Hi there "mds", and welcome!
Its sort of a small, weird space
Agreed! That's an "interesting" situation...
How would you guys set this up?
This is just for a control room, right? Just for mixing/mastering?
(I do some VO work, and ISO can be handy for some stuff in my work),
So the idea is to have a large CR (Control Room), and a small iso booth?
Clearly, the studio has to go in the area with the 9 foot ceiling: 7 feet is just too low to be good. So that takes care of one decision...
The first thing that comes to my mind, is to have your mix position facing towards the right (East wall), so that you can get decent symmetry, which is critical for a control room. The iso booth could then go in the 7' wide niche at the top left (north west), in the region defined by the "L" shaped raised floor. That would give you a long, narrow control room, and a nearly square iso booth... You'd have to check the dimensions on a room ratio calculator to see it that would work for a CR... try these:
http://www.bobgolds.com/Mode/RoomModes.htm
http://amroc.andymel.eu/
I have a feeling that the CR is too long for the width and height, so one option might be to take off a small section from the rear of the control room, and either add that to the iso booth or use it for storage. But don't shrink the CR too much in the search for the impossible "best ratio"! There is no such thing, and it isn't life-or-death anyway. Just get away from the bad ratios, close to the good ones, and that's fine. You also want the floor area to be as large as possible (ideally 215 ft2 or more), and the room volume to be decent (ideally over 1500 ft3). Small rooms are hard to treat, and the smaller they are, the harder it is to get it good. Yours is a decent size, so don't kill it by shrinking it to much.
Another option would be to flip the CR around so it faces west (similar to your first option), then you could have a window into the iso booth for good sight lines and visual communication with the VO talent. That would limit your iso booth width, though. Or you could splay the front part of the CR walls a little, to help out the iso booth, then use the "wasted" space on the other side of the CR (south west corner of the building) for one of your HVAC silencers, and take some space off the rear of the CR (East wall in this case) for your storage.
Those would be my two preferred layouts.
There are options, but the key points to keep in mind if you want to play around more:
1) Symmetry is king. Make sure that the front half of the CR is totally symmetrical, with the left side being a mirror image of the right side. This is to ensure that your left ear hears the exact same acoustic "signature" as your right ear, so you don't end up with a skewed sound stage or off-center stereo image.
2) Rectangle is king: OK, we already have a king (symmetry) so lets make the rectangle the queen. In other words, keep your room rectangular as far as possible. It just makes things so much easier to predict, and to design, an to build. If you do need to splay the side walls at the front as I mentioned, make the splayed section as short as you can, in order to not remove too much air volume from the room.
3) Speakers go on a short wall, firing down the longest dimension of the room. I could give you all the reasons for that, but there are quite a few, and they are all powerful reasons.
4) Ideally, speakers are flush mounted in angled modules at the front of the room, to get the best possible acoustic response out of the speakers and the room, minimizing the unwanted artifacts you get from having speakers inside the room.
5) The rear wall should be as far behind your head as you can get it, within reason, and hopefully more than ten feet behind your head. That doesn't seem to be a problem in your room.
6) Do not put doors or windows in the corners of the room, nor within about three or four feet of the corners, because corners are sacred places in a control room: they are reserved for the deep bass treatment that all small rooms need.
7) Mix position goes about 1/3 of the distance from front wall to rear wall. Theory says 38%, but most engineers seem to prefer a spot a little further forward. Do not put the mix position at 25% or 50% of the room length.
Many more guidelines, but those should be enough to get you on the right track, initially. Play round, post an updated design that takes them into account, then we can tear it apart and give you more "rules"....
- Stuart -
