Been following this board for a couple of months now and also have been reading as much as I can from this book lately:
"Recording Studio design" by Philip Newell. Just want to say how grateful I am that you guys have posted such a wealth of information and help up here. I have already made sure to donate to help keep this resource alive and kicking.
I am a Producer / Mix engineer in the design phase of adding acoustic treatment to an already built sound proof room. My move in date for the new space is Nov 15th, 2016. So I currently do not have direct access to the location as we speak (I will be taking REW measurements when they give me the keys). Till then I am trying to create a game plan and assess what I will need to build in order to make the place usable. I have bounced around a lot and have been working out of bedrooms covered in Owens corning 703 for over 8 years, so this is my first permanent location dedicated to only to music.
The space is pretty rough but it would be nice to try to make it as accurate as it is physically capable of. My top priority for this room is getting it to sound right (or not awful at least
), I'm aware that I will be giving up a lot of real estate to treatment, and I am not concerned if it looks cool (bonus if it does). It will be my own personal work space, not really taking clients here, and my own gear setup is lean at this point. (1 Computer, 1 rolling rack of gear) Instruments: (Midi Keyboard, Electric drum kit). Any real tracking would be done at a full scale studio.Loudness
I generally Mix between 78 db - 83db C weighted. Occasionally turning it up further to see how it feels loud. I also I work with a lot of electronic music, so dealing with a lot of beefy low ended tracks. The one good news about this space is that there is no loudness restriction. The room is located in a "Studio Factory" which are pretty common here in Brooklyn. Essentially a warehouse filled with poorly constructed "soundproofed" rooms all running next to each other. Its in an industrial zone, so no problems with cranky neighbors and no hourly restriction on when I can work and make noise. I will have to occasionally deal with neighboring studio room noise, but fortunately I am a night owl and will usually be there working when the place is empty.
The Room
Trying to find any sort of space to rent here in nyc is utterly soul crushing. Unless you got some serious coin to blow the options are pretty grim. With the high cost of living and astronomical apartment rent, there was only so much wiggle room I had. So this was the least s**t option available in my budget. A lot of other music spaces kept band rehearsal rooms next to the studio rooms. Fortunately the owner of this space had enough foresight to keep all the production/mixing people in their own separate wing which is nice.
The Dimension of the space is exactly 131"x107"x94"inches (roughly 11'x9'x8 feet) which is at least not a pure cube or evenly divisible lengths and widths etc. But it is VERY SMALL.
(Note: This is my first time using sketchup so please forgive me if some of the angles of the panels and speakers are a little lumpy. I have made sure to make sure the dimensions and proportions of things are accurate though.)
Construction
According to the owner the rooms are double 5/8 drywall on both sides of the wall with independent frames not touching adjacent rooms. I believe there is also some sort of fiberglass/rockwool in between the walls. Unfortunately they were sloppy in terms of hermetically sealing the room. All the electric sockets and the "AC duct" (discussed later) are all not properly sealed. As for the door there is no air lock, just one single heavy metal door with a layer of mdf or hdf screwed on to it to make it heavier. There is rubber trimming around the door which seals some what competently. I am on the first level, and the floor is a solid concrete slab. As of now there is some carpet and auralex garbage on the wall which I have requested both to be removed. So when I move in all walls will be blank and concrete will be exposed.
Irregularities
All surfaces are parallel, the room is a rectangle. There are only two irregularities to consider. 1) A fire sprinkler on the ceiling which must remain exposed. 2) the two air duct tubes feeding a portable air conditioner located in my far corner, this is my ventilation and climate control. Yes, that does mean I will have to chose between air/ sweating my balls off, and silence. ( I can tell you are getting jealous of this lavish lifestyle I live)
this to me was a big disappointment as I had planned originally to put super chunks there and this makes it impossible. Its located in what would be the front corner behind my left speaker. It consist of two 10"ish wide air conditioning tubes, which feed into my AC exhaust hoses. Here are some photos showing how much space they take up
The room has no windows or pipes sticking out. The only other slight difficulty is that the door is located in the back right corner of the room. However I plan to make moveable super chunks to fix this issue. I can just slide them in place when I enter the room and start working.
Isolation from the street
In terms of Isolation from the outside road I would rate it good. The room is located inside a brick building and my room walls are about 20 ft away from the external brick walls, so not much of an issue there.
Please let me know if I am missing any other important construction details.
Monitors
I am currently using Dynaudio Bm15a's. I do have DIY cinder block stands I made a few years back. However the stands are double wide because at the time I was using two sets of monitors. Now I only use one.
The acoustic axis is 43.7inch/ 111 cm. Slightly low but my chair goes down fine and it keeps me out of the 50% line between floor and ceiling. Just so you know this is just something I already have. I am no by no means attached to it, and if it makes sense to make something else I am totally fine with that.
Furniture / Gear
In terms of furniture I am extremely minimalist. My setup has always been just monitors, a comfy office chair. No desk. Just a laptop stand which will either hold a laptop, or wireless keyboard mouse combo connected to a tower unit. If I am producing or composing a midi keyboard will be taken out and put on a keyboard stand to one of my sides. In this room these are my main tools. I also have an electronic drum kit. But its pretty compact and can fold itself to have a small footprint about 3.0" feet across.
I mix in the box with a Neve mastering compressor strapped across the master bus for some flavor. The Neve lives in a rolling rack with a few pre's.
These are really the only things I need to fit in this room. No couch, no hangout area. My apartment is not far, if I need to chill I can go home. This is a work space.
Acoustic Panels
Here is a list of panels which I have collected/built over time. Also included in the list are a few I am possibly planning to build. Once again this is just an inventory of what I already have. I am also very open to not using or taking apart and re purposing any of them if it makes sense for the room. (note: Both the blue corner traps and the yellow super chunks are not built yet, every thing else I already own)
The Layout
This layout is not written in stone at all, it was just me trying to get a feel for the room using what I already have with my current understanding. I tried to take SoundMan's advice and focus my resources on the rear wall and in the corners.
Top View:
The circle in the middle is my 38% of the room length zone mix position. Obv I will have to move around and listen where is best. In reality I will be sitting there with a small laptop stand or midi keyboard. I have tried to place the monitors as far back as possible on the front wall. In terms of centering and angling the monitors I am still struggling to get it symmetrical in sketchup. If you look to the front left corner you can see the two ducts as circles. In order to get some corner coverage around the A/C ducts I am going to have to straddle the corner with traps that are 36" long 24" high 4" wide. It will take 4 stacked on top of each other from floor to ceiling. My current idea is to put duct holes in the corner traps to run the A/C exhaust into the pipes. (more detailed images later). To the left of the mix position is the air conditioner unit.
Rear Wall
I'm not sure if I am wasting resources doing this but I have focused the heaviest panels I have on the rear wall. From what I have read on this forum and in Philip Newell's book, it requires a crap ton of fiberglass to absorb bass. The rear wall being most critical. Correct me if I'm wrong but even this is not enough to get to the really low stuff. I have lined my corners with moveable superchunks. In addition my ceiling corner will be lined with GIK tri-traps (more or less a super chunk) and my floor corner with another tri-trap. On the acual wall I planed to use the GIK Monster trap (more or less feels like a OC 703 trap 6" thick") with a 4" air gap. In front of that I have my own DIY panels on stands. They are 8" OC 703. Because these are on stands I can move them any distance from the wall.
Front Wall:
In the front wall I have the speakers pushed all the way to the wall with 4" oc703 panels behind them to try to help a little with SBIR. Ideally I would have loved super chunks in the corner but that's not happening with the AC duct. So instead as described before I am thinking about straddling the corners with 4" 703/ or rockwool filled panels. Whats annoying is the standard 2foot wide straddle is not enough for the ac ducts so it will require 36" length panels. That wastes 1ft of material per panel being I will have to cut a foot of each 48" long slab of fiberglass leaving me 8 feet of 4" fiberglass leftover.
in the 36" long corner panel I plan to put duct holes in them for the a/c. The sketchup is rough but the idea is clear.
......---> continue
Ouch! Those things are NOISY! You might want to consider building an isolation box for it, to keep it quiet, with built-in silencer for the air to circulate through it. It would have to be quite large, and the isolation won't be perfect, but at least it would allow you to use that AC unit most of the time.
Thanks for the kind words! The graphs on that page are actually not the final graphs: we carried on tuning a bit more after that post, and it got even better... 