control room ceiling height

Papawhitehead · Post by **Papawhitehead** » Thu Apr 15, 2004 6:46 am

Hi I'm building a control room in a space that has a 6' ceiling. Does anyone have any advice for making this work, or will the short ceiling be a nightmare to deal with? The actual ceiling is about 7' but there are crossbeams that lower the height closer to 6'. Will a wood floor help make the room sound bigger or just more out of control? HELP!

Post by **John Sayers** » Thu Apr 15, 2004 9:00 am

How is the ceiling at the moment ?? is it exposed timber joists or has it been sealed off with plaster??

cheers
John

Papawhitehead · Post by **Papawhitehead** » Thu Apr 15, 2004 11:03 pm

It's exposed.

dymaxian · Post by **dymaxian** » Fri Apr 16, 2004 12:03 am

So if you measure up to the floor deck above the joists or timbers it's 7', but the bottom of the timbers is at 6'? Is that correct?

If so, there's hope. Does your room have the isolation you need to work down there? If it does, and you don't feel like you need to put drywall on the bottom of the joists to add to the isolation, what you can do is put blanket insulation between the joists, and 1" rigid insulation panels on the bottom there. This'll give you just over a foot of absorption on the ceiling.

A lot of sound will get absorbed by that, and it'll make the room sound like it has a much higher ceiling. With it being that low physically, your best bet is to make it as absorptive as you can.

Just gotta watch your head.

Kase
www.minemusic.net

Papawhitehead · Post by **Papawhitehead** » Sun Apr 18, 2004 2:08 am

What about putting in a wood floor? Would this complicate things?, or should the floor be dead too? Thanks for the replies.

knightfly · Post by **knightfly** » Sun Apr 18, 2004 6:20 am

Generally, small rooms work best with dead ceiling, live floor - so if you have carpeting it should go away. Too much absorption makes a room unnaturally dead sounding, not fun to work in... Steve

Papawhitehead · Post by **Papawhitehead** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 6:16 am

Should the walls be sorta live too? thanks again

dymaxian · Post by **dymaxian** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 7:26 am

Should the walls be sorta live too?

Well, that's a pretty broad question. It depends on a lot of variables; the greatest of which are "what exactly will you be doing in there?" and "how big is the space?"

What exactly will you be doing in there? We know it's the control room, but what style of music? How good are your speakers (lots of low end, good studio monitors or Best Buy multi-media speakers? Are you mixing just stereo, or 5.1 surround or pro theater stuff? Is the room large enough to do tracking in, like an all-in-one space?

Most of the control rooms on the planet are designed for stereo stuff with a pair of at least semi-pro speakers. Many of the control room designs on this board go in that direction.

How big is the room? It's 7' high, but the other 2 dimensions are just as important to how you treat the room. Our recommendations on how to treat the ceiling and floor will keep flutter echoes from happening vertically, but if the room is a 10'x10' square you'll have to do a lot of work to get the room to sound good. If it's huge, and you plan on doing all your recording work in there, your wall treatments will be all different. Having parallel walls will mean you'll either want to put up diffusion, absorption, or some way to keep sound from fluttering between them.

Give us a little more data and we can help you out a lot. There's a lot of old posts on here that will probably answer your question, so read as much of them as you can. If you get specifics, hit the search and you'll probably find what you need.

Good luck!

Kase
www.minemusic.net

Papawhitehead · Post by **Papawhitehead** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 2:04 am

The room is roughly 13'x13'. By roughly I mean that the room has some parts that are shorter b'cause of a closet. I have ns-10s and a tannoy sub. I will be doing mostly "rock" music. Stereo mixes, isolated tracking rooms. thanks

ps. Is there a Mac version of a design software program that I can use to draw something up?

dymaxian · Post by **dymaxian** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 11:39 pm

The room is roughly 13'x13'

Eeek. A square room.

How much altering can you do here (or how much are you willing to do? Or how much can you afford?)

If you've got the money to do it, and you own the place (or have a very understanding landlord), you could build a pair of false walls along whichever walls will be the side walls. You could build these at symmetrical angles, so that the front of the control room ends up being 10' or 11' wide, with the new walls just running into the back corners (leaving the back of the room just under 13'). I don't know how this would interact with your closet, but it's just a thought...

If you can sketch your room, and put the dimensions and door/window locations on it, someone here can draw it up if you can't find a program to do it.

Kase
www.minemusic.net

Papawhitehead · Post by **Papawhitehead** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 5:23 am

Here's a sketch. I'm sure the scale is off but, it's my first try. I am willing to remove the closet. There is a slight possibility that I could raise the ceiling 3 or 4 feet. ( there is attic space above) I'm not sure if I can afford it. I will be getting a bid to see how much it would cost. thanks guys. -B

Papawhitehead · Post by **Papawhitehead** » Fri Apr 30, 2004 4:46 am

I was wondering if someone could draw up a control room design for me. John maybe? Thanks a lot. -B

Papawhitehead · Post by **Papawhitehead** » Tue May 04, 2004 6:58 am

hey Dymaxian, what about a thick acoustical curtain or baffels instead of actual walls to change the shape of the room? thanks -B

dymaxian · Post by **dymaxian** » Tue May 04, 2004 7:15 am

I only had a little time to mess around with a design for you, and nothing really appeared to me that you couldn't get from John's other designs up here. If you built a room-within-a-room, you could nullify the problems you'd have from having those windows on the back wall. In-the-corner stations don't work out too well with that closet there, no matter where you put them.

Curtains aren't a bad idea- you can continually adjust the reverb of your room with them. You'd need to build in a bunch of low-freq trapping behind or among them, tho. The curtains will soak up the highs and mids and do almost nothing for your lows unless you space the curtain like 2' off the walls... I'd reckon you're not going to do that. But yeah- as long as there's enough low-bass absorption to balance out the curtains, they'll be great.

Again, if you can do it, the room-within-room thing may give you a better shaped room. If you can get the plan to work really well in 2-dimensions, the ceiling being low won't be quite so bad.

If I get time to come up with a design, I'll post it, but no promises...

Kase
www.minemusic.net