Advice on my Control Room Refurb Please

Jeemy · Post by **Jeemy** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 11:36 pm

Hi,

I am about to remodel my "control room" - up to now just a square room with a worktop and shelves.

The unit I lease just now will be knocked down in 2 years and my goal is to save enough to purpose build at the end of it. So this is simply a measure to make the room sound - and look - semiprofessional so I can deal with the budget demo recordings I do most of to the best of my abilities, make a good job of the full albums if any ever happen, and have the place look professional when potential clients come to visit.

The first view - an overhead - shows the existing room, a 3.6m square room with high ceilings. I am guessing the ceiling is 12ft, maybe more, it is certainly getting towards 3m. It shows where the worktop is.

My plan is basically to use the lefthand shelving unit, together with the windowsill at the rear, which are both 285mm off the existing worktop, as a rest for a new contoured worktop which I will make out of MDF and paint with an enamel paint.

Also to build out the lower worktop in an opposite parabola, so I have 2 levels. I will paint everything below the lower worktop black.

So you can see in this second picture the proposed layout, and the lower worktop in a lighter grey and the old construction in very light grey.

The third picture shows a rough handdrawn perspective to ensure you can see the main features on which I have doubts.

Firstly you can see I have the speakers arranged in a parabola so ideally when you switch between the two sets of nearfields you get a stereo image from both. In fact this will be 6 speakers hopefully, Tannoy Reveals at the outside (my usual), MPS5s closer in (for a double-check on actives) and a set of very poor hi-fi speakers for a reference mix in the centre.

I am hoping this will give me a good listening position in the centre.

Mixer you can see centrally and 5U 19" rack cabinets will be slid under the desk, deepest equipment at the outside, in front of the desk is the keyboard.

I haven't quite worked out VDU positioning yet, hopefully my business partner will invest in some flatscreens which I will mount above the speakers, if not I only have a 17" CRT which will need to sit above the speakers centrally I guess. In both of these instances, will I need to seperate the speakers from the VDUs due to magnetic field? I could lose the crap speakers in the centre and put them somewhere else to make VDU space I guess.

Above the second worktop I intend to mount a framework of flat panels. These will be used to mount lights on at the top, and will be backed with a light hardboard and covered in acoustic foam sheets.

However I am concerned about how to deal with this parabola and the back of the room.

I have read a parabola is a bad shape to have in any room due to it reflecting all the sound back to one point. This foam is pretty absorbent stuff but still, any advice?

The back of the room behind me is obviously a nightmare at present. One idea is to rotate the whole assembly 15 degrees clockwise pivoting from approx the keyboard position, so that instantly the back of the room is more random angles. I could then build a "wall" - basically a frame with the foam "wallpapering it" and a hanging fabric door to get me through to the cupboard in the southeast corner.

Or just to leave it as it is, basstrap it thoroughly, and forget about it. Trouble with that is I have all my cables hanging on the back wall (I would change this if it would help the acoustic) and the door is on the back wall in the southwest corner.

Any comments on major structural issues before I commit to this plan? Any tweaks or refinements?

Your help is as always much appreciated,

Jeemy

knightfly · Post by **knightfly** » Tue Nov 16, 2004 7:44 am

Jeemy, glad you posted this here as well as at RO - I've no separate place set up to post graphics, so would have had to do it here anyway -

I've been mulling this very subject over for quite a while, trying to reach a workable plan for my next studio, which I hope to start on next year when the weather dries out.

There are several problems you will likely run into with your plan - first the problems explained as I understand them -

1 - According to Philip Newell (Recording Studio Design, etc) there is a problem with placing speakers very far out of the same horizontal plane as the ears; the pinae (those little "useless" nubs in the center of our outer ear) are there for localization of sound in the vertical plane, and it's been found that higher frequency sounds do NOT translate the same when they are above our ears as they do when they are at ear height -

So placing speakers high and aiming them downward, while better than NOT aiming them downward, makes you tilt your head upward to get the same incidence (and sound quality) while ALSO increasing the likelihood of bad reflections off the floor behind us and back to the mix position.

I know you didn't say you were doing this; I'm just listing potential problems to be worked out at this stage...

When you get speakers much closer together than 60 degrees, you start to lose stereo imaging; you can go up to about 90 degrees with them, but this can give an exaggerated sense of stereo so will likely cause you to make mixes that are somewhat LACKING in width when played on more typical systems.

I can tell you from painful experience that you do NOT want to place your VDU's, whether flat screen or CRT, so that the TOP of their screen is more than about an inch above your eye height - I tried this in desperation in one setup, and couldn't stand it for more than about a half hour at a time without looking for a chiropractor.

Next, rotating your entire setup as you show will hurt your sound field balance by making the side walls NON symmetrical around the vertical center plane (an imaginary large sheet of vertical "plywood" that passes through the center of your head and a point equidistant between your left and right monitors) - so that's not a good idea without some wall building.

So, to sum up, everything you need to listen to and look at in your studio needs to be in the exact same location

- kind of hard to do without violating some pretty established laws of physics (matter, same place, same time, etc)

The direction I've decided on (still a work in progress, BTW) is to use 3-4 of the newer 19-20" LCD's, but place them as LOW as I can get them and still see them behind the mix surface (whatever that is) and to tilt them back as far as they will go (this decreases their effective height so speakers can be set lower) without losing too much definition (newer ones seem to be getting wider viewing angles, so that's good) - then, nearfields on stands BEHIND the desk so their reflections off the mix surface MISS your ears and continue on to the rear wall, where they will be absorbed/diffused depending on the size of the room.

In my case, there will be soffited mains so I won't want nearfields in the way of imaging, due to diffraction around the nearfield cabinets - I'm still thinking about DIY ways to "pop up" the nearfields only when needed. In lieu of this, using nearfields that have all the cabinet edges radiused should help some of the diffraction problem. (Again, I don't want the mains much above ear height, reasons stated earlier)

As to room treatment, in your case (moving soon) I would build some rear corner traps as large as possible and still be portable, and build some free-standing "gobos" around your mix station to balance out reflections and re-direct them to the rear - sort of a DIY version of the "max-wall" approach by Auralex (or you could buy the Auralex setup if you have more money than time)

Here are a couple of crude drawings of what I've been talking about -

I hope this will answer a few of your questions... Steve

Jeemy · Post by **Jeemy** » Tue Nov 16, 2004 9:10 pm

Hi,

To address your points and add questions they raise:

1) The higher of the worksurfaces will be 1.3m from the ground, dead-on at head-height when sitting. So monitors and VDU positioning should be good.

2) I am going to work out the stereo curve where the sets of speakers are to sit so that I get an 80 and 70 degree incidence on the two important pairs, and the centre ones are more for checking a mix on crap speakers, and may well be moved anyway to make room for VDUs

3) As regards the reflections going below my head to the rear, I will get this sorted by hook or crook. I will post new drawings later.

4) The room is 10 feet 1 inch high. This appears to be a good thing from what I have read on the boards. I will get the ceiling traps sorted no bother.

5) As regards the rest, I am going to redraw plans so my existing structures are maintained. In front of these I will mount the appropriate traps and structures as you have shown. Will post up later today so you can see how I imagine this looking.

All the Best,

Jeem

Jeemy · Post by **Jeemy** » Wed Nov 17, 2004 5:04 am

PS my door is in the southern corner (southwest) on the back wall. any ideas how to do this so i can still get in and out!!

Jeemy · Post by **Jeemy** » Wed Nov 17, 2004 6:04 am

also can anybody tell me is it okay if the gobos and front bass traps just come down to the height of the desk i.e. from 1m upwards past head height of 1.3m to about 1.6m or do they need to go from floor upwards?? so i'd need to split the bass traps above and below?

there are pipeboxes and existing desking in the corners so i can't use the basstraps as floor-to-ceiling frames...

Jeemy · Post by **Jeemy** » Wed Nov 17, 2004 6:18 am

here is combined working plan:

Jeemy · Post by **Jeemy** » Wed Nov 17, 2004 6:28 am

rear trap etc got cut off a bit, but don't worry,it will be there

Jeemy · Post by **Jeemy** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 12:06 pm

anybody wanna respond on whether these need to come right down to the floor, if you look at pic one I have desk in 3 corners, do i need to cut it out.

knightfly · Post by **knightfly** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 6:53 pm

Jeemy, one way to handle the door; build a free-standing gobo (instead of that rear absorber) of rigid fiberglass or rockwool (use slats to fasten the insulation to, not solid plywood or mdf - you want sound to be able to pass through this insulation and to the wall behind) - then, just move the gobo out of the way when you need to move gear in, and leave the gobo spaced a few feet away from the wall so the door is accessible. You might even want two of these so they're smaller to handle, and still cover the rear of the room where the corner traps are NOT.

Doing this will get you more absorption in the lower frequency ranges because of the increased distance between the rear wall and the absorbent material, so should help to even out the response of the room better.

AS to the corner traps in front, the more you do the better; but if you can't go floor to ceiling, you may want to build more corner traps for the corners between the CEILING and walls; this is another place where traps work best, it's still a CORNER, and will still get buildup -

Hope that helps... Steve

Jeemy · Post by **Jeemy** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 12:50 am

well what i can do is fill the areas below the desk (rectangular) with rockwool.

if you look at picture 1 again the area in the top left corner is a set of shelves, i could remove these and put the basstrap in the top left. in the top right the desks meet nd under is a sealed rectangle which they rest on.no idea what is in there but i imagine it is empty.

so maybe i should remove the cabinet and rectangular area and build into them?? or just stuff 'em with rockwool.

can i just check dimensions with you.

fibreglass panels large will be 1200x1200 plus a wood frame, roughly centrally spaced around the listening position.

small will be 600 x 1800 about 200 off floor to 2m high.

corner traps will be 1200 on the long edge plus as high as i can make them!

which only leaves the side gobos: i intend to make them part of the desk unit i think, so they extend 600mm up from 1m to 1.6m high.

sound good? i will be doing all this saturday/sunday - will post pics monday,

if you could confirm this is all cool and best way to approach the front corners, great.