was able to find one from their 50 cubic metre selections, namely 1:1.58:1.89
OK, but what are the actual dimensions? That matters too!
I just can't seem to find a working design otherwise - but that's likely just my poor design skills. Still, this does at least seem to work functionally so perhaps it will work acoustically also?
IT is inside the Bolt Area, so it should work. And plain rectangular rooms can certainly make good studios! Personally, I'm really partial to RFZ design, so most of the ones I do are based on that, but there's nothing wrong with plain old rectangular, if you treat it appropriately.
1) Is having a window on the left wall of my CR a no-no? I had the same window in my last studio but my walls were splayed there. Here I'm worried about first reflections. The window is angled down towards the floor if that helps at all.
If the glass is at your first reflection point, then yes, it is a problem. And angling it down might help a bit, but not as much as you imagine: reflections will just come from a different point on the glass. sound expands outwards in a 3D field, not just in 2D, so instead of thinking about the sound that came out exactly horizontal from your speaker and hit the glass at yoru ear height, change your point of view to 3D and think about the sound that came out from the speaker going in the same direction but heading slightly upwards: that will now strike the glass a bit higher than your head, and be reflected right back at your ears...
That's why splaying your walls is a good way of creating an RFZ. Or if you want a rectangular room, then you must treat the first reflection points with thick absorption. That's a problem if your window is where the treatment has to go...
2) In the small drum room / booth I would really like to do sliding glass doors or some kind of glass wall to make this room feel like an extension of the main room. I'm not so worried about isolation here - although I do of course want to keep as much drums out of the main room vocal mics as possible, but rather my question and concern is on the acoustic properties inside this room for recording drums. If one wall is mainly glass, and especially if the other wall will be containing a window - is there not a pretty high probability that the drums will not record well in this room?
There should be no problem with that. Most drum kits sound good when recorded in a slightly bright room, so as long as you have a reasonable amount of absorption on the ceiling and other walls, and maybe some diffusion too, you should be OK.
3) Is my Control Room going to be too small to sound decent? I have read that they should ideally be 1500 cubic feet minimum and that there's even an ideal 11ft ceiling height. I'm quite a bit off on both - approx. 1150sq ft and 88 - 92" or so by the time I've framed the new ceiling (after demo I'm measuring 92" from slab to joist).
I just wrote a reply to another post, asking more or less the same thing, so I', just copying and pasting that here:
"That depends on what you want to do, and far how you want to go! For example, for optimum critical listening room, the specs from EBU, call for a floor area of not less than 40m2 for a reference room, and 30m2 for a high quality control room. That's about 430 square feet and 320 square feet, respectively. On the other hand ITU specs call for "20 - 60 m2" for a stereo room, and "30 - 70 m2" for a multi-channel room (5.1, 7.1, etc.). 20m2 is about 215 square feet.
On the other-other hand, John has built highly successful studios inside a shipping container, and many people here on the forum have built great studios in small spaces.
So, if you are aiming for a world-class studio that meets international specs, then you need a floor area of about 250 square feet or more for your control room, and about 5 times that for your live room, for a total of about 1500 ft2 or so. Or if you don't need to go to that level, then you can do a great studio in less than that."
The specs don't actually mention height, and yes about 1400 cubic feet is a good total volume, so you can work it back from there: if you have "standard" 8 foot ceilings then, then about 175 square feet of floor space would give you that, so a room roughly 17' x 10' would be good. But as I said above, John and others have done fantastic things in much smaller spaces. I mentioned on another thread that I did a design for a guy in Canada last year on about 400 square feet of space, and we managed to fit in FOUR rooms: CR, LR, vocal booth, live room. So you can get good studios in small spaces.
I'm guessing I need to angle the two walls at the front left and right of the control room. 6 degrees each side right?
6° will get rid of flutter echo, but isn't enough to deal with first reflections. There's no minimum angle or "one size fits all" here: you have to ray trace, either in SketchUp or on paper, with ruler and protractor, to make sure that your reflections are missing your head by a wide margin.
- Stuart -
I don't want to upgrade just yet, as I'm in the middle of a big project, and last time I upgraded I ran into unexpected issues... I should be done in about a week or so, so I'll upgrade then, and give it another shot. Sorry!
