How Will I Know If My Room Needs Treatment?

Thank you for the advice, GIK! I was wondering whether to make those walls asymmetrical. The site is destined for the corner of the room, next to the chimney breast. My first thought was rectangular, now I'm thinking I could cut off the corner to make a triangular structure. Looking at the corner and imagining it tells me none of the 'walls' would actually be directly facing each other inside.

Though I've looked at square/ rectangular ones both DIY and professional pre-fabricated ones.

Do I need to raise the floor? I was thinking of using fork-lift pallets, the same way as I built my shed in the back yard.
 
Doctor Varney said:
What do you think of this?
::::D.I.Y. Recording Booth Plans::::

They seem to be built using multiples, as you advised against. Is this because they are designed for recording instruments? Were you referring to one tailored for speech?
Click to expand...

They are designed for isolation, not acoustics. To give you a small breakdown of why multiples are bad from the get go, lets study the issue of modal activity.

We know that certain notes resonate in rooms much longer than they are actually played. These frequencies that ring out are directly related to the length, width, and height of your room. Those are your "axial modes" in the room. So, if you had (for example) a 10x10x10' cube room, you would have a massive peak at ~55 Hz, with a TON of modal ringing there as well. This would be really hard to acoustically treat and likely would be a problem for mixes. The same is true if you have multiples of each other. ie; a 10x15x20 room. The modal activity would mostly build around one frequency (the same 55 Hz). When we have different room dimensions like 9x11x13' or something, you have modes that build up in multiple different frequencies, but much less intense. This is much easier to treat and fix.

The structure doesn't need to be completely triangular or anything (though that would work). Angling the walls at 12 degrees or more would be enough to break up flutter echo. A little bit more severe of a pitch, like 20 degrees, may be more beneficial to break up modal activity. I do recommend making it a good size in there if its possible. Maybe something around 5x6x7? or 5x7x8?
 
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