Also, LEDE rooms are not good.
Right! No serious designer builds true LEDE rooms (original definition) any more. They were found to be great acoustically, but unpleasant physically, and fatiguing for long sessions. That's why we have so many extensions of LEDE today, that fix those major issues: NER, RFZ, CID, MR, etc. All are extensions of, or related to LEDE in one way or another, and all beat LEDE in terms of usability.
Your proposed control room would be 120ft2.
Right. Any smaller than 180 or so is getting very iffy for good acoustics, and good practicality. 113 is borderline unusable. The smallest room I have even done is slightly under 100ft. It is miniscule! 129" long by 107" wide. It's a one-man room, barely. It is an RFZ design, with all of the HVAC hidden inside the soffits (including the actual air-conditioner). It works OK, but with caveats. There's hardly enough room to open the door and get in, and certainly no room to have a couple of other people in there with you. Even though it is treated to the hilt, there are several issues that just cannot be fixed, because there is no room left to fix them!
Here's what it looks like, from the doorway:
BDNY--full-room-from-door.JPG
That's it. The entire room.
Here's what it looked like under construction, with the soffits complete:
BDNY--soffits-and-HVAC-done.JPG
Both of those are without the final desk in place, which leaves even less space available.
So, can it be done? Yes it can. Do I recommend doing it? No way! It was very complicated to get the room to the point where it is usable! I'm not at liberty to reveal the interior of the soffits, or the rest of the treatment, in detail, but I'm amazed at how much we managed to squeeze in there, and how complex the treatment was, just to get it usable.
So how usable is it?
Here's the full-spectrum frequency response 1/3 octave smoothed:
BDNY-REW--FR--20-20k--1..3--soffits-done.png
And the full-spectrum waterfall plot (also smoothed to 1/3 octave):
BDNY-REW--WF--20-20k--1..3--soffits-done.png
Sorry that I can't show you those in higher resolution, but the client hasn't given me the OK to do that. (Some not-so-serious studio designers only ever show their room graphs at 1/3 octave, and flat refuse to show anything in higher resolution: Beware of those! But not me: whenever I can, I'll show my results at much higher resolution, since 1/3 octave hides all the important details. I'm not afraid to do that, as I'm usually pleased with the results. However, in this case I can't show you that. But even at 1/3 resolution, you can see that it is pretty good across the board, except for the low end. And that's where the remaining problems lie. To be fair (to me!), this is the result right after the soffits were completed, but with only temporary "place holder" treatment on the rear wall: it did improve at the end, but I don't have that data available to show, unfortunately.
So Greg is absolutely right: I would not recommend trying to do such a tiny room, since I'm very well aware of just how complicated it is, and what the results can be, best case. I would not recommend doing 120ft, or 150 ft2 either: 180 ft2 is borderline: If you treat it carefully, it can be good. For the record, the corner control room is 146 ft2, and it's clear from
his thread just what a challenge that has been to treat. I would not suggest trying to do a room that small on your own, without experienced advice.
Of course, in all of the above, I'm assuming that you want good acoustics in your room! If you really don't care much about having accurate response, then it doesn't really matter, and you could go small. But I'm pretty sure that's not the case...
So why am I telling you all this? It's sort of a case of "Don't do what I do: do what I say" or maybe "Don't try this at home!". Smallish rooms can be made usable, yes, but it is very complex to do that, and it's not something the normal home-studio builder would be able to design himself, unless he's already very well versed in acoustics.
So my advice would still be, as Greg said: don't go below about 180 ft2 if you can avoid it! There's a reason why the specs for critical listening rooms place a limit of 215 ft2 as the smallest room allowable...
I'm not telling you how to build your place! Just pointing out the challenges that you will face, if you do decide to go down this path.
all of the dimensions you're throwing out there have two sides very close to the same length.
Right! Another potential problem. Thanks for pointing that out, Greg. I had not noticed that.
Always check your dimensions with a room-ratio calculator. Not really to make sure that you have an excellent ratio, but rather to make sure that you are far away from the bad ones, and close to the good ones.
It's not that simple. You'd have to use acoustic treatment that could be adjusted for ideal mixing acoustics, then adjusted for tracking.
Trying to track in the live end of a LEDE room would sound pretty bad.... it's not as "live" as you'd think! The word "live" in there does not mean that one end sounds like a concrete bathroom, and the other sounds like the tomb: it means that the two ends are balanced, carefully, such that the mix position gets neutral response. I would not want to track instruments in the live end of a LEDE room, expecting to get live-room results.
863.66 Cubic feet
The recommended minimum volume is about 1700 ft3, so you would be less than half. Even in that tiny 100 ft2 room, I still had nearly 800 ft3 to play with, and that one is smaller than what you propose in floor area... yet nearly the same in volume. Implying that you have very low ceilings? If you have 113 ft2 floor and 863 ft3 volume, that implies your ceiling is only 7'6"? Rather low...
Front Length 8.6'
Width 11.5'
Back length 11.06'
I'm not understanding your room layout. How can the room be 8'6 long at the front, but 11' long at the back? Small rooms are ALWAYS oriented with the speaker firing down the longest axis, never across the short axis. Therefore the "front" of your room will be 11' from the "back" of your room at all points. The width can vary, yes, but the length cannot. I'd need to see a dimensioned diagram to understand what you are trying to say.
There would be some other benefits to sectioning the room , traffic flow , having two ISO rooms for more flexibility ( a third if doing vocals in the control room) . The wash room as a amp room ... I could do drums , guitar , and bass , and vocal/acoustic tracking simultaneously.
Is all of that "benefit" worth having lousy acoustics in the control room? It's your studio, your business model, your customers, etc. but if that were my studio, I'd be wanting to offer the best service I can to keep the customers coming back for more. If the control room sounds like a broom closet, and the mixes don't translate well, then I'm not so sure that you'd be getting a lot of return business.
Sometimes people ask me why I never actually built the studio I was planning for my own garage: the truth is, I realized it would be no good for what I wanted it to be. Too small. Both the CR and LR would have been tiny, and it would not have given me the acoustic accuracy I wanted. So I didn't build it. I'm still considering doing it as a single control room, and I might do that one day, but not as two rooms.
IF I could make the smaller control room work.
That's a very big "if"! Enormous, in fact...
- Stuart -