Modular Room Treatment - Semi-new construction

[WDmix]

Hey,

This is long, but stick with me. I don't know if anyone has ever tried this, but I'm anxious to hear what people think. First, I'm not well versed in room acoustics and sound physics apart from the basic knowledge of absorption, diffusion, and basic placement of treatment. I'm currently building a new control room for mixing in Nashville, TN and I'd love to get feedback on my design and see what needs to be tweaked. Pictures are below to show the concept.

1) I am planning on doing a room within a room in my garage with 2'"x4" studs 24 on center. The dimensions would be H-8'8", W-13'4", L-21' (based on some ratios I found and tweaking the dimensions on this website https://www.bobgolds.com/Mode/RoomModes.htm. I don't really know how to read the results, but I just assume green means good and the Bonello Graph looks good, I think.

2) I am planning on drywalling the outside of the studs of the wall and the inside for the ceiling. I'm going to put Roxul 60 on bottom and 40 on top to fill the 24oc stud cavities 2'x8' in area. So at this point, all the walls have 2" absorption.

3) For the front wall, I plan to do some shiplap-esque reclaimed wood panelling and leave it bare, no other treatement

4) All corners will have Roxul 60 triangle super-chunks floor to ceiling about 2.5' wide

5) The back wall will be a combination of Absorption and Diffusion. Think about a cabinet 30" high and protruding about 2.5' with a shelf on top, but instead of cabinets on the bottom, there are massive rolls of insulation loaded up in there and some fabric over that. Above on the sides will be shelves, with random things. In the vertical and horizontal center, a skyline diffuser aprox 3'x3'. I am contemplating having it be 3' deep. Any benefit to this?

6) Cloud over mix position 8'x8'. Ceiling corners with diagonal single 2" panel 2'x8'

7) Here is where the experiment is happening. Since the walls are full absorption at the moment, I thought it would be cool to make the room modular. So, I would create 2'x8' frames with 1"x3". There will be 4 types of frames
- a frame of only fabric (full absorption)
- a frame with fabric and a few spaced out pieces of wood (semi-absorptive and reflective)
- a frame of all wood pieces similar to the front wall (full reflective)
- maybe... a frame of 1 curved diffuser (cylindrical diffusion)

I would use the absorption frames at first reflection points, and then stagger the others down the line of the room to create more life in the room. So, no drywall on the studs, just those frames with differing materials that can be swapped around into the best sequence (symmetrically of course).

Floor is stained concrete, but I'll have a few rugs down and some couch/chairs/instruments in there as well.


Any thoughts on if using this more open, modular wall panel thing will work for me? Any potential problems? Have I designed it well enough to take care of problem areas? What could be done better and what could I do without?

Would love some feedback.

[Soundman2020]

Hi there " WDmix". Please read the forum rules for posting (click here). You seem to be missing a couple of things!

That said, it would be better if you choose one of the many room concepts, and go with that for your basic design, then tune as needed.

The dimensions would be H-8'8", W-13'4", L-21'

That's a really nice size for a control room: nearly 280 square feet floor area, and over 2400 cubic feet volume. Specs call for a minimum of about 220 ft2 and 1500 ft3, so you are fine there. The ratio is good, the modal response is fairly even you have modal support down to 27 Hz, your Schroeder frequency would be around 107 Hz, so that has very good prospects for turning into an excellent control room. But instead of inventing an entirely new concept that might or might not work at first attempt, and would need lots of tuning, it would probably be better to go with an existing concept, and adapt that as needed for your room. Personally, I think RFZ is the best concept out there, and pretty much all of the rooms that I do are RFZ-based, modified where needed. Here's an example of such a room, tuned to perfection: http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... =2&t=20471 That's a little larger than yours, but yours could get close to those results, for sure. If there's room to make your room larger, then you could get even closer. For example, if you could get your ceiling higher, that would help. If you could make it longer or wider, that might help too.

The method for tuning a room, is here: http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... =2&t=21368 That's a work in progress right now: We are tuning that control room to get it as good as can be, and you can see exactly how we went about that, with all of the stages, test, and devices, and what they do. That's the way I normally tune control rooms that need high precision. That's not the ONLY way to do it, of course, but that's the way I prefer.

7) Here is where the experiment is happening.

You could do something like that, yes, but I would do it based on actual acoustic measurements of the room, rather than just trial and error. Here's how to do basic measurements using the REW acoustic software package: http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... =3&t=21122 You would need an awful lot more measurements than that, and in many different locations around the room, to tune it properly using your method. Fewer if you use my method...



- Stuart -