John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Um....I'm showing my lack of expertise here....This should be an easy question for those who know.

Sound travels any direction it can; floors are just a wall that's horizontal, so for best isolation you still need two centers of mass, separated by insulated air space. The floated floor decouples the floor from structure, so breaks the transmission path between the isolated area and the rest of the world.

In a multi-room studio, floating all the floors separately gives enough isolation to be able to set mics on instruments, amps, and drum kits while ONLY hearing the result through the speakers, so the engineer can get a better idea of sound quality going on tape - it also keeps the control room speaker sounds from getting back on tape thru the mics, so the engineer can use speakers while recording instead of having to use phones... Steve

Thanks for the info. That makes sense. In my case, I'm a musician setting up my own room (on a small budget) where I can perform and engineer at the same time, with one hand on the music gear and one hand on the board, and my house is well away from other houses. So, it seems that a floated floor isn't necessary, right? Monitoring would always be with phones.

No problem isolation-wise then - however, there are a few problems with trying to get a workable mix just using phones instead of speakers... Steve