I am trying to figure out how much space I should set aside with the designer for a control room.
There are a few documents that lay out the exact technical specifications that you need for a "critical listening room", which is what a control room is. One of those is ITU BS.1116-3 Google it, and download it. Skip the fist six chapters as they are not applicable, but there's a few chapters on the room itself, the layout, and the acoustic response that is absolutely needed for a control room. Pages 12 to 22 should have you covered. One of those specs is the floor area. The minimum area recommended is 20m2 for a stereo room, or 30m2 for a multi.channel room (5.1, 7.1, etc.). That works out to roughly 215 ft for stereo, and 320 ft2 for multi-channel. In both cases, the maximum area is 60m2 (around 650 ft2). Of course, this does not mean that a room of only 214 ft2 will be terrible, while 216 will be amazing!! It just means that there's an optimal size, and smaller rooms will require more treatment to get good results. I have designed rooms from around 120 ft (!
) to around 500 ft2, and it seems to me that the best results are in the region 180 ft2 to around 300 ft2.
There's also the issue of height and room volume, which go together: the general rule of thumb is that you want at least 40m3 of room volume (aprox. 1400 ft3), a tthe bare minimum. A 180 ft2 room with a 7 foot ceiling wold be lousy, even though the floor area is fine. A 220 ft2 room with a 10 foot ceiling is 2,200 ft3, which is great. The specs for critical listening rooms don't actually specify the height, but the decay times are all indexed to a hypothetical room that has a volume of 100 m3. Think of a room measuring 295 ft2 with a 12 foot ceiling, and that's the reference volume. Or 320 ft2 with an 11 foot ceiling. Or 350 ft2 with a 10 foot ceiling.
We are working with 10 foot ceiling.
That's the final finished ceiling height, right? In other words, inside the completed inner-leaf, after all the isolation has been completed, but before treatment?
What is the smallest recommended width and length for 8 inch speakers
Speakers are mostly irrelevant in choosing the size of the room: They are important when deciding on the layout, geometry, and treatment of the room, yes, but don't have much influence on the size of the room. In fact, if you check the document I linked you too, there's no reference at all to the size of the speaker: only to the frequency response and directional characteristics (on axis, +/-3db, 40 Hz to 16 kHz, pairs matched to within +/-1 dB, 250 Hz to 2 kHz, etc), as well as distortion, transient response, dynamic range, etc. But nothing at all about size. Pretty much any good quality studio reference monitor will work.
- All the finishing will be dry wall. Standard in Canada. No brick or concrete. This means we can be creative with wall angles.
For a control room, the best strategy is usually a purely rectangular room, with angled surfaces as needed by the design concept you use. Eg, if you go with an RFZ style room (highly recommended!) then you would need to angle some surfaces at the front of the room, but not necessarily the walls themselves.
Also, have you considered building your room "inside-out"? There are advantages to that....
- Here is a link to the speakers I will be using.
Nice! I have used the 8050 (and some of its siblings) in a couple of rooms, with good results. So I'm guessing you wont be using a sub? With those things, you don't really need a sub (unless you want to mix earthquakes and canon fire...).
Thank you for your help in advance. I am simply looking for basic acceptable measurements so I can decide where this room will fit in the design plans.
Use one of these Room Ratio calculators to figure out the best dimensions for your room:
http://www.bobgolds.com/Mode/RoomModes.htm
http://amroc.andymel.eu/
Both of those are very good, and will help you to decide how best to build your room. They give you tons of information that is really useful to help figure out the best dimensions. But basically, you should worry about maximizing the room volume while getting the smoothest modal spread.
However, designing a high-quality control room is a lot more than just getting the right-sized room and putting great speakers in it!
I would suggest that, in addition to choosing the room size and dimensions, also consider the basic deisgn concept that you want to use: Do you want RFZ, CID, NER, MR, LEDE, etc. Once you have settled on the design concept, then adjust the dimensions accordingly, and start to plan your initial treatment. If the room is large enough, then you can use numeric-based diffusion. If not, then you are stuck with only absorption and reflection.
Also, if this room is going to be part of a complete studio with other rooms around it, such as a live room, vocal booth, drum room, iso booth, machine room, etc. then do consider access paths, sight lines, traffic flow, door openings, etc.
- Stuart -
