tight on to the speakersstand. I took pictures but I'm not sure where I've saved them. If I find them, I'll post them to...

first and second layer MDF soffit except speaker part.jpg

detail on MDF layers soffits.jpg

For the cut-out of the speakers I first made a model in paper, that I used to make the cut-out. Just follow the pictures ...

Paper model for speaker cut-out.jpg

cutting out speakers first layer.jpg

detail on start of the cut-out.jpg

fitting in the first cut-out layer.jpg

second layer speaker cut-out mounted.jpg

I have forgotten to take pictures of the cut-out of the second layer, but it's the same principle as the first one. Only difference is that my saw was angled 45°.

Voila, that's it for the mounting, next I took some measurements to find out what these soffits are worth...

[Dirk]

And here the measurements are. First the SPL, and next the waterfall. I compared my last measure (see way up in this post) when I mounted the closet doors with isolation in it to the measurement after the build of the soffits :

spl soffits vs closet doors.jpg

waterfall soffits vs closet doors.jpg

It's really amazing what these soffits do with the sound. I'm really happy to have gone through all the work. So much more detail in the music, bass extends deeper and is much more accurate.

[Dirk]

And this is where I have ended up until now. I have mounted "basstraps" in the left and right upper corners of the room, that is in the corner of the left and right wall with the roof. in the detail you can see the isolation is held up with stapled chickenwire. I will build some frames to cover these traps. The goal is that these frames will be mounted with the white magnet things (like the are sometimes used to close closets). Each of them can cary 5kg, so it should be okee, I hope
See next pictures :

upper basstrapping in both corners.jpg

detail on upper soffit.jpg

I also have build the frame between the soffits :

framing between soffits + panel for screen mount.jpg

And here are the results of the jury... euhm, the results of the measurements. These measurements are for the upper basstraps and some more isolation between the speakers (where the frame between the soffits are (not yet on a picture) versus the last measurements (= after soffit build). And no smoothing :

spl soffits vs upper basstraps.jpg

waterfall soffits vs upper basstraps.jpg

And the full mdat file can be downloaded from here :
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-GyUY ... sp=sharing

These upper basstraps have added another gain on detail in the lower frequency range. This room start to sound amazing, even my 11 year old son is excited !!

In the coming weeks I hope to continue this quest, and put more isolation on the rear wall, and then starting on the first reflection points (left, right and up). So stay tuned

And as always, any comment is welcome !!

Dirk.

[Dirk]

Hello everyone.

It's been a very long time me checking in on the forum. Had lot's of stuff to do, and have been sick for about a year (heavy burn-out). I'm almost out of it now, so it's going the right direction .

Anyway, in the near future, I will upload the remaing pictures of my build, so that this thread is complete. But in the meantime, I want to share my youtube channel with all of you. It's been one way of dealing me with my burn-out, because I stopped making music in my way onto my burn-out. So, after more than half a year sitting in the couch, I slowly restarted having fun in music, ant this is the result.

It's the result of many houres of music recording, video recording and editing in my studio/listening room and it give's a good view on the progress of my build to. It's metal music, but not that heavy. I think it's still pretty doable for not metal heads .

Enough talk, here is the link : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0Nxer ... wMGqN1OYWA

And my latest cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgGEAWQnuHI

The pre-latest:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgXPIS61wuU&t=59s

And the rest is there for you people to check out on my channel. Hope you like my work.

Cheers,
Dirk.

[TerryFalafel]

Hi Dirk,

Glad to hear that you're​ getting back on track. I've just read through your build thread and it's very inspiring. You clearly worked very hard and the results looked excellent. I'd really like to see those photos of the finished room.

Cheers

TF

[TomVan]

Hey Dirk,
Loved the Taylor Swift. Studio looks clean , nice lines
Peace
Tom