Help needed with acoustic treatment!

[aevarr]

Hi all.

I'm about to acoustically treat a home studio room, but need some sound advice. The plan of the room is shown in an attached pic. Basically I need a room where I can both record at least vocals and some quieter acoustic instruments plus mix as well as possible. And I'm using the room for teaching singing as well, so I can't propably bring down the echo time to very short.

The basic structure of the room is far from ideal, but I have to live with it. So I want to know if my plans sound allright or not.

I'm setting up my working desk with active monitors on the wall that is around 2,9 m in length. Actually there's the closet taking up most of the other wall, but leaving a gap for the door to open in to the room. On the wall opposite the closets there is a window (around 1,7 m width).

So my plan about acoustic treatments is as follows:
- covering most of the back wall (opposite the monitors) with acoustic tiles (unfortunately only 10 mm and 30 mm in depth). I've got a bit more tiles to work with, but can't afford buying much more.
- constructing and hanging a QRD diffusor of (for example) 150 cm width x 100 cm height behind the workdesk / monitors
- And that's it so far.

How does this sound to you? Should I instead construct different sized diffusors and hang them in different place(s)?

How about the damping elements? The window is in a pretty bad place, so I don't know if I can hang acoustic tiles on the sides (taking down side reflections).

Any ideas on how to best use my existing acoustic tiles, money and efforts in constructing the studio?

[aevarr]

The situation's changed now. I really could use some help still. Anybody? I've thrown in the bin the idea of a diffusor. The room's pretty much too small for that. There's two pics of the room as it is now.

I've covered most of the back wall with 10mm and 30mm acoustic tiles (with a 50 mm airspace behind them). Also I have four of the 30x600x1200 mm tiles on the wall and in the corners behind the monitors. They're just laying against the wall on the floor, long side up.

I can clearly hear some (lower) notes booming in the room when I sing. Not to a terrible degree, but enough to disturb practicing and definately recording. I ran a pretty basic acoustics test and the analysis shows big dips in the mid-to-high end. I don't think it actually tested the low frequencies at all, since the curve was pretty straight.

Also, when I play a low sine wave synth sound through the monitors, I can hear some of the low-mids are vanishing, but the very low notes are booming (of course).

What do you suggest I should do? Should I install some broad-frequency absorbers/bass traps made out of this stuff: http://www.paroc.fi/channels/fi/acou...id=BULLERSKIVA

Its acoustic characteristics can be found on this page under the name Bullerskiva: http://www.paroc.fi/channels/fi/acou...ptiokayrat.asp

The pages are in Finnish only, sorry, but the graphs are understandable without any language skills

[Shout It Out]

If you are hearing bass problems you should invest in bass traps made of 703 rigid fiberglass, you'll hear a big difference and be pleased that you bought it. Makes life much easier knowing the bass frequencies are being tamed. Also if those are the bx8s, they sure do make my bx5as look tiny!

[HapiCmpur]

Originally Posted by aevarr

What do you suggest I should do? Should I install some broad-frequency absorbers/bass traps made out of this stuff: http://www.paroc.fi/channels/fi/acou...id=BULLERSKIVA

That link doesn't work for me, but yes, you want to put bass traps in the corners and broadband absorbers on your parallel walls. Like Shout said, OC 703 is highly recommended around here. Anything with similar specs should work just as well, and what you choose will depend mostly on the prices and availability from your local suppliers. Here's a helpful comparison chart: http://www.bobgolds.com/AbsorptionCoefficients.htm