I should add that Frank has built this place from the ground up, and done the majority of the work himself, which is pretty amazing. To get some perspective on what he's accomplished so far, here's a view of the partly completed studio, at various stages of construction, starting with the rough outer-leaf framing and up to the currently finished Live Room:
Frank--20150311_111935-Framing-03.jpg
Frank--20150319_163944-Roof-trusses-in.jpg
Frank-20150320_190203-Sheathing-on.jpg
Frank-20150612_092931-EXTERIOR-01-SML.png
Frank--LR-to-CR--walls-done--ceiling-not.jpg
Frank--20170802_083916.jpg
Frank is getting better than 50 dB of isolation to the outside world at present, which is very respectable. He could have gotten a bit more than that if he would have used non-operable windows, but he really wanted the option of being able to open the windows, and didn't mind sacrificing a few dB to get that. The original design was for 55 dB, so achieving more than 50 dB with opening windows is pretty darn good!
Congratulations, Frank, on what you have done so far!
Now Frank is at the stage of completing the CR, and treating it, and tuning it. We just did the first acoustic "baseline" test of the CR with the speakers in place but no treatment at all, and it's already looking quite nice. Frank suggested that we start posting images and descriptions on the forum for others to learn from, and I love the idea! It's not often that a client wants to do that, since it's his money, his investment, and his design (since he paid for it!), so I'm grateful for Franks generosity in wanting to share this with the forum.
Hopefully it will be interesting and useful for forum members to watch the Control Room treatment and tuning process as we work through it. It will take quite a few weeks still, of course, since Frank only has one pair of hands, and needs to eat and sleep every now and then...
Plus he still has to work, so he can make more money to buy the stuff to finish the place! So if you are interested in seeing how this works out, check in to this thread regularly.
We'll try to show as much of the process as we can, warts and all, so forum members can get a good handle on how to do it themselves for their own rooms. However, there's a couple of things that we won't be going into full detail about: one is my proprietary "fully floated" mounting system for the speakers (which is something that I'm not prepared to share with the world, and is carefully tuned for each room and each speaker individually anyway), and the other is the final digital tuning process (probably a couple of months away still).
I'll explain why we wont be going into detail of how that digital tuning works, when we get there, but basically its because: "Kids, don't try this at home! You might hurt yourself!"
It's a complicated precision process that requires certain acoustic prerequisites that are just too complex to explain in enough detail that anybody can do it, and doing it wrong without understanding what is going on will lead to
worse performance, not better (even though you might think you made it better if you look at the wrong things...) So Frank and I agreed that it's not a good idea to try to show how that is done, as people would just try to copy it without any true understanding of what they are doing, and end up with a room that sounds ugly, even though some of the squiggles on the graph say it should sound good. We'll show the "before" and "after" graphs, so you can get an idea of what it does, but not the in-between details.
This process is sometimes incorrectly called "room correction", and it's one of my pet peeves. There is no such thing as "room correction" in reality, despite the marketing hype! I call it "digital tuning", which I think is a more accurate description. More details when we get to that point. But that's one of the reasons why I wont share that part: You MUST get the acoustic treatment maxed out to the limit first, BEFORE you can successfully use digital tuning. Trying to do this without having the acoustic treatment perfect is a recipe for disaster. For an example of how it can turn out in a large room taken to the absolute limit, take a look here:
http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... =2&t=20471
I did also want to mention that this is an usual control room design, called a "corner control room", since it is set on the diagonal across the room, rather than facing one of the walls. We decided to go with this design right form the start of Frank's project, because as he mentioned, he wanted the largest possible live room that we could fit on the size slab he was permitted to build in his area, and the corner control room allowed for that. So this is an interesting and challenging room to treat: there will be some strange and unconventional stuff going on here....
Anyway, stay tuned:
We'll be updating this thread each time there's an interesting advance. Bookmark it, and make sure you check the "Notify me when a reply is posted" box if you add a comment or question, so that you'll automatically get notified of updates.
- Stuart -
