John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

I got this from a friend and was wanting to know if you all had some suggestions.

The main room is 10x12 with 8 foot ceiling. three layers of sheetrock insulated and sheetrocked on the other side as well. Same goes for the ceiling. The walls have auralex covering about 30-40% coverage, with single auralex bass traps in each corner. The floor is ceramic tile with a area rug. the vocal booth is about 6x4 and a8 foot ceiling with 100% auralex coverage. Cermic tile there too for the floor. Here is the e-mail I got from the friend. Suggestions are most welcome.


it just sounds really weird in both of them. there's room sound but it's
really quick and low end room sound. really horrible for recording. i
recorded some acoustic guitar tracks and vocals and they're the worst
i've ever recorded. i've auralexed the entire small room and it
sounded really bass heavy and stuffy, so we took some out, but it still
sounds that way. we covered the bottom tile with a rug that doesn't
quite cover the entire ground.

John,

> i've auralexed the entire small room and it sounded really bass heavy and stuffy, so we took some out, but it still sounds that way. <

This is a common complaint. If your friend has a budget send him/her to my company's site www.realtraps.com. Otherwise there's lots of good DIY advice here on John's site, and also in my Acoustics FAQ, second in the list on my Articles page:

www.ethanwiner.com/articles.html

--Ethan

Yeah, with all that sheetrock you probably have a very tight room. There's nowhere for the sound to dissipate. The Auralex will absorb high frequencies, but will do nothing for the bass. A balanced room will almost invariably be the opposite situation. You'll wind up installing quite a bit of low frequency absorption and rather little high frequency absorption.

Thomas

John,

You can have your friend contact me directly: savant@auralex.com. I'd be happy to work with him to come up with some more balanced solutions for his rooms.

BTW: It doesn't sound like anything we would have suggested. We have an entire team of acousticians that help people with the proper application of our products. We offer this off-site room analysis free of charge.

To give you some examples: Unless circumstances warranted it, we would not have suggested 100% coverage of the vocal booth. And we very likely would have suggested a lot more low frequency control in both rooms.

I'll look forward to hearing from you or your friend soon!

Best regards,

Jeff D. Szymanski
Chief Acoustical Engineer
Auralex Acoustics, Inc.