John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hello there,

first of all, I would like to say that your forum is really amazing and useful. Thanks for that. Me and my friend decided to built a recording studio. It is situated in a building made of hollow bricks which is almost built and no essential changes can be made there. We want to concentrate on alternative rock music, but also want the studio to be useful for live recording of bigger bands including brasses etc.

Our inner plan is based on “The corner control room” available in the John Sayers Recording Manual, the section “Studio plans”. Our control room follows John’s design completely (it is a pentagon with four identical sides (4m) in the angle of 120°). Than there are 2 studios, the larger, Studio A with irregular hexagonal shape (max L 7.5m, max W 6.5m, max H 5,7m) with space hopefully sufficient for 12 member brass-band, and Studio B, presumably larger vocal booth (max L 3.9m, max W 3.5, max H 4.9m), or a drum room, unless circumstances allow otherwise. The last room is a rest room for musicians with a small kitchen, toilet and shower. There is also situated a loft where 4 human beings can spend the night in a relative comfort (musicians are usually run out of money, so it can help safe some). The Room mode cal. with largest dimensions input was used for recording rooms with positive outputs, although their irregularity prevents unambiguous conclusions. The supplemented .skp file should help with the orientation, overall insight and dimensions,

The inner constructions are planned to follow those suggested in John’s Recording manual including double plasterboard stud walls between the rooms in the 12° angles (except the rest room that should separated from the audio rooms with wall made of concrete blocks on the inner side in 0°). The stud walls adjacent to outer brick walls will be presumably constructed according to 200mm wall plan from John’s pages to allow additional acoustic treatment. We also plan to measure the room’s acoustics with REW before the final treatments and finish slot resonators and other absorbers according to gathered data.

Our budget should cover the outlined plans but not too much more........

My questions are:

1) Is there something really bad in the inner plan what should be changed? I will be grateful for any suggestion.

2) We plan to keep the ceiling in the control room to rise in the angle of 15° and the ceilings in Studio A and B will trace the profile of the roof. Is this the best acoustic solution for the space available?

3) Is it better to keep the angle 12° between the glasses on the front wall of CR or to angle the wall itself?

4) Is it a good idea to equip the rest room also with one wall plate and use it as “Studio C” if necessary?

Thanks a lot,

Tomas Besta (really not a native speaker)

Hi Tomas, and Welcome to the forum!

I'm really tight on time this morning, but I'll try to get back to you during the day. In the meantime, you might find this thread interesting: http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... =2&t=21368 It's about a studio that is almost complete (just a few weeks to go), with a corner control room, similar to what you want. It might help you with some ideas.

- Stuart -

Thanks for the helpful link and a really quick answer. The skp file with corrected heights has been uploaded and the originall deleted.

Have a nice day, Stuart.
Tomas

Hello there,
construction works progressed a little bit, so:

1) there are 3 steel beams built on the steel pilots supporting the prospective roof now. They are marked red in the attached zipped .skp file. This off course limits room sizes adjustments based on your potential recommendations.

2) We decided to make the floating floors according to Phillip Newell's "Recording Studio Design", specifically the one with 10cm concrete slab layered on 10 cm of mineral wool of 60kg/m3 density (volume weight). It is cheaper an also less time consuming in our geographical conditions.

Any inspiration for Central European Guys?

Tomas

Any inspiration for Central European Guys?

It appears that you're doing lots of reading, so that's great!

I personally won't download zipped files for security reasons, but again, it seems like you're trying to obtain the knowledge before building. And heck, you're using SketchUp to design it so I'm sure you're doing great so far. If you have any specific questions, maybe export some pics from your SketchUp for us to review!

Greg

2) We decided to make the floating floors according to Phillip Newell's "Recording Studio Design", specifically the one with 10cm concrete slab layered on 10 cm of mineral wool of 60kg/m3 density (volume weight). It is cheaper an also less time consuming in our geographical conditions.

Before going to all that expense and complication, first you should read this:

http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... f=2&t=8173

Floating a floor is a big deal. It's nowhere near as easy as you seem to think it is....


- Stuart -

Thanks for you replies,

1) Slab floating floor: Practically, I have 3 possible choices of floor finish:
i) The wooden floating floor as proposed by John Sayers placed on the isolated structural concrete floor
ii) The 10cm concrete slab layered on the 15cm of floor polystyrene (heat isolation of floors are required for new buildings in CR) with wery poor sound isolation.
iii) The 10-13cm slab floating on the 60 kg/m3 dense mineral wool as proposed by Philip Newell. The resulting spring system should have resonant frequency around 4.4 Hz with the mineral wool compressed to final 7cm (see Fig. 3.24 and 3.27 in Newell (2008)). Such system should effectively attenuate frequencies above 10Hz, which is, I guess, sufficient enough. However, we plan to build circuits of separated floors from besser blocks of 15cm width on the 5cm of cca 150 kg/m3 mineral wool where the walls are planed to be built. These would be separated from the concrete floating floor by heavy mineral wool of ca 2 cm thickness to limit sound transmition to the wood-plasterboard-mineral wool walls suggested by John Sayers. The main reason why we would like to do it this way is that the neighbouring house, which is built simultaneously, will have ii) floors, so the expensive concrete pump is going to be at the place either way, so why to not use it if the price favours concrete against wood.

So, some further questions probably for Stuart:

1) Should I float the floor or not? The link you posted, Stuart, supports me to let it be on the structural floor. But, I have to make some floor finish and the concrete floating floor is to be cheaper according to wooden one based on my calculations. Or should I simply use the ii) option and let the floating floor float away?

2) Has the wooden floating floor any evident advantages except better resonances for mids and highs or preference of musicians for wooden material? But, I guess John Sayers favors stone for drum recording.....

3)

Even a heavy weight floating floor is pointless with a lightweight room in top of it.

I estimate, that even the walls will be much lighter, the floor resonance is going to be attenuated better using concrete floating floor.....At least, I think it should not be a mistake.

4) What type of floor would you propose for us?

And reply for Greg: the .skp file has 512 kB, so I’m not able to post it without zipping. I’m going to find the way to make it smaller. And here are some pictures.....the quality is not the best:)


Philip Newell (2008): Recording Studio Design. 2nd Edition. Elsevier

Hello again,

1)I tried to find some more relevant information on the concrete slab over rock wool floating floor. Indeed, there is no reference neither in Gervais (2006) nor on the internet. However, the description in Newell (2008) is discussed in detail and seems (to my mind) to be relevant. It was successfully used for Spanish Tio Pete studios.Yes, I’m not able to get similar resonant frequency for walls and ceiling but it is the cheapest way how to float the floor........Anyway, I will be grateful for any relevant reference, either positive or negative. If we think of this type of floor, I can save about 3$ per m2 using polystyrene instead of mineral wool for floor heat isolation, so, if you consider the floating floor completely irrelevant for our project, I will follow this approach.

2) During investigation, I found out that relatively low number of projects has the walls in the 12° angles as proposed by John on this forum. They rather rely on non-angled double leaf parallel constructions. You know, I tried to take after John‘s Recording manual with angled walls and floating floor at the beginning.....And it seems that neither floating nor angles are usually used.
So, is it a good idea to angle the walls or not?

Thanks a lot, guys

Tomas

Gervais R (2006): Home Recording Studio. Build It Like the Pros. Thomson Course Technology PTR

Newell P (2008): Recording Studio Design. 2nd Edition. Elsevier