help with monitors placement etc...

[carlosguardia]

Hi there,

For the past few weeks I've been fixing my recording studio. My control room is rectangular, measuring 3.35 meters, by 3.17 meters wide and 2.44 meters high. The studio is 3.35 by 4.35 on one side and 4.65 on the longer side (the 30 cm difference was so that the back wall would not be parallel to the front wall). All walls are made of gypsum (plaster I guess would be the translation of the material). The ceiling is suspended 2 cm plywood panels.

I recently also built a vocal booth that I plan to treat with absorbent material so as to leave it anechoic. I have a custom built desk that I had originally placed centered in the control room but a few days ago I had the room carpeted and while the people doing my carpet where here I decided to put it on a corner and have been working this way since. I'm going to try and take some pictures and post them, but in the meantime I have a few images I did of the studio in order to explain myself better.

I want to maintain a LEDE (Live End Dead End) control room and make it as neutral as possible. The sofas behind where I sit kind of work as bass traps and I would love to add some schroeder diffusors on the walls behind me and have tried to put the monitors equidistant from the walls etc.

My questions are basically what opinions do you have of my studio and the disposition of the elements I have there so far, and how would you improve the acoustics of it?!

Thank you for the time and I hope to learn some more and be able to make better mixes in my control room.

Cheers,

Carlos

 

[rayc]

The glass behind the R monitor might need consideration. I hate to see so much space wasted across a corner. Wouldn't you want a direct view of the tracking space?

 

[gullfo]

turn the desk to face the wall to the left of the desk - you will then have a view into either room and be pointing down the long portion of the room. if necessary, have the windows angled front to back to get reflections past you. if not an option, put up heavy drapes you can close over each when mixing. then treat the corners to get bass trapping, also over the front top corner and lower front corner will benefit from trapping.

 

[carlosguardia]

Thank you guys for your response and sorry it took me a while to get back to you...
rayc, you're totally right, the glass behind the R monitor is not a good idea. I would like to be able to look into the vocal booth and the main room, hence where I placed my desk. The booth used to be a shower and since in only need the toilet and the sink in the studio, I decided to build a window into my control room and turn the shower area into an anechoic chamber to track voices-guitars-percussion-whatever I want to track in that space However, my priority right now is acoustics and not aesthetics or comfort so if I have to give my back to one of the tracking rooms or see them at 3 and 9 o'clock, that's fine as long as I have my monitors placed in the best spot I can find given my control room.

Gullfo, thanks for your suggestion. I had considered moving the desk so that the booth would be at my 9 and the "big" room at my 3... I also thought it would be wise to treat the wall behind the monitors with either carpet or foam (thick piramid shaped stuff) to work as absorbent material... One thing though... the longest side of my rectangular room is the side that has the windows... not the other way around... is that or could that be an issue? given the doors where would you place the bass traps? Would triangular (more like pyramidal) bass traps work just as well?? would you recomend a schroeder difussor on the wall behind where I should put the desk?


Thanks again and any new input would be awesome!!!
What do you think about a cloud

 

[carlosguardia]

by the way, what do you think about a bass trap cloud right on top of where my sweet spot would be? And one more thing... my windows are already built and they are slanted where the top of the window is closer to me than the bottom of it (does that make sense?) and there is a good 5 or 6 cm distance between them...

 

[gullfo]

if the long portion is side to side, that actually might help a bit because of being trapped between windows. definitely add enough absorption overhead and the rear wall to deal with reflections. the slant doesn't help much in terms of reflection control when top to bottom but would help a bit if front to back - to move the sound past you.