Have a look at my studio space - where should I have the speakers?

MartinJohn123

New member
Apologies already for the the really messy room - I hope you can make out the studio and space from the photos! It's half a children's playroom (obviously when I'm not recording!) and half a recording studio. Hardly ideal space but I'm going to give it a makeover, put in lots of acoustic treatment. It's 11m by 3m roughly.

The question I'd like some advice on is where to position the speakers & workstation. Currently they face the short wall (3m gap) but I've read that speakers should always face the long wall as it allows more time for the bass soundwaves to decay and therefore doesn't cause standing waves. My concern is that the room is so big and wont have any acoustic treatment at the far wall.

Any suggestions will be very welcome! The only thing I can't do is move it to another room!
 

Attachments

  • 20200818_215000.jpg
    20200818_215000.jpg
    3.6 MB · Views: 19
  • 20200818_215013.jpg
    20200818_215013.jpg
    3.2 MB · Views: 22
  • 20200818_214951.jpg
    20200818_214951.jpg
    3.6 MB · Views: 25
Speakers facing hte long way into the room. Next time instead of sending messy photos, post a floor plan of the room.
 
Speakers facing hte long way into the room. Next time instead of sending messy photos, post a floor plan of the room.

Thanks. So the length of the room is about 11m. I will be putting acoustic treatment in the studio part of the room but what about the rest of the room? Approx 5x3 will be the studio and 6x3 will be the kids play area. Would it be better to put a curtain up to divide the sections to control the sound better?
 
You will benefit from giving the room some acoustic treatment generally, but If you put up a curtain, at least make it openable.

The benefit of a curtain is that it divides the areas nicely and not permanently. The disadvantage is that it encourages the creation of a mess behind it.
 
I would put speakers and workstation facing the 3m wall, near the wall, with an acoustic treatment on the other walls to prevent echo.

Better, you could make a glass wall (1,5m high) at about 3m from the back 3m wall, positioning workstation looking at the glass and treating the back wall.
Look at this ASCII draft:
View attachment Studio.txt
 
Last edited:
Thanks guys, I appreciate the advice. I'm going to move it around today and once the acoustic treatment is in place hopefully it'll be better
 
Hi, MartinJohn
Did you look at my ASCII draft in message #9? It wasn't clear there was a drawing... :)

Hey! Just seen it - thanks a lot for taking the time to do that. It makes a lot of sense to turn the speakers around, hadn't thought of that at all!

Today I've moved the workstation and speakers to the short wall at the front. The speakers sound awful in this new position, that is until I move back to what must be around 38% from the front wall. Given how long the room is (11m) it would be impractical to mix from 38% (approx 4.5 meters - can't be bothered to do the maths!) so maybe in this situation it would actually be better for me to put the speakers along the long wall, as they originally were.

But gianluca68, I'll give a lot of thought to turning the studio around so that the speakers face the front wall from the midway point.
 
If OP is primarily recording himself, then a control room would be unnecessary. Not having a control room would avoid the acoustic problems that a small room has.
 
Today I've moved the workstation and speakers to the short wall at the front. The speakers sound awful in this new position, that is until I move back to what must be around 38% from the front wall. Given how long the room is (11m) it would be impractical to mix from 38% (approx 4.5 meters - can't be bothered to do the maths!)

This diagram might help. I may have misunderstood your post, but it sounds like you had your speakers against the wall while you located yourself 38% away from it (which is 4.2m by the way).

art_room-setup1.gif
 
Back
Top