Upstairs room turned into a treated room?

[ryansanders]

We just recently built a house and right now, the upstairs part is not finished at all. The rooms upstairs will be fairly small, with low ceilings. I have decided to turn one of the small rooms into a treated room for recording and stuff. I don't know the dimensions right now, but I will try to get some soon.

The ceilings will follow the roof shape, which is basically an upside down V or whatever. How much would it cost to treat a room fairly decent? I know its hard to tell me without seeing pictures or details, or I imagine it is.

Say if I only had $300 or $400 to spend on room treatment right now, what would be the best way to go? I will mostly be recording vocal, acoustic, and guitar cabinet. I plan on buying a Sapphire LE and a AT3035 mic.. and maybe a couple Naiant mics. If you can help, let me know.

THanks

[Ethan Winer]

Originally Posted by ryansanders

Say if I only had $300 or $400 to spend on room treatment right now, what would be the best way to go?

Room treatment is a deep subject, and a complete answer requires far more than will fit into a single reply here. So here's the short version. All rooms need:

* Broadband (not tuned) bass traps straddling as many corners as you can manage, including the wall-ceiling corners. More bass traps on the rear wall behind helps even further. You simply cannot have too much bass trapping. Real bass trapping, that is - thin foam and thin fiberglass don't work to a low enough frequency.

* Mid/high frequency absorption at the first reflection points on the side walls and ceiling.

* Some additional amount of mid/high absorption and/or diffusion on any large areas of bare parallel surfaces, such as opposing walls or the ceiling if the floor is reflective. Diffusion on the rear wall behind you is also useful in larger rooms.

For the complete story see my Acoustics FAQ.

There's a lot of additional non-sales technical information on my company's site - articles, videos, test tones and other downloads - here:

www.realtraps.com

--Ethan

[zbert]

Yeah, what Ethan said. It works! He also has something called a portable vocal booth. Has some good specs. Might be something looking into with the budget you mention.