John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Yeah, I've been following your build - looking good too!

Cheers!

Looks sweet!!:) I have been whatcing your build as well.

Cracking Job Tim - looks the total business!

Regards,

Lou.

Cheers, guys!

Sorry for the lack of updates, guys - things have been cracking along here nicely and I have lots of great pics and info for you, but we've been touring or I've been snowed under with work and haven't had a chance to do too much updating.

I'm still checking in here every few days - your builds are really inspiring to read while I'm getting this done!

Anyway, expect some updates in the next couple of days!

Alrighty! Let's be havin' some updates!

Lots has happened since the last update, so let's see if I can remember it all...

So, the floor tiles all went down... more or less. Even with the prepping we did on the floor, they still started to lift around the edge of each tile a bit after a while. I suspect that I did the job a little too well and once the tiles expanded a bit, they pushed against each other and the crappy adhesive didn't keep them from lifting. *sigh*

Doesn't look terrible bad and we have rugs hiding the worst bits, but still kind of sucky and demoralizing.

Here's some pics of the completed floors:







In good news, however, I managed to track down a cabinet maker to do the soffits and resonators. The owner of our rehearsal rooms had a friend called Brett Cooper who was apparently an amazing builder and did everything from small kitchen work to building mansions from scratch. He was way too busy to do anything until he told his boss he was quitting (in far more dramatic and obscene fashion! HAHA!). That left him needing some immediate money to go freelance, which worked good for me because I needed immediate work!

The next day, Coops rocks up on a Harley, leaps off, introduces himself and then runs into the room with a tape measure and notepad... 5 minutes later he comes out and goes "this is how we're gonna do it" and proceeds to tell me how he's going to create everything, pretty much exactly as I wanted. Holy. Crap. I don't think I've EVER had a more no-bullshit experience in my entire life. I like this guy!

He immediately orders in everything we needed, and first thing the next day he gets to work. First of all, cutting out the panels for the slat resonators and the soffits. Instead of cutting individual slats, he wanted to route out the holes - fine by me!

Here's the as yet un-slotted slat resonator panels:





(Sorry for the photo quality of those ones - I normally take pics with my Nokia N95 phone that has a lovely 5 megapixel camera but I managed to turn it into a $1000 paperweight during a failed software update, and had to use my crappy old 6600. I've since fixed it, though, thankfully!)

After that, John the original builder came back and insulated the ceiling of the bathroom area.

We noticed that we were getting a lot of sound leakage through the top there, and it was mostly to do with the sound escaping through the air gap between the ceiling and the inner rooms which wasn't entirely sealed going into the bathroom area. We plan to do a remodel of the bathroom area anyway, so we figured it was worth spending the extra money to get the ceiling looking good now and fix the insulation problem all in one go.



Then Coops started putting the paneling and framing in for the soffits, as well as a space and shelf for the TV and speaker boxes:



One nice big delivery of rockwool later, we insulated the back wall behind the soffits and routed out the slats in the center panel, and stained it:



The stain came up great - instead of just doing an even coat, we did 2 coats of a crosshatch effect to give the plain MDF wood a bit of character and to also hide its imperfections. Imperfections in "real" wood with the grain looks great, but on particle board like this, it looks a bit dodgy, so the stain really went a long way to making this look a lot cooler than it otherwise would have.

After that,we pulled the multicore cable through the conduit from the live room to the control room and packed it in behind the soffits, added the black cloth covering to the holes to hide the insulation behind it and got it all into place.



Here's a panoramic shot from the mix position (stitched together from about 12 photos):



Getting there!

So, next up is finishing the wooden trim around the black fabric (you can see it's been started on the right hand side), then we'll be adding a door in front of the power outlets and more outlets will be added just out from the soffits that will sit under where the desk will be to power the computers and racks. I'm getting a custom desk made in the next day or so... basically keeping busy until my ECM800 measuring mic finally decides to arrive so I can properly profile the room (ARGH! Hurry up!) and we can start work on the corner slat resonators.

More updates soon!

really good looking stuff, especially the stain effect from the paint!!
(you've gotta fill me in on that stuff, it's exactly what I was looking for)

It was Cabots 2-in-1 stain and varnish. I'm sure you'd be able to get something similar in Holland.

Here's a link to the product:

http://www.cabots.com.au/interior/furn_inone.asp

Really good stuff and works well!

your man does some nice work! and rides a harley!

Hi

Looking great. congrats.

i just have one question hopefully someone can answer:

Will the fact slats are effectively one piece of wood have any effect on its ability to vibrate at different frequencies? If it is the same results as cutting individual slats then i'm sure routing would be much easier and less time consuming than cutting every individual slat.

cheers

Alan

I can't speak for the efficiency but from what my builder tells me, it's about the same amount of time doing both. To get everything so straight he had to set up guides and all kinds of stuff and that was about as time consuming as cutting out the slats, but he preferred to do it this way because it was neater.

I would guess that it wouldn't have much of a different effect as it's still reflecting and absorbing the same amount of sound. Maybe someone with some more smarts than me could say for sure?

It's aliiiiiivvvvee.... kinda!

I took down my mixer and speakers and fired up some music through it with them in the soffits.

First impressions: Awesome! The sound is clear, well defined and balanced for the most part, but I'm already hearing problems in the room due to the unfinished treatments.

There's a bit of a 300 hz build-up in places and I'm hearing some flutter echoes between the ceiling and floor in the middle of the room. We'll be adding in the cloud above the mix position to fix that, and when we put in the couch and finish the slat resonator in the corner, that should take care of a lot of other stuff. Possibly, we may also need a broadband diffusor on the back wall. But overall, considering there's really no acoustic treatment in the room yet, it sounds awesome!

Yay!

And the speakers and TV are in:



The speakers are in so tight that if anyone plans to steal them, they'll have to take the walls too!

The custom desk is nearly done too, minus the keyboard drawer, and I should be getting the racks this weekend.

Starting to look like a studio!

Tim - I would so love to comment Dude, but I'm afraid my hands are otherwise engaged picking my jaw up off the floor!

Totally awesome, (bonza!), my friend. I think some of us (me) might well be stealing some of your ideas!

Congrats, and festive good wishes to you and yours.

Regards,

Lou.

HAHA! Cheers, Lou!

Not long to go now, with any luck. My biggest hold-up is waiting for my ECM8000 measuring mic to arrive so we can plot the room. I'm told it'll be here tomorrow - fingers crossed. The builder I'm using for the slat resonators is off to Thailand for a couple of months come Wednesday next week, so I'll either have a finished studio then (more or less) or I'll be a sad guy with half a studio.

If anyone is that way inclined, a prayer to the delivery gods would be much appreciated! HAHA!