Noisecell Studio (Steve's One-Room Studio build)

[mr_durden]

Hi folks,

after 2 years trying to find time to start building my small one-room-basement-studio, I managed to start the studio build in April. But after some very intensive start, progress is now slowing down dramatically because my job takes over again...

Anyhow I thought I could share some pics of my studio build with you.

First of all some short description of my little studio: As I'm a hobby musician it's going to be a one-room control/tracking room studio. All walls, floor and ceiling in the basement are concrete and I decided that I don't want to change the layout of the room. I will only apply some acoustic treatments to the room.
In the corners I will install 4 superchuck basstraps, 4 slot resonators (John's design) are going to the side walls, some diffusors at the rear of the room and some basstraps panels to the left and right side and over the mixing position. The attached studio design isn't up to date, but I will update if I find some time...

Beside these acoustic treatments to get a nice tracking / monitoring environment, there is one very important thing for the studio. And that is isolation from outdoor noise as my studio is located very, very close to a city airport. (Perhaps I'll post some pics of airplanes going by where you can identify the eye color of the pilots ) So a good sealing of the basement windows is most important. This is already done! As you can see in the pictures the windows are sealed with very heavy plywood panels (55mm). In the gap between the windows and the plywood panel I attached acoustic foam, which can be taken out easily and I can open the windows for some fresh air. To seal the windows airtight, I will glue some felt to the plywood panels touching the walls. But also without this felt the sound isolation from the airplane noise is already very good. Superchunk corner traps are also already finished and at the moment I'm building the diffusors and slot resonators, but I'm not making big progress at the time.

Ok folks, that's it for now. I'll post some more pics later...

cheers,

Steve

[mr_durden]

some more pictures....

and it's late now, time to go to bed! Good night to you all!

Steve

[jwl]

Very nice!

One thing, in your drawing the side angled slot resonators are angled toward the listening position. You want to angle them toward the rear of the room instead, the whole point is to aim reflections toward the rear of the room, as well as absorb the frequencies in its range.

So when you build them, make sure they are opposite of the drawing.

[mr_durden]

Hi,

thanks a lot for that hint. I wasn't really aware of that point, but it makes totally sense! Fortunately this is no big deal as I can use the right wall absorbers for the left wall and the other way round

This week I didn't have much time for further constructions, and so I didn't make any real progress. But the weeks before we have already finished the wood flooring and the superchunk cornertraps are also nearly finished. We only have to staple the fabrics, but that will be done later.

Here are some more pics.

By the way someone or something has eaten up my picture comments

image20: wood flooring done! And I still have to get used to that green colours. Don't know what's driven me to make that decision

image26: rear superchunk filled with rockwool (sonorock)

image27: This is some synthetic cotton wool I use to wrap the rockwool stuff

image30: synthetic cotton wool stapled!

image36a: right front corner bass trap filled with rockwool

image 36b: and right corner trap wraped with cotton wool.

Alright, that's it for now.

bye,

Steve

[mr_durden]

Hi folks,

now that 2 months since my last post have past, I thought time would be right for an update. Progress has become very slow, and there is so much left to do (e. g. slot resonators and furnitures) but a friend of mine helped me finishing my diffusors (not installed yet). Although there is much room treatment to do, I couldn't resist to fire up my mains and do some listening tests. The room has a lot of flutter echoes, because of parallel walls / ceiling and neither I have installed the slot resonators nor installed the traps for a RFZ. But I must say that the room already sounds very focused with only 4 superchunks installed. ) I hope I'll manage to finish the 4 resonators and the furnitures till the end of august.

All the best to you...

cheers,

Steve

P.S. I'll try to catch a picture from second floor, when an airbus flying by. That's rather impressive and LOOOUUUUD!!!

[jwl]

Nice progress!

What design did you use for the diffusors? They look like QRDs but I can't see the well depth.

[tlsaudio]

Mind sharing the design for the resonator's? I will be building some soon and like the size and look of these.
Thanks,
T.

[Ro]

About the doors that will close the windows...
Would it not be an idea to add an absorbing material (wool for example) on the back of the doors to avoid a hollow sounding construction?

Add enough wool to press against the glass-window as well to lessen vibration.

[mr_durden]

Hi,

very pleased to get some feedback

Yes, they are QRD diffusors and they look pretty cool, but unfortunately that's all they do. I didn't installed them yet at the rear wall, but my first impressions are that they don't do any audible advantages to the room. So from this acoustical perspective (and I read some same opinions in this forum), diffusors for small rooms (mine is 6,2m x 4,1m x 2,4m) don't make much sense. Second off I must say that I really underestimated the efforts and costs to build these diffusors. I thought it would be quite easy to glue some woods (which I ordered already sawn to length) together. But it took really some time and was also a bit difficult. So in my present opinion it's not worth the efforts you gain acoustically from these diffusors. On the other hand it was my fault that I didn't recalculated the dimensions which I found in the internet. (didn't have the dimension by hand, but I will look for them and post some more pictures). Anyway now that they are finished I will install them and comfort the look of these acoustical-non-sense-cool-looking-diffusors

warm regards

Steve

to tlsaudio: Do you mean the slot resonators? If so, they are exactly based on John's design (see DIY Wall Units). For the diffusors: From my present point of view I would really think twice if you need diffusors in your room (just my humble opinion now). But if you really want to build QRD diffusors do some calculations (e.g. http://www.digitalaudiorock.com/cgi-bin/qrd.cgi) and search this forum. If you still want to build some and need some detailed assistance, I would be pleased to help.

to ro: thanks for the clue, but I already have some acoustic foam between the windows and the doors. (not shown in the pictures). The doors are very heavy (6 cm solid-wood) and sound isolation is absolutely fabulous. I'm very pleased with this construction.

[mr_durden]

Hi there!

Just a quick update. The last 5 weeks A friend of mine helped me building my recording room. It's gonna be finished in some weeks. I decided to change the colour scheme, and now I'm very satisfied. I also decided to build a second room as an ISO-Booth. And I discovered some interesting room effects when we added the fabrics for the corner bass traps (much more flutter echoes, as the fabrics tends to reflect some higher frequencies). More details and up to date photos soons, but here are some older ones from 4 weeks ago and I can tell you a lot have been changed and progressed till then. I'm excited as I was as a child on christmas day!!!

best to all of you,

Steve

[Ro]

Good to see you're still in progress!
nice update.

[mr_durden]

Hi,

I have nearly finished my controlroom (pictures will be added soon) and now I have the chance to use a second room as an isobooth for drums/vocals/guitars. The room is quite small (l:3,50m x w:2,50m x h:2,40) with rectangular shape. Now I'd like to know some of your opinions for the room treatment. Here are my thoughts: low frequencies seem to be the biggest problem in such a small room (esp. for tracking drums) so I'll add as much bass trapping as I can install. Also I think I have to make this room sound quite dead as I don't expect this room to "sound" good. So here are my treatment suggestions.

1.) 4 big superchunk bass traps are going to be installed in all 4 corners.
2.) The ceiling over the drumkit will be covered with a ceiling cloud as additional bass trapping.
3.) More bass traps will be installed throughout the whole room lenth between wall and ceilling.

Till now I'm quite drawn how to treat the walls, but I'm favoring to cover one long wall and one short wall (the respectively 2 other walls left untreated) with 6cm rockwool glued to the wall (covered with fabric).

Ok, these are my thoughts. So any help or assistance would be very appreciated.

all the best to you,

Steve

[John Sayers]

Steve - a couple of suggestions.

1) The rear wall of the control room needs heavy insulation treatment instead of the diffusors - as you said - they don't work well in small rooms. Maybe consider a foward leaning wall like Joe's Castle.

http://johnlsayers.com/Pages/Castle.htm

2) With the drum room remember you can have 300mm depth of absorption in the ceiling and still have a 2.1 ceiling height.

[mr_durden]

Hi John,

thanks a lot for your input!

You're abolutely right with the diffusors. I realized that already when building the controlroom and so I decided to treat the ceiling at the backend with a huge ceiling cloud. I attached some pictures with some up to date photos of my controlroom.

Though I didn't have done room measuring I'm already very satisfied with the room sound now. The Idea for the isobooth is ingenious. Lowering the ceiling is indeed the easiest way to have more bass trapping without loosing too much usable room. I have already started to build the framing for the ceiling insulation (there will be 16cm insulation and 10cm air).

What do you think about treating only one of the parallel walls? Is this sufficient to avoid flutter echoes or comb filtering?

greetings from Berlin

Steve

[John Sayers]

What do you think about treating only one of the parallel walls? Is this sufficient to avoid flutter echoes or comb filtering?

yes - that should be adequate.