John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

hi,

i´m finally about to begin with building of my recording studio in the outbuilding on our property. the building is 13,5 by 4,5 metres and will be internally seperated in two equal halves for live and control room - by room within room constructions.

in fact the outbuilding doesn´t have a real baseplate going through so in between the outer brick walls there´s nothing but pure soil & dirt - must have been a barn or whatever!? because of this i thought of pouring out two separate concrete floor plates (about 20 cm high) with cable ducts etc. - each about 6 by 4 metres so that there´s no contact to the outer walls. on these i would then place my room within room constructions with timber studs and gypsum board.

i guess this should give some good isolation and may even make a resilient channel construction and neopren strips unnecessary or redundant. both rooms would then be completely disconnected from the surrounding building!? am i right there

thanks for your thoughts!

fretless

Two separate concrete slabs is a good start, but if you want really good isolation between rooms (for things like being able to do mic placement by listening to control room speakers, without drums/etc bleeding through and confusing what's really happening) then you still need to isolate walls, use heavy, un-equal double glasses, seal everything with acoustic sealant, and (unless you're using light gauge STEEL studs, put Resilient Channel on one half of double walls between control and live room.

If you isolate walls from floor, you attenuate the amount of sound that's transferred from concrete to walls - that makes less sound that can vibrate one leaf of the wall, which then transfers through the air space to the other wall, which then can be heard in the second room.

Same thing applies to blocking sound between studio and the outside world - this can be less necessary, depending on how quiet your surroundings are and whether you have close neighbors who would be irritated by noise... Steve