John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

I have a rather large space in Tulsa, Oklahoma that I and a partner are looking at.

Right now it is a large building which we can divide up and use as we need. It is much, much larger than what we would effectively use. We are looking at using somewhere between 5,000- and 6,000 square feet. The space is on the bottom floor. The building has two floor for most of the length of the building, however, the area of the building at which we are looking does not have an upper floor, the upper floor ends at about the area where we would start using for a studio space.

We would like to build out a multi room facility (multiple control rooms, one probably larger than the other, and with a large live room, drum booth, piano room, and iso booth; the smaller control room might have one or two smaller booths). We would also like to build a couple of small editing/mixing rooms to be used for students and smaller mixing jobs that don't need or can't afford the larger rooms. And a couple of general use offices for administrative tasks, restrooms, etc...

My biggest concern is that this building is approximately 400 feet from a general use freight railway, multiple tracks. Most of that 450 feet is occupied by an open parking lot, and the building is across the street from the lot. The rail way is sunk down some number of feet below the grade of the parking lot and potential studio space.

What steps are necessary to effectively isolate a space from the super low end frequencies of train noise? Would we need to actually consider building a floating floor (yes, there I used the FF-word!)?

I've attached a Google Maps image of the location of the building and the railway.

Hi there JC! Good to see you around still! Haven't seen you for a couple of months.

Do you have any idea about how bad the noise / vibration might be? It would be good to get out there with a sound level meter when there's a lot of train traffic going on and do plenty of measurements, and also take a stethoscope to listen to the slab and see if you are getting any train vibrations through the ground. Vibration can be just as much of a problem as airborne sound.

I'd also be curious about all those streets around the lot: is that an industrial area? Large trucks? Buses? Lots of cars? That might be a concern too. (Welll, answering my own question: "Parking lots" = "Lots of cars"... duh! )

If you do have a problem, and it is bad enough to potentially effect your studio, then probably your best bet would, indeed, be to go one better than "FF" and actually "FR" ! (Float the Rooms). It'sm just like floating the floor, but heavier since you have the entire room sitting on top of the floated floor. From some point0s of view, it's easier than floating just the floor, because you have a whole lot more mass going on in the "floated" bit. That's a good thing.

Do you have the budget to do that? I guess if you are considering a 6000 square foot facility, then you have some pretty good financing in place, or accessible?

But I'd start out by getting some objective numbers on how bad the problem might be. If you can get a spectrum analyzer too, that would be great. There are a couple of sound level meters that do that, but they are a bit pricey. Personally, I have a Phonic PAA3 for that type of measurement. That's about the least expensive one I know of, and it costs around US$ 500, but it does a pretty good job. It gives you the SPL reading, of course, but it also gives you individual readings for 30 different bands across the spectrum in the form of a bar graph, so you can get a really good idea of which frequencies are contributing most to the total SPL. Get one of those if you can, or something similar.

I gotta tell ya, I'm really looking forward to seeing this place come together! Sounds like a really nice project to get your teeth into, with some interesting challenges!


- Stuart -

Soundman2020 wrote:Hi there JC! Good to see you around still! Haven't seen you for a couple of months.

I've been busy working on some other freelance projects, and designing some barbecue smokers as a side project (figuring out how to draw hollow 3-dimensial cylinders with hollow 3-dimensional domes in Sketchup was a b!tch). But still looking for a proper studio space. This project is one of those.

Do you have any idea about how bad the noise / vibration might be? It would be good to get out there with a sound level meter when there's a lot of train traffic going on and do plenty of measurements, and also take a stethoscope to listen to the slab and see if you are getting any train vibrations through the ground. Vibration can be just as much of a problem as airborne sound.

I'd also be curious about all those streets around the lot: is that an industrial area? Large trucks? Buses? Lots of cars? That might be a concern too. (Welll, answering my own question: "Parking lots" = "Lots of cars"... duh! )

I do need to get out there and do some real measurements. I hadn't thought about the stethoscope idea. I'll have to add that to my list of tools (and maybe a white lab coat too, it would look very "mad scientist"). But, the vibration noise would be my biggest concern. There's not a ton of heavy traffic, as in highway traffic, the highway is another 1/4 mile to the north of this location. But the other traffic noise is a concern, as well as the rail way. But, it's not a heavy industrial area; but more of a burgeoning arts district.

If you do have a problem, and it is bad enough to potentially effect your studio, then probably your best bet would, indeed, be to go one better than "FF" and actually "FR" ! (Float the Rooms). It'sm just like floating the floor, but heavier since you have the entire room sitting on top of the floated floor. From some points of view, it's easier than floating just the floor, because you have a whole lot more mass going on in the "floated" bit. That's a good thing.

Do you have the budget to do that? I guess if you are considering a 6000 square foot facility, then you have some pretty good financing in place, or accessible?

We don't have any budget yet, but if this project goes forward then we will secure the financing or investment to do it right.

But I'd start out by getting some objective numbers on how bad the problem might be. If you can get a spectrum analyzer too, that would be great. There are a couple of sound level meters that do that, but they are a bit pricey. Personally, I have a Phonic PAA3 for that type of measurement. That's about the least expensive one I know of, and it costs around US$ 500, but it does a pretty good job. It gives you the SPL reading, of course, but it also gives you individual readings for 30 different bands across the spectrum in the form of a bar graph, so you can get a really good idea of which frequencies are contributing most to the total SPL. Get one of those if you can, or something similar.

I have a pair of the dBX RTA-M measurment mics, and have access to a pair of Earthworks M30 measurement mics and Smaart. Also have a Galaxy CM160 dB meter. How do you go about measuring the noise coming through vibrations?

I gotta tell ya, I'm really looking forward to seeing this place come together! Sounds like a really nice project to get your teeth into, with some interesting challenges!

If this project goes forward, you'll be hearing a lot more about it. Though I'm not sure that I am up to the task of designing and overseeing the build out on a commercial space this big, so we might have to hire someone

This building is located in a newly developed arts district here in town. There's a bunch of hipster coffee shops and restaurants, museums, and some performance venues, including an outdoor amphitheater type venue katty-corner to the building in question, to the upper left in the picture. The building itself is being developed as a sort of "artist" residency compound, with studio apartments and work spaces for lots of different types of visual and performing artists. Our goal is to get a full time commercial space up and running in Tulsa, and to also provide for some educational opportunities for high school and college students and other up and coming artists and engineers.

I have a pdf of the floor plan and a Sketchup model that the architect for the building sent me that I am trying to clean up (apparently architects don't use groups in their 3D models).

As much as we like the idea of locating here, with the other artists, we may have to look for a more suitable location with less traffic and rail way noise.

Here is a screen shot of the pdf which shows the proposed layout of the end of the building we are looking at. All of the interior walls are imaginary and just for reference. We would be able to build out in whatever configuration we need, in whatever amount of space suits us (and which we can afford).

The bulk of the space is approximately 48; wide, by 86' long, which is the side with the inset doors on the bottom of the picture and then from there up to the yellow area which is entrances for the rest of the building. There are structural supports along the right hand side, and I was planning to put some offices, or small mixing labs in between those posts.

The Sketchup model that I got from the architect shows the interior ceiling height at about 12' 8" to the bottom of the lowest red iron beam, and 16' 8" to the top of the upper red iron beam. Not sure yet where the bottom of the concrete ceiling slab is. When I was in the building last week, it looked like about 14' ceilings.