John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hello all! Here's the skinny:

The family and I will be moving in to a new house in about a month (we close the deal next week, but there are a few renovations to be done before we move in) and I will have a small mix/edit/overdub room there. I won't/don't need to do any isolation at this location, only treatment. I have a couple rooms in town I can work out of, so this will be used for mixing and overdubbing when the client can't afford to do those in the commercial studio, as well as editing and songwriting for my music projects.

The room dimensions, as close as I can get them, are 11' 11 3/4" L x 9' 10" W x 7' 10" H. Given the size of the room, I was planning on bass trapping as much as possible, but I'm a little concerned about over-deadening the room. The attached sketchup is what I have so far, but I'm wondering if I need to swap some of the panels for slat walls instead. In the sketchup, I just used blocks the size of the treatments to represent the bass traps, wall panels and cloud. The traps in the corners will initially just be panel bass traps, though I may upgrade to superchunks if necessary. The traps on the front and rear ceiling will be the same. The cloud will be similar to Kendale's beautiful cloud (http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4091). Since very few threads about this size room are updated AFTER the treatment is in place, I'm torn between the standard panels (as pictured), or going with something a little more complicated utilizing slats. My budget is approx $500-1000.

The front of the room is the side with the corner traps (you may also notice the listening position and first reflection traces on the floor). The door on that end of the room goes to a closet. The other door is a hallway. The arched opening is a window. I intend to hang panel absorbers on the backs of the doors. I haven't come up with a solution for the window yet... may just build a movable panel that can be set up there when mixing, moved when I need light.

The .jpg is without the ceiling treatments in place so you can actually see the room.

Upon re-reading my post, I'm not sure my question is clear...

Will the plan above result in too dead of a room and should I plan from the beginning to use slat resonators? Or is it fine as is?

Hi "SignorMars", and welcome!

Will the plan above result in too dead of a room and should I plan from the beginning to use slat resonators? Or is it fine as is?

The total absorption looks about right, maybe even a bit on the low side, but the issue is the coverage in each part of the spectrum. It's a small room, so you need deep, heavy abundant bass trapping, but of course that also sucks out the highs. So one easy solution is to put 6 mil plastic across the front of your corner bass traps, and perhaps some other absorption, to reflect the highs back into the room while allowing he bass through. You might even need something a bit more substantial than plastic, such as very thin plywood or something similar.

So start out by just doing the absorption, then measure the room response with REW. If you are losing too much in the highs, put plastic on your superchunks. If you are still losing too much, then put plastic on other things, but NOT on your first-reflection treatment. Or if it turns out that you are losing highs and mids, then replace the plastic on some of the traps with panels. Keep on testing and tweaking until you get it right. REW is a great tool. and will reveal a lot about what the room is doing, acoustically. Just make sure you get the mic in the exact same position in the room each time you measure, accurate to within about a 1/2". If not, then you cannot compare the graphs from previous tests: each test is still valid, but you can only compare tests that were taken in the exact same, identical location.

One other thing I noticed; you only ray-traced to the insides of your speakers, but you also need to raytrace the outsides. You have missed things by only going one way: your front door, for example, is clearly a first reflection point for your left speaker, but it doesn't show up on your ray trace since you never did the left side of the left speaker...

Also, don't forget that sound is 3D, not 2D, so you need to repeat the ray-tracing exercise in the vertical plane too, also including your desk and console: those are very often problematic for first reflections.

I wouldn't worry too much about the window initially: it is pretty much behind your head, so should not affect things too much. Worst case: build a large gobo on wheels that you can push in front of ti for critical listening.

You seem to have a decent basic plan. Looks good!


- Stuart -