Surely there are a lot of other studios who make great music from square rooms.
Not ones that I'm aware of!
There might be some, but the amount of treatment you'd need to make it usable is rather large: The issues is "modal response". All rooms have a set of frequencies at which they resonate naturally, and that "set of frequencies" is set by the relationship between the dimensions. Those resonant frequencies are called "modes" in acoustics, and each mode is related to a specific dimension of the room, or a set of dimensions. If you happen to play a note that coincides with one of those modes, then the room itself will multiply and amplify that note, so it sounds a lot louder than the notes on either side. Not only does it sounds louder, but since modes are resonances, after you stop playing that note, the room carries on playing it for you for an extended time, as the resonance slowly decays.
If you have
two dimensions that are the same, then all the modes related to one of those dimensions will occur at te exact same frequencies as all the modes related to the other dimension. In other words, the note now sounds TWICE as loud, and rings longer. So the problem is multiplied when dimensions are the same. The worst case is a cube room, but second worst is a square room. Professional studios only use rectangular rooms, where all three dimensions are unrelated by simply multiples.
What this means is that the room lies to you. What you here in the room is NOT what the music actually sounds like. Your speakers produce the music, but the room adds it's own "coloration" to that, by modifying some frequency response and time response, and not modifying others. And of course, as you mix your songs, you will try to compensate for that by changing EQ curves, dynamics, and reverb effects until it all sounds nice in your room. But that's the problem; You have now added stuff to the mix that is only needed in YOUR room: no other room on the planet needs that compensation, so your mix sounds lousy anywhere else you play it. This is called poor "translation". Your mixes do not translate to other places. So when you play it in your car, living room, club, iPhone ear buds, out in the open, or any other place on earth, it just does not sound good, and you can't quite put your finger on what the problem is. You notice that it is not the same as it was in your room, but you don't know why. The reason is simply this: your room is coloring the sound.
The solution is to design a control room that does NOT color the sound. The room itself must be neutral in both frequency response and also time domain response. It must "tell the truth". Exactly what comes out of your speakers is what must get to your ears, without the room adding to that or taking away from it. You cannot achieve that in a room that has large modal peaks and dips. That's the problem.
Organizations such as the ITU, EBU, AES, Dolby, and others have figured out what it takes for a room to be considered "neutral" and usable as a control room. They have published those specifications in various papers over the years, so there is good documentation on what you should be aiming for if you want your room to be usable as a control room. One of the specs is that no two dimensions of the room should be the same, and in fact each dimensions should be at least 5% different from any other dimension. There are several other specs related to the relationship between dimensions, which are commonly called "room ratios".
Over the years many scientists have done research on room ratios, and produced papers that show what the best and worst ratios are. They all agree: rooms where two dimensions are the same, or close, are bad, because the modes all line up. Rooms where the modes are spread around evenly across the spectrum are good, because no single note is favored above any other.
That's why you wont ever see a high-end professional control room where two of the dimensions are the same.
Yes, it is possible to install acoustic treatment in a room to reduce modal reverberance and smooth things out a bit, but since the largest modal problems are always in the lowest frequencies (below about 200 Hz), where wavelengths are very large (many feet long), the treatment that you need also has to be very large (many feet deep) for maximum effect. In small rooms, there just isn't enough physical space inside the room to fit in the treatment that is needed. So small rooms with bad ratios CANNOT be fixed. Which is why professional studios are never built that way.
All of the above applies to control rooms, but not to live rooms. For a live room, it doesn't matter so much: live rooms are supposed to have "character" and "vibe" and "style" and their own "signature" sound, so if part of that comes from modal issues, that's fine. Musicians can compensated if needed as they play, and the mix engineer can also compensate if needed... provided that his room is telling him the truth! If not, then there's a double problem! Firstly,k he is compensating for problems that are not actually there, because his room is adding them, and secondly he is NOT compensating for the problems that really ARE there, because he can't hear them! The room response is "masking" them from him. So his mix sounds bad in two different ways, and will never translate well, no matter how much he tries.
--
These are the reasons why I suggest that you should switch around the purposes of your room: make the smaller room that is not square your control room, and make the larger room that is square, your live room. That allows you to fix both sets of problems at once, very easily, at now cost. You simply re-purpose the rooms. Your control room is the critical room in any studio, so give it the best room you have that is most suitable for a control room. The live room is less critical, but acoustic instruments always sound better in rooms that are bigger (more space, more "air", more cubic volume), so give that your biggest room, with the most volume.
Is there a reason why you don't want to do that?
It is the easiest, best, simplest, cheapest fix that you have on hand. If you insist on keeping the current layout (CR in the large square room, LR int he small rectangular room) , then be prepared for some major treatment expenses and complexity. It will take up a lot of space on all of the walls, as well as the ceiling, leaving very little usable space inside. If you are OK with that, and have the extra budget to handle it, then there's no problem. But if money is tight, and you want spacious rooms that both look good and sound good, then I'd suggest that you flip the purpose of the rooms.
Is there anything I can do to to make that space work? Could I move a wall back a metre? Or angled walls/splayed walls?
Yes you could, but that all adds complexity to the build, increases your costs, slows things down, and might also bring structural issues into the equation: the wall you want to move, angle or splay might be a load-bearing wall, or important structurally in other ways: you can't just move walls around without first getting a qualified structural engineer to do a study and provide his written recommendations. Which implies even more cost, more complexity, more delays...
The isolation for the LR is to keep the sound contained in the room when recording drums.
Yes, no problem, but you are missing the point that the CR is part of your isolation! You can't isolate the LR by itself without also taking the CR isolation into account. When you build an "isolation wall", it has two sides to it, or two "leaves": the" inner leaf", which is the one facing the room in question, and the "outer leaf", which is the other side of that wall: They work together as a tuned system to provide your isolation. However, switch your point of view around here, and you'll see that what we called the "outer leaf" of your live room is in fact also the "inner leaf" of your control room... See where this is going? The two leaves work together, so the CR side of that wall needs to be built correctly to provide the isolation that the LR needs.
In other words, all parts of your studio are a system, and doing one part wrong affects the while system, not just the part it is directly associated with.
The CR is right next to it, so I'm looking for as much isolation,
Refer to the above paragraph, to see why this is a problem...
We are building a 2 leaf system. I have removed the other layer of plasterboard from the existing walls and will be installing 2 layers of plasterboard to the outer sides of the walls.
It sounds to me like you are isolating ONLY the LR, and are not attempting to isolate the CR at all. If the CR is simply the original room, exactly as it always was, then, with no modifications, then all you will get there is the same isolation that any room in your house provides, which is likely about 30 dB.
The original ceiling has been caulked with green glue and there is MDF board over the top to seal sound leakage. The new ceiling will be erected under the original ceiling with two layers of plasterboard.
... which would create a three-leaf system! You have your new ceiling, your existing ceiling, and beyond that either the roof or the floor of the room above. That's three leaves. I'm not sure if you are aware that a 3-leaf system produces worse isolation than the equivalent 2-leaf system?
Those monitors are my main monitors, although those pictures are a bit old and I've been using some Adam a7x's
A7X's are pretty good. I have a set of those myself, and I have used those in several rooms that I have designed, so that would be a good choice. What are the other ones you have there? It's hard to figure out from the photos.
They're on the meter bridge. Where would you suggest I put my monitors? Or best way to mount them?
The very best option is to flush mount them( also called "soffit mount") in angled sections of the front wall of the room. In effect, that removes the monitors from the room, acoustically, thus eliminating many of the artifacts associated with having a monitor close walls. That's the most recommendable option, and in my opinion the single most important thing you can do to a room to make it sound great. If you can't do that for whatever reason, then the second best option is to put your speakers on stands behind the console or desk, up against the front wall. (Actually, that's the third best option, but your room is not large enough for the second best, so I won't even waste your time describing it). The stands must be massively heavy. Some people stack up bricks, others use hollow metal stands and fill them with sand. Others build their stands from concrete, or huge chunks of wood, stone, or even thick glass. The main point is that it has to be very heavy, and of the correct height to position the acoustic axis of the speaker in the correct location.
The forth best option is... well, there is no forth best option! The above three are the only real options for setting up speakers in a studio. Many people assume that because they see photos of studios with speaker on the meter bridge, then that must be the right way to do it. What they don't realize is that those are not the main monitors: those are the lower quality monitors, similar to typical home "bookshelf speakers" positioned badly on purpose to sound like a typical domestic setup, so that the mix engineer can get an idea of what the mix will sound like on typical consumer grade speakers installed in a typical living room... They are meant to CHECK the mix on, not to DO the mix on. The soffit-mounted mains are there to do the mix on, because they tell the truth as accurately as possible, thus allowing your mix to translate well... provided that the room is working along with the speakers, not fighting against them because of a poor room ratio, poor layout, poor geometry, or poor treatment!
By the way, there still the issue I highlighted in my first response: Please read the
forum rules for posting (click here). You seem to be missing a rather important item. It's the one in big blue letters, about half way down the page...
- Stuart -
It's SQUARE? Ooops... That is going to need fixing.
Then it's probably a good time to stop, so you don't have to tear down too much to fix it...