Help with WILD live room acoustics!

Daddywags · Post by **Daddywags** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 2:48 pm

I have almost finished all the construction of my new studio. The next critical step is analyzing and treating the acoustics. While the control room is much more critical, I feel that the live room just needs to sound good.

My new live room is about 14 X 16, 9 ft ceilings, with all wood floors. The walls are standard wallboard. I walked in the room once it was all done just to see where I was in regards to acoutics. It was incredibly lively, very bright, with at least a 1.5 sec reverb time. Man, this is going to be a terrible room without some sort of acoutic treatment.

So I got a chance to hear some drums being played in it. The room seemed to amplify them x5, as they were incredibly loud! The cymbals made your ears bleed and the kick sounded like a giant boom.

So now I'm starting to think it's going to take a LOT of treatment to make this room usable. So let me start with a plan of action and see what you all think.

First off, an entire 8 ft wall needs to be covered with some sort of fabric or heavy curtains. Why? Well, we have a window that was originally there that we built around when we constructed the new sound-proof walls within the original room. We intend to build a "plug" made out of plywood and soundboard to be placed into the windows spot to sound proof the giant 4x6 window. I was hoping to find some really heavy curtains ot something to cover the entire wall, covering up the ugly space. I hoped this would also help to calm down the room's lively acoustics.

Next step - the Ceilings. In a smaller room with lower ceilings, you will surely get some slapback into any high microphones. To combat this, I planned to use a collection of absorbers or hanging ceilings (absorbers). This would hopefully remove that factor from the equation a good bit, and over all would tighten up the acoutics. What do you think?

Gots to break up the walls. All the walls are pretty close to parallel, minus a slanted door. I was thinking that it may be a good idea to somehow diffuse the parallel walls a bit. I'm not sure how much this would audible do, considering that (at this stage, ayway) the room is incredibly lively. Maybe this is a bad move, and it may be a better idea to do this:

Calming down the room's reverb. The room is very bright and lively, and it makes listening to drums in this room very very hard. And we all know that if the instrument doesn't sound good in the room, then it won't sound good on tape. This is where I get confused. I want something that is aesthetically very pleasing but still provides the right treatment for the room. Overall, I thought about building large gobos. Essentially a large 4x8 piece of Plywood mounted upright on casters. Then soundboard on one side, covered in a fabric, and then if needed, additional acoustical foam appllied to the top. This would look very nice, and I could position these around the room for different purposes. For example - drums. I can now create a drum booth around the drums, or a vocal booth, or just along the walls to calm the acoutics down. And the best part, I can just spin them around and now I have wood all along the walls, giving my a very nice open room sound. How about that??

So anyway, those are my ideas. Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I hope to get some input from all of you. Thanks!

AVare · Post by **AVare** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 3:39 pm

Your asking at the concept stage which is great. I find it very sad reading posts with lines like " I have put 3" wool and 12.15 defibs all over th room. I changed the walls to modified straw/ mud and it still sounds bad. What else do I have to do?"

Have a look at the studio pictures in the "Studios under construction" section off the main page. Lots of studios, rooms, plans, even a gobo designed for drums! there for ideas.

Can you tell us what the construction of the walls and ceiling is? That gives an idea on what absorption, reflection is already present int he room.

Good luck!

giles117 · Post by **giles117** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 11:13 pm

Well if you angle 2 of the 4 walls you will be 100% better.

My room is smaller, 12x14. My room is nice and tight. Not dead, just perfect.

The flat walls have mineral wool on them. I used 2" 4.0 PCF stuff

My ceiling si 8.5' High It is dead and the floor is live (of course. LOL)

Just a quick take on the room. I was cutting a vocal 2 weeks ago and got livid cuz I thought the singer was directly in the mike when I saw her side view I was shocked to realize she was almost 2 feet from the mic. The presence i got (less the bass boost) was shocking.

Here is the floor plan I developed to give you an idea. Of course John helped me to get it right.

Daddywags · Post by **Daddywags** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 1:13 pm

Thank you, both, for your quick responses.

Let me first address Avare. I've done a lot of looking at the designs off the main page and they are greatly helpful! I've pulled a lot of ideas from them. But it never hurts to ask for some specific advice!

I'm going to fo some more studying of those diagrams, for sure. The outer level of the walls is your typical wall board with an orange peel finish. The inside is a design comprising of two walls, seperated by a 3-inch gap, with a layer of Homosote sound board behind the wallboard. Essentially, the design is as follows: Wallboard>Homosote |3-inch gap| Homosote<Wallboard. The ceiling is typical ceiling board with the popcorn finish on it. The floors are (I know, I know!

) laminate wood flooring. Hey, is was the enhanced lively floor I was going for, its ok with me if it's laminate! All of the doors and trim are solid wood, treated and stained pine, to be more specifc.

Giles. I really wanted to get creative with my wall designs, but I was really limited to what I could do with the space (and budget) I had to work with. I know, it stinks. But I think it will turn out okay. Neither of the rooms are square, thank goodness. Either way, I have what I have, and that's all I have to deal with for now. I'd love if you could elaborate on the techniques you used to calm the room's acoustics down. My budget's not huge, but I'll do what I can to make the room sound better.

Also, if anyone would like to post anything regarding the ceiling, I'd love to see wha others think. I was convinced I needed absorbtion on the ceiling to eliminate the slap-back echo from hitting any OH mics I may have set up. Perhaps diffusion is a better option, but that would only add to the room's livliness. Any ideas would be great!

giles117 · Post by **giles117** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 1:33 pm

What u see is it, angled walls with in the spec (>6 degrees of angle) My Walls cost me a total of 300 beans for the slats, fabric, mineral wool and studs. The only additiona cost was the mineral wool and fabric (My angled walls are slat resonators). The flat walls have 2" AFB coverd with cloth on them. About 90 beans USD

Us Michigan Dollars I should say

Not sure what your budget is, but if you dropped a figure we might be able to brainstorm within that price range. Also if you culd draw a diagram of what you have at this time that would greatly help.

Bryan Giles

AVare · Post by **AVare** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 7:04 pm

Giles117 drawing and suggestions are right on the mark.

The only thing I wold change is 4" instead of 2" material. If was on a budget, I would at a minimum space the 2" material 2" away from the ceiling.

Good luck!

giles117 · Post by **giles117** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 10:01 pm

Just to followup:

I Chose 2" so that it would not be overly absorptive. The angled walls also function as bass traps. Studying the NRC of the 2" vs the 4" the 2" felt like a better balance to me and in use, was a good choice. the PCF of the material I used was 4.0 around here 3.0 is the recomended 4.0 is pushing the edge. Notice that we stay away from 5.0 pcf which starts to get closer to a solid wall (as far as the sound is concerned)

My Ceiling is 3" AFB all across. which makes the room nice and tight but not dead. But then My ceiling ht was 8.5' before I started.

This product had a Pcf of 2.5

Later

dymaxian · Post by **dymaxian** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 12:37 am

Daddywags-

Good ideas here so far. There's only a couple things I'd add here...

First, building the angled walls that Giles is talking about will be pretty cheap. I wouldn't put up any drywall or wallboard on them- putting 4" of 703 between the stud cavities will soak up a lot of low freqs and even out the room response considerably. What you could do eventually is to make every other stud cavity into a shutter, with finish plywood on one side and fabric on the other. Open them up, and the inside fabric face will cover the adjacent stud space and make the room more dead. Close them, and the plywood will be reflecting mid and high freqs while the lows still get thru to get absorbed. John has a bunch of examples of this on the SAE site, but you've probably seen them all. This is the kind of thing that might require a less modest budget, but it depends on how much of this you'll be building yourself, too.

Second, I really wouldn't worry about the wall with the window so much. If this is the live room instead of the control room, as you mentioned, and as long as you can still meet your isolation requirements (which a curtain wouldn't help much, BTW) then I'd leave it. Make the wall across from it non-parallel to avoid flutter echoes, and use the rest of the room to control sound, and you should be fine.

If you're concerned that putting up false walls won't control low freq's enough, you can install panel traps per Ethan Winer's design in the space behind the false walls.

Third thing about the ceiling- the general consensus around here is that live rooms sound best with a reflective floor and absorptive ceiling. With that kind of ceiling height, you could build a cloud fairly easily and cheaply. Even if it's intermittent (2' squares with 2' square spaces between them, for a checker-board effect, for example) it'll do a lot of good. If you want it to help control the low freqs, you could make it really thick (4" or so) with a 4" space behind it.

Just thinking out loud. Hope this helps!

Kase
www.minemusic.net

Daddywags · Post by **Daddywags** » Fri Apr 23, 2004 12:49 pm

Hey guys, sorry I've been away from home for a while, but I want to get back to the discussion. All of the replies I've seen are great and I will definitely put your thoughts to work on paper. It's unfortunate, but my budget doesn't have much more to go. I'm certainly not asking for incredible acoustic for beans, but I do want good sounding rooms. The live room, more specifically, just needs to sound good for me. Not overly bright, not too boomy, and have a nice presence for acoustic instruments, drums and acoustic guitar especially. I'm willing to do what it takes to achieve this, but I just can't fork out the dough to do anything complex.

That said, let me start with the ceiling. An absorptive ceiling is certainly in order, although others on other forums have told me otherwise, and they suggest diffusion instead. It's the lively acoustics I'm trying to calm down, not supplement! And so a collection of hanging clouds scattered across the ceiling would be a good idea. I could spare the space to have 4", 2" from the ceiling. Now what would be the best material to construct these out of, and would simple eyehooks be the best method to hang them?

Now for the walls, this is a big issue. I was interested in doing some fancy construction on the walls from the beginning, but just didn't have the time or budget for it. (Shame on me...

) I can't change the angle of the walls; it's just not in the interest of my wallet. But it's something that could always be added later. Perhaps a good bit of diffusion on the parallel walls would help this matter? How should I approach this?

I intend to build three gobos, about 4ft wide X 7ft tall. These would be put on casters to be moved around for whatever the need is, like isolating instruments and vocalists from the room's acoustic. One side would be dead, entirely absorptive. The other side would have the exposed wood. I think that if these were placed along the walls, I could really alter the room's acoustics drastically. Maybe not, because I've never tried it. But I would certainly build them to isolate things from the room. Perhaps I should look more into how I can alter the room's acoustic with absorbers on the walls.

The curtain on the wall was more intended to cover up the nasty "window-plug". I also felt that a heavy fabric could also help in absorption of the room's bright acoustic properties, considering it's covering a 9-foot wall entirely. Look at the attached picture. I forget the name of this studio, but you can see how they have the curtains along the walls to cover up the windows. I would suspect that they could also drastically change the room's acoustics by covering up the walls. Perhaps something like this might be a good idea? What do you think?

Finally, let me wrap up with saying that I can't spend a ton of money on this, and I don't want to breech $600-700. For the live room, I don't need acoustically accurate and perfect acoustics; I just need a great sounding room that will honestly reproduce the sound of the instruments. So what do you think? I attached a quick sketch I did of the rooms. Focus on the Live room for now. Thanks!

knightfly · Post by **knightfly** » Fri Apr 23, 2004 11:56 pm

Can you please re-size (and replace)the pic down to 750 pixels wide so people don't have to scroll from side to side to read the text? Thanks... Steve

barefoot · Post by **barefoot** » Sat Apr 24, 2004 1:47 am

knightfly wrote:Can you please re-size (and replace)the pic down to 750 pixels wide so people don't have to scroll from side to side to read the text? Thanks... Steve

Done. Btw, on my computer 750 is still too wide. Anything larger than 600 and I have to scroll. My settings are 1024 x 768.

Daddywags · Post by **Daddywags** » Sun Apr 25, 2004 2:34 pm

Steve and Thomas, did you have any suggestions? Thanks!

knightfly · Post by **knightfly** » Sun Apr 25, 2004 5:51 pm

Not much beyond what Kase already suggested - if your budget allows, adding a splayed false wall at least 6 degrees out of true would help kill any flutter -

Your questions about mounting and material types are covered in several threads, please try the search function using terms like hanging, cloud, ceiling absorber, etc - most will be found either in Acoustics or Construction. Several members have detailed their methods; if you can't find anything, I'll take some time and see what I can do... Steve

knightfly · Post by **knightfly** » Mon Apr 26, 2004 3:14 am

While you're looking for ideas here, there's a couple of useful links here as well -

http://forum.studiotips.com/viewtopic.p ... 839b1c14de

In particular, this one -

http://mysite.verizon.net/vze22yzp/id4.html

would be a good way to do both your gobo's and movable wall absorbers - the gobo's could just add plywood backing for the hard side, and as shown these would still be reversible for slightly more(fluffy side out) or less(rockwool side out) high freq absorption. These could be placed either along walls with variable standoff distance, or across corners (although taller with no legs would be better in that case)

Hope that helps... Steve

Davidlavin · Post by **Davidlavin** » Tue Feb 01, 2005 5:56 pm

This has been an interesting thread. I'm in a similar situation, but I haven't yet put in my floor. I'm trying to decide between putitng in a laminate/pergo type of a flooring in my recording room, or carpeting. The issue is that even with temporary carpet in the room, it is still awefully bright.

My problem is this: the ceilings are low, and I can't really put anything more on them. Am I better off putting carpet in the room then, or do you think that if I treat the walls things will calm down. The shape of the room is basically a parallelogram, with one of the short walls angled about 15 degrees.

any suggestions?
Thanks
David