John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Greetings,
First post here, have been watching the posts enough to see the expertise and value associated with this forum.
I’ll give a lay of the land first and share my current situation.

I’ve been engineering for music and film for some time now, worked in a variety of studios. I’m working from my 2nd home studio at present and about to go into my 3rd in 6 weeks +.
Have had a lot of experience in setting up studios from the cables up but very little design or construction of control rooms.
But I’m very able to do the work & have all the suggested readings.

We are currently building a house (land package deal), It is primarily an investment in a residential estate, but we know we’ll be living there for at least 3 years. Single storey brick veneer on a slab.

It’s not the studio I want to build to last me my working days.
Other wise this would be a very different post.

Due to the nature of the construction process, I have only been able to arrange a few things in the build to make way for the studio.
I was able to remove the walls from the front bedrooms & study leaving a decent space to work in.
All the walls (inside & out) are insulated.
No flooring just a slab, got them to leave the skirting boards off.
Added solid core doors.
That was the limit of what I could modify from the model of the house we selected, couldn’t change anything else.

I will be using the room primarily for mastering music, then mixing both music and film in 5.1.
I will not be recording at all.
The suburb is surprisingly quiet, I don’t anticipate any external noise I can’t handle monitoring-wise.
I don’t monitor at excessive volumes so I don’t think I’ll be annoying anyone else either.

I currently have a budget of $10000, a lot less than what I was expecting 6 months ago.

When we move out of this new house the room will be returned into 2 bedrooms, a lounge & a study, and would prefer to make that transition as cheap and easy as possible.

My first thought was that I’d build a room in the room and all would be great.
After working in a lot of small control rooms and a few decent-sized ones I’m currently thinking of keeping the space as is and just treating it the same way I always have with home studio rooms, by dealing with it as best I can.

I totally understand that I have an opportunity to build a really nice Mastering/Post room here, but given the circumstances I think treating the room as is, is my best logistical option.

Below is the room, as I will be receiving it.
I plan on building removable clouds & traps of different types and as many as required.

I’d prefer to have a wooden floor, not sure what type yet.
I don’t want to work on a slab with rugs, been there.
I’m more concerned with how the floor will sound room-wise and walking-wise.
It is the only thing in the room that will be permanent.

To glue or not to glue …
I have had many conflicting opinions about this.
Keeping in mind I’ll be building walls on top of the floor in a few years time.
I’m leaning to a floating T&G not sure whether it’ll be Hardwoods, bamboo, laminates, budget depending.

Thinking of doubling up windows over the ones in place. I’m not concerned about blocking the lower glass off with traps.

Still deciding which type of diffusion and absorption will work best and where.
Again plan on constructing the treatment as much as possible while keeping it removable.

I plan on building Traps in the corners floor to ceiling, clouds wherever necessary, just deciding what type and how big.

Probably a large bookshelf on the rear wall.

I’ll leave it there for now,
Hopefully I’ve given the right information here and in the profile.
There will undoubtable be information I've not thought to add in.
Please ask for any other information I've failed to submit

I’d appreciate any input anyone is inclined to give.
This is how i'm seeing it so far in my head

Ok, no replies, did I miss some required information, or is it just nobody likes my post?

Please let me know what I should add to the post so i can get some feedback and thoughts going.

Soundworthy wrote:Ok, no replies, did I miss some required information, or is it just nobody likes my post?

as far as can tell you've ticked all the boxes apart from how much isolation you need in terms of db. Given that you're not recording, and monitoring at 'normal' levels then it shouldn't be an issue. You'll find that there's a few guys on here that really know what they're talking about, but they're probably answering 15 threads at once so might have overlooked you.

Soundworthy wrote:I currently have a budget of $10000

A realistic budget is always a good place to start and it sounds like you'll get there with 10k for the kind of treatment you're looking at.

Soundworthy wrote:I’m leaning to a floating T&G not sure whether it’ll be Hardwoods, bamboo, laminates, budget depending.

I'd be going with a floating laminate and running the boards the same way that the majority of your internal walls will be going when you build them in a few years. For the most part you'll be able to take out the boards (with a bit of mucking around) to put your walls on the slab. Any that are perpendicular to the boards will be a bit painfull, but some careful and accurate cutting with a circular saw adjusted to depth should get you there. You'll probably go through a couple of blades as you'll inevitably nick the concrete, but it's a small price to pay for having a nice floor in the studio while you're using it.

Soundworthy wrote:This is how i'm seeing it so far in my head

I reckon you've got the layout right in terms of orientation, speaker placement (although i know nothing about 5.1) and listening position. The traps all appear to be located right for a RFZ as long as you've got the ceiling above the listening positioned covered. So as long as you build the traps correctly it all looks pretty good to me.

The one thing that is setting off alarm bells for me is that the room appears to be almost square and the ceiling height is almost half the height of the square room. As far as I understand, that could cause you some problematic modal issues which will be very hard to treat effectively.

Soundworthy wrote:I totally understand that I have an opportunity to build a really nice Mastering/Post room here, but given the circumstances I think treating the room as is, is my best logistical option.

Yeah, that sounds like you're on the right track, especially if you're only there for a few years. Good luck and post a few pics up before you start building anything just to make sure we're all on the same page

Hi stevev,
Thanks very much for the post, muchly appreciated,
I expected to receive notification that the post had been responded but received nothing, I have only just checked it for the first time this morning since i put up the second post.

I'm at the stage of narrowing the trap designs, and getting a head full of different options.
For the rear walls/corners I'm looking at making large deep membrane bass traps using MLV combined with some front panel Diffusion/absorption combo
For the Front; corners will have fat full height absorption traps, not sure about the center section between the windows yet.

I used a modal calculator and it came out looking kind of ok, (from what my limited knowledge tells me).
although, I'm not sure how to calculate the for different widths and lengths.
The width changes from 6070 in the monitoring area to 6920 in the rear of the room. Same with the length, it changes from 7070 for half the width and 7400 for the other half.
So I’m not sure how to deal with that in the modal calculations.

Floor, I also decided to go with a laminate or engineers floor.
How does glued bamboo click lock sound to you?
For me, its very wearing and looks much better than the laminates i've seen around, the slab will be sealed with SikaMB and glued with Sikabond.
Others I’ve spoken to claim I’ll be very happy with it and all the materials come in under 3k & and I don’t have to pull it out in a few years, other than cutting into it when putting up the bedroom walls, which also I’ve been informed by the tradies that that’s a normal and easy thing to do, even thought its glued.

I’ve check out some floating laminate floors and I didn’t like the sound of them,
Maybe they were poorly installed but I’ve checked out some bamboo clicklock and I really liked the feel and solidness of the result after it was glued straight to the slab.

Still deciding on what is going in the ceiling as far as the types of absorption/diffusion will be employed.

Here some pic of the room how it will be given to me when we get access to the house.

I am also thinking of blocking of the bottom window panes with panels of some sort, maybe i could insert a membrane trap which might then work for sound coming in and out, perhaps. you can see the different widths here

Soundworthy wrote:The width changes from 6070 in the monitoring area to 6920 in the rear of the room. Same with the length, it changes from 7070 for half the width and 7400 for the other half.
So I’m not sure how to deal with that in the modal calculations.

I'm pretty sure that modal calculations go out the window once a room doesn't have parallel surfaces. There may be a way to work it out or at least get a reasonable idea, but it requires someone with a much beter understanding (and a very solid grasp of complex mathematics ) than myself.

Soundworthy wrote:How does glued bamboo click lock sound to you?

I've got floating click-lock bamboo floors in my studio and they're fantastic. Couldn't recommend the stuff highly enough. It's a 14mm thick product that I've used over a 2mm underlay. I'm not 100% sure about gluing a click-lock floor directly to concrete as it will expand and contract slightly with humidity changes, and glueing could cause problems. If the concrete surface has a variation of more than about 3mm it could also cause issues with gluing directly. The floor could also be pretty cold without any thermal barrier between the concrete and floor. I'd do a bit more research and get a few different opinions from some suppliers and contractors before you go ahead on that one.

Soundworthy wrote:I am also thinking of blocking of the bottom window panes with panels of some sort, maybe i could insert a membrane trap which might then work for sound coming in and out, perhaps.

Blocking off only part of the window won't do anything if you're trying to achieve any kind of isolation. You'd have to block off and seal (very carefully) every window to do that.

If you're just looking to use the bottem window cavity to put some absorbtion in then that'll work fine.

How long till they hand over the house/studio to you?

steve

Well, after a lot of walking on bamboo click lock, and talking to flooring professionals (real ones, not the franchise crews) they all recommended gluing the bamboo.
I just can't stand the sound it makes when you walk on it and the possibility of it resonating to the speakers wasn't one i wished to chance.
They said that the boards will still expand and the glue will expand with it as its rubbery when it sets.

So we went ahead and did just that and its AWESOME (so far).
We used Sika Moisture Barrier, 2 coats, then Sika Bond.
spent two days carefully cutting, gluing and hurting.

We get full hand over next week, but we were allowed to go in and do the floor.
I'll put a better photo up when i take my good camera but this is how it turned out.

Looking for seals for doors at present

Looking for seals for doors at present

Try Zero International. Google them for their web site.

- Stuart -

looking good

out of curiosity, how thick is the flooring and what company supplied it?


steve