John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

I thought it was about time to post my progress so that the pros can tell me what I'm doing wrong!

Some info:
- Needed to move. Needed a new recording studio. Didn't want to pay lease. The cheapest 2000 square foot piece of junk commercial building was $450,000 to buy. Decided to get a fancier house in a fancy new neighbourhood with a beach about a 1 minute walk away and the most popular retail stores (including a Home Depot) within about a 2 minute drive.
- Wife is supportive and was cooperative with me giving priority to the recording spaces, and having our living spaces take the back burner. Granted, I did have to allow her to get SOME fancy finishes (like stone and hardwood throughout).
- We designed the house so that my clients will never have to enter or even see our living spaces.
- I did get screwed with some details that were important to me (a bathroom near my control room, and all of the heights I wanted got shrunk by ~1 or more feet due to architectural requirements and the fact that the sewer invert was only so deep). I also couldn't afford radiant in floor heating in the live room due to finances and the space a boiler would take compared to the large hot water tank. Lastly, due to space, I am having to use the house furnace to heat/recirculate air in my control room and ISO room. I have done the calculations and talked over my needs with the HVAC contractor who is doing the rest of the home. Also, due to space and money, I will have to tune the HVAC ducts old school via dampers. I have taken that into consideration and will do my best to ensure that they are accessible. We will eventually get an air conditioner unit added on to our system when money permits. For the live room, I was planning on getting a mini-split system. So I have planned for it, but the live room will be phase 2 of the build, probably years down the road when I have more money saved. We'll see.
- I have had great conversations with the trades guys working on my house and explained how I need them to not mess with my design... stay away from my stuff and stay away from the floor joists I need to run my silencer sleeves.
- I have had great conversations with the city employees re: business licence, permits, inspections, etc. I ensured that I do NOT need windows in the basement. I ensured that I can glue the walls to the basement floor (which has radiant in floor heating) even with crazy heavy doors.


Spec stuff:
- I need maximum isolation, within reason. I don't want to piss off any neighbours. I will only record drums from like 8 or 9am until ~7pm. I've always worked that way. However, I want to meet the sound bylaws imposed for my city. Loud drums = lots of required TL. I am building decoupled two leaf systems for all 3 of my rooms. I'm mostly scared about the garage (live room), but I have taken measures with the house builder to save me a bit of hassle down the road. I'm hoping to put a second layer of 3/4" plywood on the outside of the garage myself which will save me the hassle of beefing up the outer leaf between the studs later on. I'm getting them to use just cheap ultra light 1/2" drywall in the garage for now (legally they have to fire tape it to allow residency) because I'm going to just have to tear it down later anyway. I'll get into those details later. It's boring to read now.
- For my CR and ISO room, I'm concentrating on those right now. I have spent most of my time figuring out how to fit my HVAC silencer boxes into the space. For the outer leaf penetration, I was unable to have duct liner within the sleeves. There just isn't room. So that's my compromise. I also designed it such that the outer leaf silencers only have the cross sectional area of the supply and return ducts coming from the HVAC trunks. The inner leaf silencers have twice the cross sectional area. Due to location, I have had to run some rectangular duct from the inner leaf silencers to the registers. I increased their size and also got pretty heavy into register specs. I ended up going with 4 foot long linear slot diffusers that have four 1" slots. Two for supply in CR. Two for return in CR. One for supply in ISO room. One for return in ISO room.
- My friend is a pro carpenter type fella. He is going to help me build some super doors out of HDF. The HDF comes in 5 mil 4'x8' sheets. We will glue them to make it thick enough then router the edges so that I can have 2 seals around it. I will probably add non-mortised automatic door bottoms to them. I already have all of the 4731 seals sitting here. I ordered them from Facca Fasteners Ltd. I found some Hager BB1168 hinges which are equivalent to the Stanley FBB168 but way way cheaper. I have to pick those up still.
- I just paid for a bunch of 1.5"x7.25" LVL studs to use for my inside out skelton ceilings in the ISO and CR room. $2000 later The reason I'm ordering it so early is because with a 19 foot span at the back of my control room and no windows in the basement, there's no way I'll get these down the stairs once the house is built. I will have to get them in there as soon as the basement slab is poured and store them until I need them. Kind of like the pirate ship in the bottle concept
- In about 1 week, I have to go dig trenches to run all of my conduit before they pour the basement slab. They're trying to thaw the ground now. It's been cold here lately.

Okay so, here's some pictures. There is LOTS to draw and figure out still so ignore all the stuff that is missing and obviously out to lunch. I'm working on it. But please advice where you can.
Things I need advise on:
- in order to have ray tracing hit correctly, I had to move the front acoustic wall towards me quite a bit. I am debating having a bit less angle than 30 degree soffit walls so that I can have the wall further away.
- I don't know if I like the shape of the couch riser floor
- I need to figure out how to use the couch riser floor as a tuned treatment device. I was initially thinking to put slots in the front lip of it and use the extreme depth of the cavities to tune it. Yes, the opening is small, so it won't do much, but every little bit helps right?
- I hope the large duct work up around the rooms isn't going to kill my bass trapping
- I have to figure out exactly what angles will work right and look cool to make a cloud in the CR. The ceiling design had to get figured out before I solidified the cloud. I JUST confirmed all of the ceiling crap and like I said, ordered the wood.
- I have to draw up the framing/insulation/slat design for all of the treatment walls in the control room.
- I have to draw up/design the soffits.
- I have Dynaudio BM6Amkii monitors right now. They are rear ported. I MAY have to use them for a bit. So I will design the soffits to have removable bezels for speaker upgrades in the future. I personally think I want either Barefoot MM45's (which Thomas okay'd and gave me a low shelf schematic to employ) OR ATC SCM45A. Both are out of my price range currently. OR, I was thinking I could trade in some gear and get some Dynaudio BM15A's which would maybe sound like my BM6Amkii a bit???? At least they'd be front ported. Again, money I should be spending on insulation, not speakers. I did write Dynaudio and ask about the acoustic axis of my speakers and asked about how to deal with damping the rear port for flush mounting. Their response was not good. They basically said to not screw with the port, period. I also have found very little information on the forum about how exactly to deal with the port. So I'm looking for advice on that.
- I'm also trying to figure out what to do regarding Sorbothane for mounting the speakers. I have an idea in my head how to do this, but it has to get sorted later on. I'll start messing with it once I digitally frame the soffit walls.
- I have to figure out what the heck I'm doing for treatment in the ISO room. I decided to build that entire room inside out for obvious reasons (bigger room, more bass trapping depth)
- I have to figure out electrical/lighting schematics. Easy to do, time consuming though. Luckily my brother in law designs lighting for buildings for a living so I'll get him to help me out and make sure I have the correct foot candles to add the right vibe to my rooms.
- I need to figure out if I'm using flex duct or more DuroDyne between wooden connectors in order to connect the inner and outer supply silencers

Here's some control room pictures:
- I do have the inline duct fans I need picked out. I just haven't included them in my drawing yet. I won't until I see how the HVAC dude ends up running his trunk and junk.
- I quickly drew up the inside out ceiling framing just to figure out the lengths and quantity of LVL stud I needed. That's why it isn't complete
- Anyway, that's enough on that.

And here is the live/drum room.
It is an oversized triple car garage.
I'll park outside for the rest of my life and let my wife park in the single car bay.
The deck area there will act as my sound lock. I screwed up a while ago and about a 3ft wide aluminum door (with proper seals and automatic door bottom thank goodness) that I will put on the single car bay to maintain the fire rating shiz. The door going into the house will be a normal aluminum crap door too. The door going into my room will be a super door.
I FINALLY got the actual roof truss diagram from the architect so this drawing isn't quite correct and as you can tell, is far from done. But, it at least allowed me to catch some issues and change them before they build the sucker. I wanted this much higher, but this is as high as I can get it. I'll have to build a room in a room for this of course and I'll probably have to use some 2.0E LVL 2 or even 3 ply to maintain some height. Right now the lowest part is 10 ft 3 inches and the peak his 17 ft 5/16 inches.
My plan is to build inside out modules and slide them up in between the roof trusses. I made sure he built them with 2x6's so that I could maintain a semi-decent air gap for the MSM system. Then build an inside out ceiling below that. I might be able to get away with 2 or 3 ply 7 1/4" LVL but may have to end up with a 9 1/2" single ply. I don't want to lose that ceiling heigh (visually), but the thick absorption sure would help the room sound tighter.

Of course, I'll have to design some acoustic treatment for this room.... I'm thinking about using some adjustable devices (like John uses in lots of his live room). The wall to the right of where you would walk down the stairs I'm thinking of having as a deep hanger wall. That's the wall I will have the mini-split head on as well.

Anyway, as you can see, lots to do. But, here are the pics:

Greg

Here are a couple other pictures for fun.

I'm quite proud of these silencer boxes as it was difficult to maintain their design requirements while fitting them into the space available.

I also included a shot under the registers I drew up to show how I could fit some low profile LED pot lights with the current side wall design. I'm not sure if I'll keep the side walls like this. But, it would allow me to tune some more broadband style HH slat walls if need be come measurement time.

And, I forgot to mention that I will eventually be getting a new desk (maybe similar to the Argosy one in my SketchUp) where I will keep my rack gear instead of in a designated Argosy rack like I have now. I think I want the rack in my drawing to just be a desk where I will have a mirrored screen for my clients to see what I'm doing and they can eat, do things on their laptops, etc.

So, I've slowly been digging away at more details.
- Been getting DB2 conduit to install once the house builder gives me the go ahead to go dig and install. My buddy gave me everything I need for free, but all of the elbows are 24" radius. I don't want to dig through clay (as far as I know it might be frozen 2 feet down still) 2 feet down. So I'm giving that back and going to have to buy the elbows for 12" radius instead (minus the 4" pipe as it only comes in 24" radius).
- Called and got a quote on some Hager BB1168 hinges for my doors. They're apparently direct replacements for the Stanley FBB168. The Stanley ones are $115 each. The Hager ones are $20 each. Good thing I found these cheaper ones!
- I decided instead of beefing up my garage live room walls after the fact with drywall and caulk, I'm going to do/pay whatever to get two layers of 3/4" OSB on the outside under the Hardie Board siding. The builder typically uses 3/8" OSB. I'm going to call the framers tomorrow and see if I can suck hole to them and maybe have them just install the first layer. Then I'll caulk it. Then I'll green glue and install the second layer myself. It should work out to only around 16-18 sheets. This will save me so much time and effort down the road. Plus, it won't chew into my air spring gap.
- I called and found a local dealer for homasote. That stuff is almost $60 for a 4'x8' sheet. I drew up my control room hanger wall and boy oh boy, the homasote alone is going to cost a ton Reading through the forum, there doesn't seem to be a viable replacement for it though. Anyone?
- I called a bunch of glass places. One guy tried countless times to tell me I was wrong and that a three leaf window system performs way better than two because "every piece of glass the sound goes through, the sound distorts and that makes it quieter... trust me, we won a bid for an entire massive hotel that was near a train and everyone was shocked at how well it performed. We've done lots of sound rooms and we always sell them 3 pieces of glass and it works amazing. It doesn't get better". I finally called a place who just shut up and quoted me what I asked for. Here's the quotes on those:
3’x5’
6mm $241
10mm $595

3’x6’
6mm $307
10mm $725
- I also paid for my LVL studs and got an engineer to confirm and approve the span and beam output. I mentioned the cloud ceiling I will be hanging and can't really even estimate how heavy it will be. He said with the sistered 7 1/4" deep LVL studs, even at my 19 foot span, he said short of hanging a V8 engine from it, it is good to go, quote. Once the basement slab is poured, I'll get the studs down the basement stairs and store them/work around them until I install them. I don't have basement windows so that's the only time I'll have an opportunity to get such long material down there.
- I read a bunch of build threads where people used rear ported speakers and it seems like a bit of a nightmare. I can't afford the speakers I want (realizing how much supplies are going to cost). I have Dynaudio BM6Amkii right now as my mains and I really like them. In my make shift room, I have an actually quite impressive REW measurement happening! Anyway, I am buying a set of old passive Dynaudio BM15's with some vintage mono block power amps to go with them for really cheap (considering how much a set of new active ones are). I might not have them in my possession for a while, but I hope they're alright. I've read a few posts that the mid range on them isn't amazing due to the big 10" driver. We'll see soon and I'll give you my review. Anyway, they should make my soffit build a bit easier (I did keep the depth of my front soffit walls deep enough to accommodate some awesome speakers like the ATC SCM45's

Bad news:
- wanting to actually start framing up (in SketchUp) my front acoustic walls now that I know what speakers I'm going to have in them, I wanted to tweak out the wall angles to get a for sure RFZ situation happening. Welllllllllll yeah. Instant anxiety. My ceiling is fine for now (even though I'm not keen on how it looks right now, but it works. The walls however are making me sweat. The house design (and budget) made a jut out in the foundation. I was pissed off about it at first, then I realized that I could mirror it on the other side and use the area for 4 of my 8 silencer boxes. Hooray! Great until now. So, I've attached a picture to illustrate where I'm at. I'm almost at a loss here now. I've maxed out pretty much all of my specs.

1. I've angled my soffit walls to the maximum recommended angle of 25 degrees (from the front wall)
2. I've maxed out the distance from the side walls 28% and unfortunately it's still putting me pretty centered (as you can see) to the soffit wall. That's the last thing I'm worried about right now though.
3. I have tried countless combinations here. My soffit wings are angled at 25.5 degrees (from the side wall)
4. My mix position (from the new acoustic front wall to the rear drywall) is at 36%
5. As you can see, I'm in the clear except for the drywall flat wall. When I draw in the one questionable ray, it shoots it right into my ear.

Possible solutions:
1. Decrease my mix position percentage to a minimum of say 30%?
2. Try adding another soffit wing at a slight angle where the drywall is? This would make construction way harder than it already is.
3. I haven't tried making the window more narrow. Right now it is 3' tall by 5' wide (I was planning on having the ISO room window a foot wider to allow for a better view into that room (mind you, that would maybe make the build out way harder and a few hundred dollars more for bigger glass) So we'll see how my Sketching Up goes with that. Bringing the entire deflection walls in might help. Obviously I want more room though for obvious reasons.
4. Go work at McDonalds and quit recording music for a living.

Please give me some advice guys!

Greg

And here's the house in it's current state... big heaters hooked into the gas line pumping heat into the basement to thaw the ground so the plumber can do his thing and I can dig for countless hours to install my conduit runs
Oh, and that's my sugar momma standing on the house. She's a fox.

Greg

So, I just finished solidifying the wall and cloud angles. I used a few different colours on the ceiling to show the different parts. I also put in the Dynaudio BM15's into my sketch up. I emailed Dynaudio and found out where the acoustic axis of these guys are. I should have the speakers this week sometime. My friend who bought them off of Kijiji for me said they sounded great and I trust him as he's a well established recording engineer.

I moved my mix position up to 37.5% depth in the room. I just screwed around more with angling the walls and such and eventually lucked out getting an RFZ front wall configuration. The ceiling and cloud then posed an issue visually. I REALLY like the look of tilted soffit walls but it doesn't make sense to increase the build difficulty while also increasing the chances of desk SBIR and the like. So, here is what I came up with. For the ceiling, the blue one is the only one that really mattered in the end. The angle of the black one basically just had to go from the window to the connection where the blue ceiling met the soffit and soffit wing walls. Having it angled will allow for more bass trapping depth and make it look cool while doing it. So from behind mix position, here's what it will look like (except different colours and such) Then, a new problem popped up. My DB2 conduit all has 24" radius elbows. A lot of my runs only need to be slightly more than 4' long. That means that even with 2 elbows joined directly together, the distance end up being over 5'. So I figured I can just angle the runs and it should be okay. I'm about to Sketch those changes up and take measurements so I'm prepared to install them. Tuesday morning is the day I start actually working on the place. I have to dig to run the conduit and have to install extra layers of OSB on some walls before the framer lifts them into place. We just got an insane amount of snow here (it's been a really mild winter so this is strange) and the framer was supposed to start yesterday, but the 3 feet of snow stopped that from happening. Here's a pic of the green glue I picked up (I wiped out two home depots) and most of the DB2 elbows. And, here is a pic for fun. This is the plumbers finishing up the rough in. I'm definitely pissed off though. After the foundation was poured, my house builder informed me that a new regulation was set in place such that they were unable to plumb the utilities to the other side of the house. So now, all of my utilities are coming in on the opposite side of the house in relation to my actual utility room. That means as soon as you step onto the concrete floor off of my basement stairs, there will be the main sewer clean out tin. I plan on having a clear 100% epoxy on the concrete so it will be pretty visible. I suppose I can just paint the tin and cover it with epoxy as well. Lastly, they assumed that they could just throw the electrical panel there at the bottom of my stairs as well (you can see it in the picture). However, I'm going to try and insist that they put in a disconnect near the point of penetration instead and run the main supply line over to my utility room so I don't have an MDF electrical panel box on the wall as I think it will look like crap. Anyway, that's it for now. I've been super swamped with about 10 bands albums right now plus mixing 5+ concerts a week all while being dad and husband and son. Today I'm going to finish planning out the conduit locations and may attempt to cut/glue the DB2 so it's ready to go. I should wait until someone is here to help manuever it though because that glue dries pretty fast.
Thanks for following!

I thought I'd share this since it's related to my studio situation. After doing as much acoustic treatment in my in laws basement (where I'm currently working out of), here is the low end of the spectrum after running some REW tests. I tweaked a lot of stuff (including putting old dog beds behind things, hanging garbage bags on top of some 703, etc, etc. I'm pretty happy with how it sounds in here minus being able to hear every dog nail click as they walk up stairs and a loud furnace. I'm making money here, so rock on!

That looks pretty darn good for a small room, to be sure!

However, that's the low end of the spectrum you are looking at, so you should not be smoothing to 1/6 octave. That's fine for high-mids, but for lows, you really should be totally un-smoothed, to smoothed to 1/48, max.

Even so, I reckon it will still look quite decent like that!

- Stuart -

Here it is with no smoothing.

The room is probably 12' deep, 10' wide and 8' tall. Just ugly as heck. I had a bunch of left over 1" 703 I stuffed up in the joists on the ceiling. Some Roxul RHT80 bass traps, front wall and first reflection point panels just hung with a few wood screws.
Note: I was taking the measurements with people walking around upstairs so that was super annoying.

Update:

Here is my son standing with some DB2 conduit in my in laws basement where I prepped it. Today, a few friends, then my mom and dad helped me dig conduit runs today. Have to finish anchoring them and back filling them tomorrow. My brother took my good work boots so I was stomping on a shovel all day in regular old crappy rubber boots (about as sturdy as a pair of socks). It sucked.

Here are 3 pics from start to near the end of the day:

These are my two friends that helped. Tomorrow we will finish in the basement. I noticed one of the floor drains the plumbers put in is in the wrong spot. It will land right under the hallway wall. I'll bitch about that

The next day I will beef up the garage walls with GG sealant and compound on a few more layers making a total depth of 1 1/2" of OSB giving me just shy of 4.5 lbs/ft^2 of surface density. The framer is a super good fella who is totally understanding of what I'm up to, so that's nice.

Greg

This all looks great Greg. Good luck with it all - it's clearly a serious build.
I'm sure it will be fantastic when it's finished. What a facility to have.

For a second there, I thought I was on an archeology website.... I scrolled up from the bottom of the page, and damn but that last picture looks like you just dug up a dinosaur skeleton in your basement!


- Stuart -

After a 13 hour day, we finally finished in the basement. Keeping everything really spot on was super difficult. We did our best to make the conduit super solid so that the concrete dorks don't mess with their placement (2 4" conduits have very critical placement (between walls).

Here's a few pictures of the dorks who helped tonight (my one friend and dad helped all day): There is some more conduit but it's out of the camera frame.
I am a bit stressed as I have to solidify the joist usage for my silencer sleeves and conduit that will run out to my live room. I took measurements tonight before we left so I can model that stuff up and figure it out. Of course, the blue prints I got aren't going to match the build We'll find out.

But, for tomorrow, it's time to beef up the live room walls with GG sealant and compound. It's cold out, so it's going to suck and we'll see what's up for help. My brother and dad will help for sure. (note: my family lives about 2 hours away. So my parents have been driving 4 hours a day to help!!!! My brother just got off a 10 day shift of work and he's coming to help. Nothing better than family eh!!) I'll share pictures as usual. I'm exhausted and sick.

Greg

Now that’s a hardy group of gentlemen.
My garden needs doing - ask if they’re free next Thursday.

And, of course I wouldn’t want to lazily fall back on national stereotypes, but you could almost say they look ever so slightly Canadian

Now that’s a hardy group of gentlemen.

They all refused to even take gas money!!!! Good fellas for sure. And Canadian, big time, eh! hahaha Note, no one here has the "ouuuwwww" accent that I see on comedic skits all the time on TV. We sound "normal" just like everyone does on big screen movies.

Here are some pictures from today. The wind in the afternoon got brutal. My face was chilled but otherwise I stayed warm. The framers lent us an air nailer for the 7/16" and 3/8" layers which was amazing and fast. The 3/4" areas was done with screws, so that was slow. I had a crew of 5 (including myself) today, so it was really easy work actually. I had my brother, his wife, my dad and a friend. The friend was one of the two guys from conduit dig day #1. I'm surprised these guys still offer their help!
Note: Green Glue is super easy to squeeze out. I also didn't use nearly as much sealant as I thought I would even though I was very generous with it. One application was done by me, the other was done by my sister in law. She was a lot of help today.
I have a few more pics I'll try and upload later on this evening maybe.
Tomorrow I'm going to apply a bunch of sealant between the walls when they lift and install them.

Greg