Here is a picture of the height of the roofing so it can give you some ideas!
Unfortunately the dimensions are illegible, but it looks like maybe 7 feet or so on the sides, where the curve starts?
Thats a great point! Its not something I've really encountered too much in my current setup which is a little similar to this just on a smaller scale but I'll definitely have to think about that and see if i can fix those design flaws!
I can think of several alternative layouts, as long as you are not totally fixated on saving this one, with your heart dead-set on not changing it...
My solution to this was to build a small divider room between the live room and the bathroom so as to give another layer of isolation. For some reason that didn't make it to the floorplan, but is something I was aware of.
OK, but it still does not solve the problem of having to walk all around the building to get there.... and it adds yet another set of doors to what is already a long trip.
I was thinking that I could put a door on the other side of the CR so that they wouldn't have to go through the live room
Then they would have to go through the control room!
So the solution does not actually fix the problem... The key point here is to separate the actual studio from the rest of the building. Once you are inside the studio area, that's it: you are there to either track or mix, or listen. Not to take a leak. Keep your domestic section separate from your studio section.
My thought behind this is because the building is curved the middle is the tallest point. And I wanted to maximize that height which is why the middle of the LR is in the middle of the building. .
Fair enough, but in that case keep ALL of your domestic rooms against the outer walls, where the ceilings can be low, and the actual studio section towards the middle of the room.
And also why the Control Room is centered in the floorplan
Right, but the CR rear wall is right up against the outer wall of the building, which is why I asked about the height. There's some type of structural metal truss along the line between the wall and roof, and the roof is lower there in any case, meaning that you can't have your CR ceiling very high back there: In general, the CR cross section should INCREASE towards the rear of the room: (walls getting wider, ceiling rising) or at least stay the same. It's usually not a good idea to have the ceiling getting lower at the rear.
The building is going to be insulated with 6" of closed cell spray foam to the interior of the metal wall.
That's fine for thermal insulation, but closed-cell foam doesn't help much at all with acoustic isolation. It also doesn't add much mass to the outer-leaf. You should take some sound level measurements both inside and outside the current building, to determine how much isolation you are getting just from the metal structure the way it is right now, and especially take measurements in side during a heavy rainstorm, hopefully with hail and thunder, also when there are helicopters / planes flying over, sirens from emergency vehicles, etc. I'm not sure how common rain and thunder are in your area, but that's the type of thing that can trash a recording session. As can all the other noises I mentioned.
Then the wooden wall (which is the outer parameter in the floorplan) goes up right next to it.
How will that inner wall be built? (materials, dimensions) How will the inner-ceiling be built? That's going to be a big challenge: following the curved contour of the outer roof would be very impractical, of course, so I'm assuming you will be doing some type of gambrel or cathedral style ceiling? Even then, it's going to be complex. You need to span very large distances with very heavy loads, so this is where you are definitely going to need a structural engineer.
I thought this would act as a "double wall" but if you think another wooden interior wall is need that can be installed as well!
It will only act as a true MSM wall if both leaves are sealed air-tight. I see a couple of massive roller-doors on that far wall, and it will be impossible to seal those air tight. Are you planning to keep those, or fill them in and replace them with conventional doors?
Also, it's not just the wall: isolation is a system, not a wall. The isolation system consists of everything! The walls, ceiling, floor, doors, windows, HVAC system, electrical system, plumbing,... everything. The TOTAL isolation is only as good as the weakest isolation. So if you have fantastic walls but only a flimsy ceiling, then you have no isolation. If your walls and ceiling are excellent, but the HVAC system is done wrong, then you have no isolation. If you have great walls, ceiling, floors and HVAC, but the doors are cheap, unsealed or light weight, then you have no isolation. To understand this, go sit in your car in a rally noisy place, such as the parking lot outside a rock concert, with all the windows and doors of your car closed. Listen to the music. Now open just one of the windows about an inch. Notice the massive change in sound level? Even though you have steel and glass all around you on all sides, that tiny 1" gap bypasses all of the isolation you were getting from that. Your studio is the same: you can build everything wonderfully, but a gap under the door or around an HVAC duct, can trash your isolation.
So, in your design, you need to have a complete outer shell that is full sealed, air tight, then a complete inner-shell that is also fully sealed, air tight. Ditto for the doors, windows, HVAC and electrical.
This is why I recommend that you have all of your domestic area at one side or one end of the building, so you can simply build a single isolation wall across the rest of the building for the actual studio part, to seal that off completely.
If I were doing the design, and I had free reign to get you the best possible studio, I would re-arrange those rooms very differently. The CR would be rotated 90°, for example, and go up against the isolation wall, with the bathroom, bedroom, storage, lobby, kitchenette (you don't have one of those, but you will need it for a commercial facility), green room (you don't have one of those, but you will need it for a commercial facility), utility room (for the electrical and HVAC stuff), and any other non-studio rooms on the other side of that wall, probably with independent doors into the LR and CR from that area, and also at least a couple of doors between the LR and CR. That would allow you to have a larger LR, a good size CR, and all the other stuff easily accessible.
Traffic flow. Isolation. Use of space. Acoustics. Usability. Access. Comfort. Those are all aspects that a studio designer should take into account when coming up with the best layout for the studio.
This is probably one of my biggest questions. Since a lot of the bands I work with have at least 4 to 5 members i wanted to make sure the CR would be big enough not to feel cramped over extended periods of time as well as being able to accommodate a producer or two on special occasions
OK, so that should be a basic part of your design brief. The CR needs to accommodate up to 7 people comfortable for long sessions, which includes allowing them to get to the bathroom, or go make a cup of coffee, or take a nap, or go make a phone call, or just chill out for a while, without disturbing the session in either the CR or LR...
So you need 7 people in the CR: one mix engineer, one producer, one assistant, and 4 musicians/WAGs. That's what you envision for a typical session, so that's what you should design the CR to handle. Maybe make it 8, to be safe. And that includes the HVAC: it has to be able to deal with that load in the CR at 3PM on a hot day in mid summer, as well as being able to handle a single engineer working on his own at 4 AM in mid winter. It has to be able to cool the place enough for the heavy load, without freezing the lone engineer. That takes careful design!
Take a look at the corner control room: that's a small CR, design for up to three people. Take a look at Steve's room: He can get 6 people in there easily, 8 at a pinch. Take a look at studio three: you could easily get ten people in there, if you had to. Somewhere I have a photo of the owner and his two sons all working around the console, and the room looks empty! With three people in it. So that gives you an idea of the sizes you should be allowing for the CR.
When designing the space to you take Sepmeyer's ratio into account precisely or do you generally design a room that has dimensions that work with the rest of the studio? I've heard people go back and forth on this issue so was curious to hear your thoughts.
Sepmeyer is one of many ratios. In fact, Sepmeyer himself came up with several! There are also Rettinger, Louden, Boner, Volkmann, Bolt and others you could consider. However, to be very honest, you do not need to go crazy trying to find the perfect ratio for your room! You'd be far more successful going on a unicorn hunt...
Much better chance of bagging the prize there... In other words, there is no "perfect" or even "best" ratio for a room. There are good ones, and bad ones. Stay away form the bad ones, get in the ball-park for the good ones, and you are fine. Chasing after ratios is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic: They might look very neat with the way you have them organized, but it doesn't really serve much of a useful purpose...
So, to be more direct in answering your question: No, when I'm designing a place I might start out by looking at modal issues, and try to keep things within the Bolt area, but I won't cry and bang my head on the wall if I have to mess up the ratio to meet a more important goal. Here's why:
I wrote this a couple of years ago for another forum member who asked pretty much the same thing, so I'm copying it here. You probably already know much of this, but read it through in any case, as I think it covers the subject fairly well.
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Room ratios is a whole major subject in studio design. It works like this: The walls of your studio create natural resonances in the air space between them, inside the room. (This is totally different from the MSM resonance of the walls themselves: this is all about what happens INSIDE the ROOM, not what happens inside the walls. Two totally different things.)
So you have resonant waves inside the room. We call those "standing waves" or "room modes". Those "modes" (resonances) occur at very specific frequencies that are directly related to the distances between the room boundaries (walls, floor, ceiling). They are called "standing waves" because they appear to be stationary inside the room: they are not REALLY stationary, since the energy is still moving through the room. But the pressure peaks and nulls always fall at the exact same points in the room each time the wave energy passes, so the "wave" seems to be fixed, static, and unmoving inside the room. If you play a pure tone that happens to be at the exact frequency of one of the "modes", then you can physically walk around inside the room and experience the "standing" nature of the wave: you will hear that tone grossly exaggerated at some points in the room, greatly amplified, while at other points it will sound normal, and at yet other points it will practically disappear: you won't be able to hear it at all, or you hear it but greatly attenuated, very soft.
The peaks and nulls fall at different places in the room for different frequencies. So the spot in the room where one mode was deafening might turn out to be the null for a different node.
Conversely, if you have a mode (standing wave) that forms at a specific frequency, then playing at a slightly different frequency might show no mode at all: for example, if a tone of exactly 73 Hz creates a standing wave that is clearly identifiable as you walk around the room, with major nulls and peaks, then a tone of 76 Hz might show no modes at all: it sounds the same at all points in the room. Because there are no natural resonances, no "room modes" associated with that frequency.
That's the problem. A BIG problem.
Of course, you
don't want that to happen in a control room, because it implies that you would hear different things at different places in the room, for any give song! At some places in the room, some bass notes would be overwhelming, while at other places the same notes would be muted. As you can imagine, if you happen to have your mix position (your ears) located at such a point in the room, you'd never be able to mix anything well, as you would not be hearing what the music REALLY sounds like: you would be hearing the way the room "colors" that sound instead. As you subconsciously compensate for the room modes while you are mixing, you could end up with a song that sounds great in that room at the mix position: the best ever! But it would sound terrible when you played it at any other location, such as in your car, on your iPhone, in your house, on the radio, at a club, in a church, etc. Your mix would not "translate".
And you also don't want major modal issues in a tracking room, for similar reasons: As an instrument plays up and down the scale, some notes will sound louder than others, and will "ring" longer. The instrument won't sound even and balanced.
OK, so now I have painted the scary-ugly "modes are terrible monsters that eat your mixes" picture. Now lets look at that a bit more in depth, to get the
real picture, and understand why they look bad, but aren't so bad in reality.
So let's go back to thinking about those room modes (also called "eigenmodes" sometimes): remember I said that they occur at very specific frequencies, and they are very narrow resonances? This implies that if you played an E on your bass guitar, it might trigger a massive modal resonance, but then you play either a D or an F and there is no mode, so they sound normal. Clearly, that's a bad situation. But what if there was a room mode at every single frequency? What if there was one mode for E, a different mode for D and yet another one for F? In that case, there would be no problem, since all notes would still sound the same! Each note would trigger its own mode, and things would be happy again. If there were modes for every single frequency on the spectrum, and they all sounded the same, then you could mix in there with no problems!
And that's exactly what happens at higher frequencies. Just not at low frequencies. Because of "wavelength"...
It works like this: remember I said that modes are related to the distance between walls? It's a very simple relationship. Remember I said the waves are "standing" because the peaks and nulls occur at the same spot in the room? In simple terms, for every frequency where a wave fits in exactly between two walls, then there will be a standing wave. And also for exactly
twice that frequency, since two wavelengths of that note will now fit. And the same for
three times that frequency, since three full waves will now fit in between the same walls. Etc. All the way up the scale.
Thus, if you have a room mode at 98 Hz in your room, then you will also have modes at 196 Hz (double), 294 (triple), 392 (x4), 490(x5), 588(x6), 686(x7) etc., all the way up. If the very next mode in your room after that first 98Hz one happened to be at 131 Hz, then there would also be modes at 262 Hz(x2), 393(x3), 524(x4), 655(x5), etc.
That's terrible, right? There must be
thousands of modes at higher frequencies!!! That must be awful!
Actually, no. That's a GOOD thing. You
WANT lots of modes, for the reasons I gave above: If you have many modes for each note on the scale, then the room sounds the same for ALL notes, which is what you want. It's
good, not bad.
But now let's use a bit of math and common sense here, to see what the real problem is.
If your room has a mode at 98Hz, and the next mode is at 131 Hz, that's a difference of 32%! 98 Hz is a "G2". So you have a mode for "G2". but your very next mode is a "C3" at 131Hz. That's five notes higher on the scale: your modes completely skip over G2#, A2, A2#, and B2. No modes for them! So those four notes in the middle sound perfectly normal in your room, but the G2 and C3 are loud and long.
However, move up a couple of octaves: ...
There's a harmonic of your 98Hz mode at 588 Hz, and there's a harmonic of your 131 Hz mode at 524 Hz. 524 Hz is C5 on the musical scale, and 588 Hz is a D5. They are only two notes apart! Not five, as before.
Go up a bit more, and we have one mode at 655 and another at 686. 655 is an E5, and 686 is an F5. they are adjacent notes. Nothing in between! We have what we want: a mode for every note.
The further up you go, the closer the spacing is. In fact, as you move up the scale even higher, you find
several modes for each note. Wonderful!
So at high frequencies, there is no problem: plenty of modes to go around and keep the music sounding good.
The problem is at low frequencies, where the modes are few and far between.
The reason there are few modes at low frequencies is very simple: wavelengths are very long compared to the size of the room. At 20 Hz (the lower limit of the audible spectrum, and also E0 on the organ keyboard), the wavelength is over 56 feet (17m)! So your room would have to be 56 feet long (17 meters long) in order to have a mode for 20 Hz.
Actually, I've been simplifying a bit: it turns out that what matters is not the
full wave, but the
half wave: the full wave has to exactly fit into the "there and back" distance between the walls, so the distance between the walls needs to be
half of that: the half-wavelength. So to get a mode for 20 Hz, your room needs to be 56 / 2 = 28 feet long (8.5M) . Obviously, most home studios do not have modes at 20 Hz, because there's no way you can fit a 28 foot (eight meter) control room into most houses!
So clearly, the longest available distance defines your lowest mode. If we take a hypothetical dimensions as an example (typical of a very small home studio), and say the length of the control room is 13 feet (4m), the width is 10 feet (3m), and the height is 8 feet. (2.5M) So the lowest mode you could possibly have in that room, would be at about 43 Hz (fits into 13 feet or 4M perfectly). That's an "F1" on your bass guitar.
The next highest mode that you room could support is the one related to the next dimension of the room: In this case, that would be width, at 10 feet / 3M. That works out to 56.5 Hz. That's an "A1#" on your bass guitar. Five entire notes up the scale.
And your third major mode would be the one related to the height of the room, which is 8 feet /2.5M, and that works out to 71 Hz, or C2# on the bass guitar. Another four entire notes up the scale.
There are NO other fundamental modes in that room. So as you play every note going up the scale on your bass guitar (or keyboard), you get huge massive ringing at F, A# and C#, while all the other notes sound normal. As you play up the scale, it goes "tink.tink.tink.BOOOOM.tink.tink.tink.tink.BOOOOOM.tink.tink.tink.BOOOOOM.tink.tink...."
Not a happy picture.
There are harmonic modes of all those notes higher up the scale, sure. But in the low end, your modes are very few, and very far between.
So, what some people say is "If modes are bad, then we have to get rid of them". Wrong! What you need is MORE modes, not less. Ideally, you need a couple of modes at every single possible note on the scale, such that all notes sound the same in your room. In other words, the reverberant field would be smooth and even. Modes would be very close together, and evenly spread.
So trying to "get rid of modes" is a
bad idea. And even if it were a good idea, it would still be impossible! Because modes are related to walls, the only way to get rid of modes is with a bulldozer! Knock down the walls...
That's a drastic solution, but obviously the only way to get a control room that has no modes at all, is to have no walls! Go mix in the middle of a big empty field, sitting on top of a 56 foot (17 M) ladder, and you'll have no modes to worry about....
Since that isn't feasible, we have to learn to live with modes.
Or rather, we have to learn to live with the LACK of modes in the low end. As I said, the problem is not that we have too many modes, but rather that we don't have enough of them in the low frequencies.
Obviously, for any give room there is a point on the spectrum where there are "enough" modes. Above that point, there are several modes per note, but below it there are not.
There's a mathematical method for determining where that point is: a scientist called Schroeder figured it out, years ago, so it is now known as the Schroeder frequency for the room. Above the Schroeder frequency for a room, modes are not a problem, because there are are lots of them spaced very close together. Below the Schroeder frequency, there's a problem: the modes are spaced far apart, and unevenly. (The Schroeder frequency is a bit more complex than just that, since it also considers treatment, but this gives you an idea...)
So what can we do about that?
All we can do is to choose a "room ratio" that has the modes spaced out sort of evenly, and NOT choose a ratio where the modes are bunched up together. For example, if your room is 10 feet long and 10 feet wide and 10 feet high (3m x 3m x 3m), then
all of the modes will occur at the exact same frequency: 56.5 Hz. So the resonance when you play an A1 on the bass, or cello, or hit an A1 on the keyboard, will by tripled! It will be three times louder. That room will ROAR! And the nulls will be three times deeper. That's a bad situation, so don't ever choose room dimensions that are the same as each other.
You get the same problem for dimensions that are multiples of each other: a room 10 feet high (3m) by 20 feet wide (6m) by 30 feet long (9m) is also terrible. All of the second harmonics of 10 feet will line up with the 20 foot modes, and all of the third harmonics will line up with the 30 foot modes, so you get the same "multiplied" effect. Bad.
In other words, you want a room where the dimensions are mathematically different from each other, with no simple relationship to each other.
That brings up the obvious question: What ratio is best?
Answer: there isn't one!
Over the years, many scientists have tested many ratios, both mathematically and also in the real world, and come up with some that are really good. The ratios they found are named after them: Sepmeyer, Louden, Boner, Volkmann, etc. Then along came a guy called Bolt, who drew a graph showing all possible ratios, and he highlighted the good ones found by all the other guys, and predicted by mathematical equations, plus a few of his own: If you plot your own room ratio on that graph, and it falls inside the "Bolt area", then likely it is a good one, and if it falls outside the "Bolt area", then likely it is a bad one. Sort of.
So, there are no perfect ratios, only good ratios and bad ratios.
It is impossible to have a "perfect" ratio in a small room, simply because that would require enough modes to have one mode for every note on the musical scale, but that's the entire problem with small rooms! There just are not enough modes in the low end. So you can choose a ratio that spreads them a bit more this way or a bit more that way, but all you are doing is re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic, in pleasant-looking patterns. The problem is not the location of the deck chairs; the problem is that your boat is sunk!: Likewise for your studio: the problem is not the locations of the modes: the problem is that your room is sunk. No matter what you do with the dimensions, you
cannot put a mode at every note, unless you make the room bigger. It is physically impossible.
But that does not mean that your room will be bad. That's the common perception, and it is dead wrong.
All of this leads to the question you didn't ask yet, but are probably heading for: What can I do about it?
Here's the thing: Modes are only a problem if they "ring". The wave is only a problem if the energy builds up and up and up, with each passing cycle, until it is screaming, and then the "built up" energy carries on singing away, even after the original note stops. That's the problem. If you stop playing the A1 on your guitar, and the room keeps on playing an A1 for a couple of seconds, because it "stored" the resonant energy and is now releasing it, then that's a BIG problem! The room is playing tunes that never were in the original music!
If a mode doesn't ring like that, then it is no longer a major issue. (It is still an issue for other reasons, just not a major one....)
So how do you stop a mode? You can't stop it from
being there. But you
CAN stop it from "ringing". You can "damp" the resonance sufficiently that the mode dies away fast, and does not ring. You remove the resonant energy and convert it into heat: no more problem! In other words, it's not good if you own a large angry dog that barks all the time and bights your visitors, but it's fine to own a large angry dog with a muzzle on his mouth, so he cannot bark and cannot bight!
You do that with "bass trapping". A bass trap is like the dog muzzle. It doesn't get rid of the problem, but it does keep it under control. You use strategically placed acoustic treatment devices inside the room that absorb the ringing of the mode, then it cannot ring. There are several ways to do that, with different strategies, but the good news is that in most rooms it is possible to get significant damping on the modes, so that they don't ring badly, and don't cause problems. Note that bass trapping does not absorb the
mode: it just absorbs the
ringing. Some people don't understand this, and think that the bass trapping makes the modes go away: it doesn't. All it does is to damp them. The modes are still there, and still affect the room acoustics in other ways, but with good damping, at least they don't "ring" any more.
And that is the secret to making a control room good in the low end! Choose a good ratio to keep the modes spread around evenly, then damp the hell out of the low end, so modes cannot ring. It's that simple.
The smaller the room, the more treatment you need. And since those waves are huge (many feet long), you need huge bass trapping (many feet long/wide/high/deep). It takes up lots of space, and the best place for it is in the corners of the room, because that's where all modes terminate. If you want to find a mode in your room, go look for it in the corner: it will be there. All modes have a pressure node in two or more corners, so by treating the corners, you are guaranteed of hitting all the modes.
As I said, there is no single "best" ratio, but there are good ones. You can use a "Room Mode Calculator" to help you figure out which "good ones" are within reach of the possible area you have available, then choose the closest good one, and go with that. And stay away from the bad ones.
Arguably, Sepmeyer's first ratio is the "best", since it can have the smoothest distribution of modes... but only if the room is already within a certain size range. Other ratios might be more suitable if your room has a different set of possible dimensions. So there is no "best".
But that's not the entire story: So far, all the modes I have mentioned are only related to two walls across the room, opposite from each other. I mentioned modes that form along the length axis of the room (between the front and back wall), others that form along the width axis (between left and right walls), and others that form on the height axis (between floor and ceiling): Those are the easiest ones to understand, because they "make sense" in your head when you think about them. Those are called "axial modes", because they form along the major axes of the room: length axis, width axis, height axis.
However, there are also other modes that can form between
four surfaces, instead of just two. For example, there are modes that can bounce around between all four walls, or between the front and back walls plus the ceiling and floor: those are called "tangential modes". And there are other modes that can form between all
six surfaces at once: they involve all four walls plus the ceiling and the floor. Those are called "oblique modes".
The complete set of modes in your room consists of the axial modes, plus the tangential modes, plus the oblique modes.
That's what a good room mode calculator (a.k.a. "room ratio calculator") will show you. There are bad calculators that only show you the axial modes, which is pretty pointless, and the good ones show you all three types.
Use one of these Room Ratio calculators to figure out the best dimensions for your room:
http://www.bobgolds.com/Mode/RoomModes.htm
http://amroc.andymel.eu/
Both of those are very good, and will help you to decide how best to design your room. They give you tons of information that is really useful to help figure out the best dimensions.
However, modes aren't that important, despite all the hype they get: Modes are just one aspect of room design, but there are many more. It's wise to choose a ratio that is close to one of the good ones, or inside the Bolt area, but you do NOT need to go nuts about it! There's no need to nudge things around by millimeters or smalls fractions of an inch, hoping to get a "better" ratio. Just stay away from the bad ones, get close to a good one, and you are done. End of story.
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So there you have it! "Everything you ever wanted to know about modes, but were afraid to ask"!
In other words, just design a decent size room where the dimensions are not direct multiples of each other nor within 5% of that, then treat the hell out of the low end while not harming the high end, and you'll be fine.
The key is "treat the hell out of the low end". In both Studio Three and Steve's place, there are huge mountains of bass trapping not visible in the photos, as well as the stuff that is visible. That treatment is above the visible ceiling and cloud, over the speaker soffits, all across the front wall and down the side walls. In the corner control room it is all in the rear corner, and since that is such a small room to start with, it is carefully tuned and arranged to deal with only the modes that are actually making a big nuisance of themselves. I could show you many other rooms, too, but if you want the type of smooth low end you see in those three cases, then massive bass trapping is the key. Modes will always be there, not matter what ratio you choose, and trapping is the way to tame them.
The reason I was thinking Quested was because I have a few friends that use them and love them!
Don't take this the wrong way, but do you also wear the exact same clothes your friends wear, and drive the exact same cars they drive, and eat the exact same brand of breakfast cereal they eat, and paint your bedroom the exact same color as their bedroom? I think you get the point...
Get the right speakers for YOUR studio: the ones that will work best with your room size, shape, layout, and furnishings. And fit your budget.
I don't have much experience with the higher end of Adam or Eve Audio either so I'll definitely check them out! Of these options here, which ones have you found the best results with or would recommend for a larger sized CR like mine?
Studio Three has a pair of SC-407's, and they worked out quite nicely. Originally we were considering Adam S3A's instead, and then A77X's when they came out, but they had major manufacturing issues at the time, and we couldn't even get a sample to test, so we switched from Adam to Eve. And we were REALLY glad we did! You can see the final acoustic outcome of that room on the graphs, both here on the forum and on their website.
My proposed budget was mainly just focusing on the CR room construction and treatment. I already have factored in the HVAC and Soffit Speakers into the total construction costs. The total construction costs was indeed estimated around $80k-$100k. (My family owns a construction company that can get building materials a lot cheaper than the general public on most items so thats something thats hard to factor in but is definitely an advantage I have.)
OK, cool. It sounds like you are in the ball-park then.
I think locking in the CR is a main priority for me and finding the dimensions and speaker placement is the aspect that matters the most so anymore feedback on that is definitely welcomed!
I normally don't do it that way. First, I lock in the general layout, after going through several iterations with many variations. For example, for the corner control room, that is layout number eleven that we eventually chose as being the best compromise for him. You have a larger place, with more possibilities, so you might want to go through a couple of dozen before you get the best one.
Then, once the overall layout is locked in, I do rough interior layouts for each of the actual studio rooms, and I start checking sight-lines and traffic paths, tweaking the locations of doors and windows while also starting to consider acoustics and HVAC. Only then, once I have a good layout with good sight-lines, good traffic flow, good HVAC, and good basic acoustics, only at that point do I start to working on optimizing the speaker soffits, angles, mix position, acoustics, etc. Then I normally go back again, re-tweaking the sight lines to work better with the speaker locations and mix position, and the treatment.. and I keep going around in circles, tweaking here, tweaking there, nudging doors and windows and walls and soffits and treatment around, until I can't think of any more ways to improve it. For a high end studio, that can take weeks. Then I go over the HVAC one more time, to check that I didn't screw up anything too badly there, and etc.
It's a long process, and depending on the final goal for the studio, it can take a long time, or a VERY long time...
And many iterations.
So, if the CR is the key issue for you, then tweak all other things around that, but don't make major decisions early on that would paint you into a corner ... such as putting the bedroom and bathroom on opposite ends of the building, 50 or 60 feet apart....
- Stuart -
Perfect!