John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hi all, I am putting together a mixing room in an existing space and am looking for help choosing rooms from a couple options available in the building.

Unfortunately, I don't have the exact height, but I am estimating 12' up to an acoustic tile drop-ceiling, and I have no idea what's above that.
Both rooms are rectangular, and both rooms have windows on one side. They were formerly school classrooms.
The idea is to put nearfields and a desk in, and use treatment to create a RFZ, bass traps to deal with problematic nodes, and perhaps some diffusion. The room will be primarily for mixing, but may occasionally see use for recording overdubs. The most important goal by far is to have the mix position be as accurate as possible.

I plan to assemble my own treatment, and budget for treatment is approximately $4k. I'd like to make the treatment modular as this is essentially a stop-gap solution until I move into a place with a suitable room to build out. That could be months or it could be years.

There are six rooms available, but preliminary "testing" (I brought a portable speaker and played program material in the room, far from scientific) led me to thinking that two of them sounded best in an untreated state. Room 1 seemed to have a slight edge in this regard.

(other rooms were 24x28 and 24x29)

Room 1 (the one painted lavender) is 22 ft x 28 ft and has a wall of windows

Room 2 (painted white) is 24 ft x 32 ft and about 75% of the windows has been covered by an unidentified dense board.

Price is similar, so need not be part of the equation. The extra space would be handy, but the primary driver in the decision is which would require less work to create an acoustically accurate mix position.

Soundproofing is not necessary.

Thank you for your help, this forum is such an incredible repository of knowledge.

welcome!

one major challenge will be how to treat an 8000ft3 room for $4K...

best bet may be to find the room with the lowest reverberation time and build hard/absorptive panels to "create" a smaller space which will be closely aligned with your requirements for mixing (low RT, even frequency distribution esp in LF, and time factors like ITD etc are balanced).

gullfo wrote:welcome!

one major challenge will be how to treat an 8000ft3 room for $4K...

best bet may be to find the room with the lowest reverberation time and build hard/absorptive panels to "create" a smaller space which will be closely aligned with your requirements for mixing (low RT, even frequency distribution esp in LF, and time factors like ITD etc are balanced).

Thank you!
Yes, the size of the room was certainly on my mind, and I do not expect to properly treat the whole room within my budget.
The other options I have at my disposal are a 10x11x7 bedroom (cheaper rent), and a 17x20x8 room with wood ceilings (more expensive rent). I have a few days to think about this before signing the lease so input is welcome!

My thought was that the larger room with higher (treated) ceilings would likely present less problematic modes to begin with, and what I was envisioning was not treating the room in a traditional sense, but placing the mix position and speakers in the least problematic position in the room, and then placing broadband absorption on frames (basically tall gobos) behind the speakers, to my sides, behind and above. Do you think there will be an efficient way to control LF at mix position without treating all corners of the room?

Do you think there is merit to this concept? This is not intended to be a commercial studio. However, I am trying to create a workspace where I can monitor with a professional degree of accuracy.

Wooo, Space, the Final Frontier. Drop Ceilings are an amazingly good start. Check the tiles. Sometimes they use chalky hard ones. Not good. You can get fully absorbent ones such as Autex.
Mark out a CR on the floor. If you current tiles are reflective replace with Autex or similar. Build a 'Cave' of stud framing. Include spaces a mm or two smaller than standard fibre batts.
Push fit or caulk in Caruso Isobond, say 20mm, then say 150mm of light Ecose batts, then another layer of CIB. An absorbent and blocking 'tent'.

Thanks Dan Dan
So that sounds like a strong vote for the larger room vs the smaller alternatives that I mentioned.

Is there an American equivalent to Caruso isobond?

When you said “include spaces a mm or so smaller than fiber battes,” do you mean to make the stud framing sized so that fiber battes squeeze tightly between studs?

Are you suggesting stud walls that reach to the ceiling? Or partial height walls? Does this "cave" have a fiber batte ceiling as well?