John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

I have a 12'x10'x8' room.

I'm making a live tracking room. There is a hardwood floor and drywall ceiling and walls. One width is half covered with windows with curtains over them. I was planning on using my existing 2'x4'x3'' fiber glass panels suspended from the ceiling after building slat resonators for the walls and corner slat resonators for the corners. I have eight such panels. If I suspended these I'd cover 64' of 120'. This is about 50% of the area.

My question is; Is this enough coverage or should I aim for 100%? Should I leave gaps between the panels or try to do it with a minimum or absence of gaps? I was planning on making more panels and covering about 80-90% of the ceiling with gaps in between. My goal is to eliminate any problem echoes and reflections that would result from the walls and hard floor opposite. I figure small gaps would be ok because the highs that passed through would just get scattered into the back of the panels anyway. I was also thinking the gaps might help in diffusing any highs that aren't absorbed (lending more of a live sound) and perhaps might be better than edge to edge panels. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

I like to take a room one step at a time, see if it needs more, and stop when I'm happy; usually this means corner broadband traps, a ceiling cloud that's at least the size of the desk and centered between speakers and ears, sidewall first reflection points, rear broadband trapping, and if the room is fairly large probably alternate checkerboard wall absorbers - too much absorption and you're in a dead box, too little and you're backing off on high EQ too much and creating "muffled" sounding mixes (this is why I own only one pair of speakers with titanium tweeters, and don't use them - kept making dull mixes...)

If you do slatted corners, I would only do them at the rear, and keep the slots between wide enough to force them into more "broadband" operation - usually 1/2 to 1 inch will do this. Keep in mind that slats close to you can give some strange specular reflections, so they need to be angled to avoid first reflection points between your ears, the absorber, and your speakers... Steve