John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

I have been working on my sketchup plan and I have come up with this: I'm about to begin in a day or two so I would sincerely appreciate all comments regarding the layout and design, especially if you see anything wrong.
Green is absorbent. Purple panels are cloth with no acoustic purpose
I also have a couple questions:

1) Should I fill with rockwool/fibreglass up to the purple panels or can I use the depicted superchunk only and use the rest of the space between the trap and the purple panels as a closet for i.e. mic stands, microphones, cables, etc?

2) Can I replace the second resonator on each wall (nearest to rear wall) with shelves/closets or maybe a combination of both?

3) Is the ceiling height/inclination correct?

Thanks for your time and help.

Well, I'm trying to understand what your intentions are, but really I can't see the acoustic purpose of they way you have it laid out. I see several issues there:

1) Your speakers are too high! The acoustic axes appear to be about 1.450 m above the floor, but they should be 1.2 m, or whatever height your ears normally are above the floor when you are seated at your mix position. For most people, it should be around 1.2m, give or take a few cm. But 1.450m seems excessively high to me.

2) You seem to have huge wood-backed absorbent panels right below your speakers, where the soffit panels should be. What is the purpose of those? And right behind those is a large empty resonant cavity: What is that for?

3) What is the purpose of the purple panels next to the speakers? That's where your soffit panel should be too, but you say that purple means just a cloth panel with no acoustic purpose. Why are you doing it that way, with a non-functional piece of cloth where your soffit panels should be? I can't see how that is going to be useful.

4) Why did you make the speaker soffit boxes so small? It seems like you have enough room to do them large and effective, but they look very small to me. In fact, it looks more like you are not planning to do soffits at all, and instead just put your speakers on shelves inside those boxes. I honestly can't see that working out.

5) You have hangers above your inner-leaf ceiling! How are they going to work up there? I really don't see the point of putting hangers in your air gap, between inner and outer leaf. At least, I assume that the place where the hanger are is your air gap between the leaves, and that you are going to put drywall on that framework... In fact, I don't even see your isolation at all. What is the white wall that surrounds the entire room? Is that the inner leaf, or the outer leaf, or both at once? It's hard to figure out from the model.

6) You don't seem to have any absorption at all at your first reflection points. There is nothing on the walls, and the clouds are way too far back to work for that

Sorry, but I'm just having a hard time figuring out what it is that you are trying to do, since nothing seems to make sense. Or maybe it's just because the model isn't finished yet, and you still have to add many parts to it?

By the way, I do like the way you fitted the superchunk in with the door! That looks like a neat idea, if you can figure out a way to keep that section attached to the door (shich shouldn't be too hard). Nice!


- Stuart -

Stuart,
Thanks for your reply. I'm sorry that my post is a bit confusing. I will try to clarify things
Here's an updated file for you, with some elements that were missing: The posted sketchup is ONLY ABOUT TREATMENT. I have finished all the isolation works (thank god).
So, on the sketchup file the WHITE walls are the drywall inner leaf. The ceiling hangers are underneath the inner leaf and are covered by a plastic sheet (to avoid fibre dust) and then a cloth (in black). There is nothing else between them and the room.

The huge absorbent panel below the speaker is John's design. AFAIK, under the speaker the absorbent panel avoids reflections from the console going back at the engineer and the hangers at the bottom (not depicted) are the bass trap. In the updated file it might make more sense. I apologize again but I'm still a bit of a newbie with Sketchup.

You might be right on the height of the speakers. I usually place nearfields at ear height (tweeter), so I was going to check that after being sure about their position in the room. I downloaded John's "components.skp" file and basically copied the elements from there without changing them. For now, I would be happy knowing if their position in the room is correct.

The way I designed my room is as follows: first I determined the engineer's position by calculating the 38% position on the longest axis in the room (roughly 215m from the front wall). Then I copied the "spider" scheme from John's file (the crossed lines that tell you where the speakers go) and I centered it on the mix position. Then I copied the speaker units from John's file and placed them on their correspondent axis, against the front wall, without changing their dimension (the speaker units dimensions).

Then I placed the superchunks, resonators, hangers and absorbents. The big black rectangle on the front wall is a future 32" screen.

I have a couple of doubts left:

-The empty space between the superchunks and the purple panels should be filled with fibreglass or can it be left empty? If it can be left empty, can I use that space as storage for mics, cables, mic stands, etc? In either case, the purple panel instead of cloth should be a continuation of the speaker bezel, right? (it should be solid)

-Before placing the treatment, should I cover the room perimeter and ceiling with fibreglass like in John's "small studio" file?
-Are the 2 resonators at the rear wall a good idea? Can I build some closet/shelf in the middle of it?
-Can I replace the second resonator on each wall (nearest to rear wall) with shelves/closets or maybe a combination of both?
-Is the ceiling correct?

Any other suggestions before I get into it are most welcome as usual
Thanks again for your time and help

Bump

Ok. Just to let you know that despite no replies, I will go ahead. I would have liked someone to check the plan for me, but well, nevermind, I understand people are busy. So at least wish me luck when you read this

Stuart reads like he gave you a lot of information directly to your current concerns.

Consider what he said to be as accurate and effective a remedy as you will get here.

sonolink wrote:Ok. Just to let you know that despite no replies, I will go ahead. I would have liked someone to check the plan for me, but well, nevermind, I understand people are busy. So at least wish me luck when you read this

Stuart is handling your design analysis wonderfully. Many, if not most, of the professional class designers here will not disrupt a topic with distracting information when one expert is already handling the thread. There are world class studio designers that provide input here because they love studio design. If you want answers to your questions on your timeline, then pay for service. You have received hundreds of Euros worht of design consultation already at the right price. If you need more background on the build process, study my signature line.

Good luck!

Andre

I appreciate your advices gentlemen and thank everybody for their time and help, especially Stuart.

Sonolink wrote: -The empty space between the superchunks and the purple panels should be filled with fibreglass or can it be left empty? If it can be left empty, can I use that space as storage for mics, cables, mic stands, etc? In either case, the purple panel instead of cloth should be a continuation of the speaker bezel, right? (it should be solid)
-Before placing the treatment, should I cover the room perimeter and ceiling with fibreglass like in John's "small studio" file?
-Can I replace the second resonator on each wall (nearest to rear wall) with shelves/closets or maybe a combination of both?
-Is the ceiling correct?

xSpace wrote:Stuart reads like he gave you a lot of information directly to your current concerns. Consider what he said to be as accurate and effective a remedy as you will get here.

Understood. I didn't realize my questions were asking for too much accuracy...please accept my most humble apologies, sir.

AVare wrote:Stuart is handling your design analysis wonderfully. Many, if not most, of the professional class designers here will not disrupt a topic with distracting information when one expert is already handling the thread. There are world class studio designers that provide input here because they love studio design. If you want answers to your questions on your timeline, then pay for service. You have received hundreds of Euros worht of design consultation already at the right price. If you need more background on the build process, study my signature line.
Good luck!
Andre

I apologize again. I didn't realize this was about money. I probably naively thought that my donation would have made up for my questions...

Anyway, I will post reports and photos when I'm done (if that's of any interest to the studio design lovers here, of course). I managed to hang my 120kg homemade doors yesterday, my body is broken, but the weekend is giving me some recovery

Good day to y'all
Thanks

"I didn't realize my questions were asking for too much accuracy...please accept my most humble apologies, sir."

It's all about accuracy, as you have already recognized from using the accurate properties of Sketchup and having gathered much information in reference to the specific placement of specific materials to specific locations .

In any event, no apologies required but thanks for it anyway.

It's all good, and your work looks good excepting the speakers "look" high, but until these things get built it is difficult to tell without real world views.


Good luck,

Final sketch (he begs hopefully )
All input is welcome as usual.
Cheers

Final sketch

Not quite!!!!

That's an improvement, and you have fixed a few of the issues, but there are still several more to go.

Let's start with the big ones:
It seems like you still haven't got the concept of the speaker soffit: Its purpose is to act like an infinite baffle, which basically means that it extends the baffle (front panel) of your speaker "infinitely" in all directions. Where "infinite" means "really, really large, as compared to the longest wavelength of sound that it must work with". Assuming your speakers have good response down to 100 Hz, that means the soffit should ideally measure 3.44 meters across (11.3 feet) each side! Of course, it is impossible to achieve that in any realistically sized room, but the point remains that the soffit panel needs to be BIG!

In reality, as long as you get an area of somewhere around the dimensions of a quarter wavelength of the lowest frequency sound that it will have to deal with on each side of the speaker, then you are doing OK. A quarter wave of 100 Hz is still 86 centimeters, or 33.9 inches. So ideally, your soffit should have at least 33.9 inches of flat wood extending out to each side of the speaker. Once again, that is really hard to do in an average home studio, but the point is still that you have to make them as large as you possibly can. You are doing fine with the panel above your speakers, but the tiny dimensions that you have to the left, right and below each speaker are pitifully small, compared with what you need, and you are wasting huge amounts of space with the arrangement of the slot walls and the front wall.

In other words: try to make your soffits BIG!

I'd suggest that you concentrate on getting the soffits right, along with getting the geometry for the speakers and listening position right (it all goes together), then design the rest of the room around that. If you do that, then everything else should start falling into place. If you think about it, the speakers kind of are the single most important item in getting your room to sound good: start with lousy speakers, and the room will sound bad no matter what you do to it. So start with good speakers, then work your way forward from there. They are the focus of the entire room, to my way of thinking. It makes sense to start with those, and design the room around them.

IMHO.


- Stuart -

Dear Stuart,
I'm glad you're back

My speakers are Yamaha HS80M. The speaker unit I had in mind was the one on John's "components.skp" file. This unit's baffle doesn't seem to be decoupled from the speaker stand. I was thinking of decoupling the whole unit from the walls, though.
Btw, I thought the speaker unit and the baffle joints didn't need to be sealed airtight (at least I seem to recall reaqding a post by John on this). Also, the ceiling is just hangers and cloth (the hangers are not depicted. Sorry, forgot to mention that).

Anyway I've gone back to square one after reading your last post and decided to follow your advice and redesign the whole thing following the original idea based on the anonymous Control Room on John's site. I have placed John's original plan on the floor of my room's sketch as a guide. I hope to be now a little step ahead

Here's the corrected sketch: If the plan is now ok, I would like to ask:
-should I leave the center front as it is? I would have liked to place a 32" screen on that wall...
-Is it ok if I place shelves/closets in front of the green absorbents on the side walls (I'd cover the closet's doors with absorbents)
-shouldn't I fill the empty cavities inside the front wall corners with rockwool or fibre glass?

Thanks for your time and help
Cheers

My speakers are Yamaha HS80M.

Uh ohhh! Isn't that a rear-ported design? As far as I know, there is no way to successfully soffit mount a rear-ported speaker.

Sorry to be the bearer or bad tidings, but the issue here is that the HS80M has its bass port on the rear panel, which means it would be firing into the cavity behind the soffit, instead of into the room in front of the soffit.

Unless somebody has a plan for dealing with that (soffit mounting rear-ported speakers), then either you are stuck with putting your speakers on stands several feet away from the front wall (which screws up your entire room geometry), or you might have to think about using different speakers that can be soffit mounted...


- Stuart -

PS. FWIW, your new design is much better! Bitter-sweet victory....

Stuart,
thanks for your prompt answer. I am aware that a rear port speaker might mean some problems when soffit mounted, BUT, after taking into account that my speakers do have bass compensation controls, and after reading the following posts:

John Sayers wrote: student - the rear port on many speakers is there to support the low end response. Soffit mounting ALSO supports the low end response.
IMHO they balance out in the low end but the soffit mount also supports the rest of the response by making the stereo imaging much tighter and more accurate.
cheers
john

Soundman2020 wrote:

My Yamaha monitors (HS80m) have a rear port. Does that automatically disqualify them as a soffit mount candidate?

Perhaps, but not necessarily.

John Sayers wrote: I have the 50M and I love them - the 80M would be even better IMO

(John doesn't say if his HS50M are soffit mounted or not, but I would assume so coming from him.)

So I have decided to give it a go and try them out soffit mounted. I have a feeling they will sound great, and hope they will. If they don't I'll change monitors...

In any case I'm immensely glad I am a step ahead with the room design
Nevertheless, and excuse my insistance, I would still like to ask you to answer my previous questions, please:
-should I leave the center front as it is? I would have liked to place a 32" screen on that wall...is that possible? How
-Is it ok if I place shelves/closets in front of the green absorbents on the side walls (I'd cover the closet's doors with absorbents)
-shouldn't I fill the empty cavities inside the front wall corners with rockwool or fibre glass?

Again, thanks a lot for all your help mate

Updated design. I have answered my own questions
Cheers