Getting the 50 years old shed treated, any inputs?

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IronWine

Member
heya people.
i am moving to a new (old) house, in a quite town. the house is surrounded with a big yard and theres an old shed of about 12sqm. i woul'd love to make a small "live" room, wired to the control room (an extra 10 sqm room inside the house). Mostly, i will record instrumets one by one and it will not really function as a live room "by the book".

so...this is pretty much the shed:

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well not the actual one but really look alike. i assume it's about 50 years old, and in my country back in the days it was a real hit to build a shed out of prefabricated sement and an asbestos roof.
To be clear, i know what iv'e got in my hands, i am aware of my low budget, and i know the outcome will be very modest at best, and happily this is what i am looking for.

my main object is to soundproof the room from outside noise ( the other way around is less of an issue ). right now, it suffers from a major noise leakage from the nearby road. at a later stage, i woul'd treat the inner acoustics of the shed.


The dry facts are pretty much like this:
-Stone pavement-like floor.
-asbestos roof (will be get rid of).
-prefabricated concrete walls
-3 glass windows.

I want to find a solution first for soundproofing these 3 elements (roof, walls and windows) as a start. I assume, i woul'd need dense materials and i am thinking about OSB wood panels:
longlength-hero.jpg


. just literally covering all the inside of the shed apart of the door and the windows, basically builiding an extra layer for the shed. as for the roof, the panels will be first layer, and ofcourse an outer water-resistant material will be used.


before commiting to any idea, i want to hear your opinions ..maybe a different material? a different approach?
thanks in advance
 
Good luck....you have a real challenge there! :D

That's pretty small...and then being all stone and concrete, buy the time you treat it, it's going to be a lot smaller. Leaving it too "live" will not work in that small size room. You'll have to make it pretty dead...and that's not even considering that you will need to add some kind of heating/cooling, plus run power and tie-lines to it from your main recording area. A lot of work with little to no gain from that structure, IMO.

So think more of it ending up like a larger iso-booth than anything else.

If you really need to use it because you have little room elsewhere, than use it like that...otherwise, I don't see much benefit for having a detached iso-booth.
Maybe it's best to just use it as a shed which might leave more space for you in the main building. :)
 
Thanks Miroslav for your input. yes, a booth will be a better word for it. i might got it a little off on the size and it's a bit larger, maybe 14sqm, but anyway it's small. that's fine with me.

what about..what about doing the soundproofing work from the outside rather then the inside?

I am now concern more with preventing the outside leakage rather then the actual acoustics of the booth, that will be taken care of later. i have not used the word "booth" as it has an acoustical hint in it. i might end up with an echoing room, but as long as it's more isolated, that's a good start for acoustical treatment.
 
Preventing leakage from the outside means really sealing those windows, door(s), maybe creating a double door with airspace, and same thing with the windows, using a sealed layer of plexiglas.

Concrete walls aren't going to be a problem, but wherever air can go in/out is where sound can, too. So, then you have to look at the roof-wall join and how the soffits (which I assume it has) are handled. Possibly some venting that is baffled with something more like rock-wool density (vs. fluffy insulation) using a series of offset pieces, i.e., so the air moves, but sound doesn't have a straight path.

I predict a stuffy little room when you're done, though. Like [MENTION=94267]miroslav[/MENTION] says, more of an iso-booth.

Whether you attack the paths for sound from the inside or outside, I don't think it will be a huge difference in the space. I'd still treat heavily in there to make the recording space pretty dead.
 
keith.rogers said:
Preventing leakage from the outside means really sealing those windows, door(s), maybe creating a double door with airspace, and same thing with the windows, using a sealed layer of plexiglas.

So basically the weaker points are the doors and the windows because of it's poor atteuation to outside leakage? as for the door i think this is the more tricky one, creating a double door meaning building a whole construction that will support that extra door. Are there any curtains-like solution out there that can do a good job? i'm thinking about those heavy, factory-used curtains.

Concrete walls aren't going to be a problem, but wherever air can go in/out is where sound can, too. So, then you have to look at the roof-wall join and how the soffits (which I assume it has) are handled. Possibly some venting that is baffled with something more like rock-wool density (vs. fluffy insulation) using a series of offset pieces, i.e., so the air moves, but sound doesn't have a straight path.

Yes, the concrete walls made me think of the idea the first place. it gives a good staring point i think. The roof-walls join has actually no suffits, theres a short gap between. but, the fact that the old roof will be ged rid of, gives a chance to deal with that weak point meticulously. first i woul'd have to decide which roof will make a good choice (multi-layered of some kind )

I predict a stuffy little room when you're done, though. Like [MENTION=94267]miroslav[/MENTION] says, more of an iso-booth.

Whether you attack the paths for sound from the inside or outside, I don't think it will be a huge difference in the space. I'd still treat heavily in there to make the recording space pretty dead.

That's really fine with me. The goal is a small deadish room that can sustain demo - quality recordings.
What do you reckon about the OSB wood as the second inner layer for the room? any better material option? shoul'd i aim for decoupling the two walls layers or putting them together with something inbetween?
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What is it you are expecting to gain by adding a layer of "wood" on top of concrete? If you want to add mass, drywall is going to do that as well, and give you a paintable surface. Neither OSB nor drywall will give you a dead interior space though - you need treatment for that.

You said you wanted to keep outside sounds from getting in, and would just start with sealing and adding insulation/mass to the new roof, along with some way to keep air from the outside having a direct path into the inner surfaces, because that's what the outside sound waves will most easily follow. A bit of simple weatherstripping and floor sweep made an amazing difference in the door to my little converted bedroom, and the door isn't even solid. ("just sayin'")

If the shed is built on a slab, and you really want a room-in-a-room, From what I've read, just separate the inner wall with an airspace and insulate it with something dense, like rockwool, and double up on the drywall. But that seems like real overkill for your purpose, and not sure you'd be happy with the result. Again, I'd start with a simple seal and fix the roof and get a bunch of rock wool panels for trapping would be my suggestion to start with.
 
As already said, ventilation/cooling is going to be the biggest concern once you get a new roof on and seal everything up.
 
About 12 by 12 feet (but hope TC it's not square!) for the imperials here? That is small but only slightly smaller that my son used for acoustic guitar and clarinet (bass DI'ed, drums software) and that sound ok but you really would not want to go smaller.
So, as stated, fix the roof. Any chance it could go higher then you could hang trappy stuff in the pitch?

I would also like some details about how you will get and rig power to it? Armoured cable would be mandatory here (where is your "here"?) but you could run conduit cable down stout plastic tube. RCD of COURSE!

Dave.
 
There are two parts to consider.
First is isolation, where you need to seal every acoustic leak in the room to attenuate any sound passing through the structure.
The second (after isolation is achieved) is room tuning, which involves adding absorption in various parts of the room (this room is way too small to use diffusion effectively) to reduce nasty nodes and flutter echoes.
 
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