Perhaps this thread should rather be called "How NOT to do it and (roughly) still succeed" but that would be a bigger debate.
Three years ago I set out to build a house in the Austrian countryside with the help of my dad's workmanship. The intention from the start (though somewhat ill defined) was to build it in such a way that I could use the entire basement as a studio for music and video post-production purposes. The available budget was good after I had some well-invested capital from monetary compensation due to a climbing accident with major back injuries some ten years earlier. So much to my background.
Two years ago I made a post right here – already well past most of the construction and past most of the admittedly ongoing planning stage – and our dear Stuart graciously and patiently took the time to explain to me in detail all the ways in which I had gone wrong and how we could have done the same thing better for less
. A well-needed punch in the gut at that point.
Stuart advised me strongly to halt construction and finish the plan before doing anything else! And while we did pause for a while and I studied and modeled like crazy, we eventually moved forward and completed the studio as well as we knew how.
Not least to my own surprise, the studio turned out wonderful in almost every respect. Insulation is fantastic, HVAC turned out very effective and also whisper-quiet (I can post details on how we solved our issues in a separate post if anyone is interested), the room acoustics in the live room are very pleasant and versatile, the entire space looks, feels, and sounds amazing, but alas, unfortunately, it is currently not a very reliable mixing environment, no surprise to anyone looking at the dimensions of my CR.
I 've been tracking several bands in the studio over the last year or so since completion, and I always had a blast mixing things in this wonderful space, but every time I tried my mixes outside of my CR, the mixes fell apart, leading me to go over and over them, often in vain. Only when I started mixing primarily on headphones have things begun to sound like I wanted them to outside of the studio too... Obviously that is an unfortunate outcome in light of all the money and effort that was put into this place.
As I have outlined in my original thread, the room is virtually square (4,99m long, 4,78m wide and 2,99m tall), making it modally sub-optimal from the get-go. Additionally, I designed the room with the studio window to the left of the console favoring a TV screen in front of it for post-production, and I had always had the room in mind with the speakers firing down the shorter dimension, rather than the longer one as I had later learned would have been preferable.
All of this was addressed comprehensively by Stuart in my original thread from two years ago here.
I took on-board what I could, but also improvised to some significant degree...
And while – mostly through dumb luck – the room response overall turned out quite decent, REW points out a number of significant problems I now hope to resolve with your help.
Specifically, my measurements show three modal holes at around 87Hz, 146 Hz, and 185Hz that have narrowed and weakened with treatment, but not been eliminated.
A more comprehensive set of measurements can be found here on my dropbox.
Here a few pictures during treatment and how it is now.
We built two large soffits positioning the speakers close to the front wall, a bit outside left and right of the 25% width mark, all solidly mounted with plenty of mass, with the speakers fully floated on sylomer pads (I have done the calculations, too).
We then built large cages around the back of the speakers and attached airducts to release excess heat up and away from the speakers back into the room. We stuffed the top space behind and above the speakers with Rockwool and fluffy insulation and used 5 hangers of varying sizes on each side for the space underneat the speakers.
We put in 16cm of cm of rockwool RW3 in the center front section and 8cm along the sides to act as broadband absorption, used the same material to build two superchunks in the rear corners, (very similar properties to OC703 according to my research), put another layer of 8cm of RW3 along the rear wall and hung 5 more large hangers of varying width in the center of the rear wall.
We used a stiffer insulation material used for under-floor insulation fitted into the fabric frames (2 cm thick) to act as semi-absorbant waveguides, and used the same technique for the ceiling clouds, only that we mounted those frames directly on a 2cm thick, rigid plasterboard (correction: actually it's fiberboard, similar to homasote] backing, to guide the reflected energy towards the back wall where it can be absorbed.
Finally, a few more shots of the rest of the studio, just for curiosity's sake!
I could go on about plenty of details regarding our build, but perhaps I'll best write a diary in hindsight once all the main issues are actually resolved!
So now: my question to you all is simply this:
How might I try to resolve these last critical acoustical issues in my Control Room, so that I can finally get to use this great space to its fullest potential?
Thank you all in advance! I'm looking forward to a great discussion.