John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hello Everyone,

First post. Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

In the next year or so I'll be buying a house. My goal right now is to land one with a large, unfinished concrete basement with at least a 9 foot ceiling. The dream is to build it into a two room studio (control and tracking). Also, a small gear storage and machine area.

I'm looking to:

1. Create a tracking room that doubles as a great sounding jam area for having friends over (fitting 5-6 people in there comfortably)
2. Create a control room big/shapely enough to mitigate common reflection/bass issues and offer solid audio representation during mixing

I'm aware I'll have to make some compromises (once I have a place to work with). My question for members are, at the onset, would there be "minimum size" room dimensions for making the two-room studio work effectively? I'm sure, as heights and widths decrease, there's a point where it just wouldn't sound good to have two rooms built.

In thinking about this, assume I have unlimited budget for things like isolation/HVAC/etc. I'd just like to know rough limits while I'm out looking (or useful things to look for). I'm a novice to the engineering involved in studio construction (currently reading Rod's book) and appreciate any helpful ideas or perspectives. Thank you all!

Bob

Hi Bob, and Welcome!

assume I have unlimited budget

Oh yeah! Now THAT'S the right way to think about building a home studio!

OK, assuming you have unlimited budget,you would definitely want a control room that fully complies with ITU BS.1116-2 in all aspects. That's probably the most widely accepted specification for a world-class critical listening room, which is basically what a control room is. Here's an example of a room that meets the spec:

http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... =2&t=20471

Assuming you are just doing stereo (2.0 or 2.1), and not doing multi-channel (eg,5.1, 7.1, etc), then according to that spec, you'd need a minimum floor area for your control room of 20m2, and maximum of 60m2. In imperial units, that would be 215 ft2 to 645 ft2:

Call it 200 ft2 to 650 ft2, for simplicity.

You would also want a room volume of at least 1500 cubic feet (42.5 m3), and you'd want to hit one of the top 5 room ratios. I'd suggest Sepmeyer 2 or Sepmeyer 3 for that. Sepmeyer 1 is better, but you need more length and width to get the floor area, as your ceiling is low at only 9'

But money is no object, so assume that your inner-leaf ceiling can be 10 feet: A room measuring 15'6" long, 12'11" wide and 10" would hit Sepmeyer 2 spot on, would have 200 ft of floor area, and a room volume of 2000 ft3. Perfect! The Bonello curve for that room is very smooth, and it passes all three critical BBC tests.

OK, so that would be your ideal optimum control room, assuming money is no object.

Now for the live room, also assuming money is no object. General rule of thumb says that the volume of the live room should be about 5 times the volume of the CR, so we'd need about 10,000 cubic feet of volume in your LR. Assuming that you can get wonderfully high ceilings at say 16 feet, you could shoot for a floor area of about 650 ft2, so you'd want a room about 33 feet long by about 20 wide and 16 high.

For isolation, allow an extra foot on all sides:

LR = 35x22 = 770 ft2
CR = 17x14 = 238 ft

So your optimum basement to fit all that in would need to be at least a thousand square feet, and it would need 17 feet of clearance (slab to underside of joists).

With that, you could indeed build a world-class studio that meets or exceeds all specs, including BS.1116-2.

Realistically, that would cost you somewhere around US$ 120,000 to build (assuming a cost of US$ 120 / square foot, which is a reasonable "rule of thumb" assumption for such a studio)

(Well you DID say that money was no object.... !)

Of course, that's for the ideal, perfect studio in the ideal, perfect basement: but to be very honest, you don't need to go that far to get a really great sounding studio! At the other end of the scale, John has designed and built entire studios that fit inside a single shipping container, with excellent results (Search for the "Spark One" thread on the forum). I've done quite few in spaces that are much smaller than "ideal", and for somewhat less money... Not as small as a shipping container, but still small: For example, I did a four-room studio in a basement in Canada, in an area of only 450 ft2, total. That includes a CR, a drum booth, a vocal booth, and a LR. Tiny, low ceilings, but workable, and very usable sound.

So that's the bottom line: 120 grand will get you an amazing world-class studio provided that you have a cavernous basement with ridiculously high ceilings. For less money, in less space, with realistic ceiling height , you can still get a great studio.

I'd just like to know rough limits while I'm out looking (or useful things to look for).

Hopefully I've given you that: The top-end "spare no expense" option, and the "really tight squeeze" option.

- Stuart -

Stuart,

Amazing reply. I applaud you for taking full advantage of my "unlimited budget" clause.

I appreciate your description of the smallest "perfect dimension" studio (given my rough parameters). It's also VERY reassuring that you can get good/usable sound from a shipping container. No doubt, my studio will end up falling somewhere in the middle of this continuum...and I'm sure the sound will be just fine.

It will be fun to revisit when I have more information and can begin planning. Thank you!

Bob

I'm looking forward to seeing that, Bob!

In case you are interested, here's links to the container studio:

http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... =11&t=4168

http://johnlsayers.com/Pages/Spark_1.htm

http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... 11&t=11752

On one of those there's a sample recording that was done in the studio, which is pretty breathtaking. Tracking vocals like that usually needs a much bigger room to sound so exceptional.

I'm not saying you should build in a container! Just pointing out that studios do not always need to be "perfectly sized" to be excellent. Bigger is always better, of course, but smaller does not have to be bad, ... especially if you have John as your designer!


- Stuart -