C
conan
New member
Well, as some people may remember I came to you guys for help a few months ago, found a site for building, found out it was going to be useless, and have eventually been forced to plump for a terraced residential house (ouch). Thanks to your help, the isolation (room-in-room on floating floor) has turned out more than adequate for our purposes despite being in a less-than-ideal location.
With that done, it's now onto the fun part - acoustic treatment. As usual, I will try to be pretty verbose in my explanation of the problem.
To recap, I will be using the studio for dance music production. Tracks are always mastered externally by our record labels so I don't need or expect the studio to sound anything like a multi-million pound mastering facility. No vocals will be recorded in this room (we'll be using an adjacent room for this but as dance music vocals are so heavily processed, you can forget about this for now).
I completely forget the room dimensions, but I can get them from the plans if needs be. There will be a laminate wood floor but apart from that the room is now just bare plasterboard.
1) I would like the studio to sound reasonably flat with minimal additional cost or construction (yeh, don't we all?) However, as I said, I'm producing dance music - not the latest orchestral prodigies - so if I can get a half decent sound I'll be very happy. When working in poorly treated 'studios' I often tend to mix too bright with too much top end and not enough bass/sub-bass. Am I right in thinking that in this scenario, on a simplistic level, I need to control the bass/mid frequencies with bass traps and/or panel absorbers and allow some of the highs to be reflected?
2) I notice in most home studio construction guides (including John Sayer's SAE material) that there is a second frame built out from the plasterboard, filled with insulation and covered with cloth. Have I got this right or am I going mad? What kind of effect does this really have on the sound of the room? If it helps with reflections, would it do any good to build such a construction just on the wall facing the monitor speakers? There really isn't enough space to do this throughout the room.
3) I also note that any studio designer worth her salt cringes at the mention of carpeted walls. I understand the acoustic principles behind such a reaction, but considering that I can cheaply purchase fire-retardant carpet designed for schools, is there any merit to be had for strategic application of this material on walls? If part of the walls were carpeted and split up with proper absorbers/diffusers/bass traps in the right places, would this give me a flat-ish response (carpet absorbing high/high-mid, traps absorbing low/mid) or have I completely misunderstood the science involved?
Thanks guys!
With that done, it's now onto the fun part - acoustic treatment. As usual, I will try to be pretty verbose in my explanation of the problem.
To recap, I will be using the studio for dance music production. Tracks are always mastered externally by our record labels so I don't need or expect the studio to sound anything like a multi-million pound mastering facility. No vocals will be recorded in this room (we'll be using an adjacent room for this but as dance music vocals are so heavily processed, you can forget about this for now).
I completely forget the room dimensions, but I can get them from the plans if needs be. There will be a laminate wood floor but apart from that the room is now just bare plasterboard.
1) I would like the studio to sound reasonably flat with minimal additional cost or construction (yeh, don't we all?) However, as I said, I'm producing dance music - not the latest orchestral prodigies - so if I can get a half decent sound I'll be very happy. When working in poorly treated 'studios' I often tend to mix too bright with too much top end and not enough bass/sub-bass. Am I right in thinking that in this scenario, on a simplistic level, I need to control the bass/mid frequencies with bass traps and/or panel absorbers and allow some of the highs to be reflected?
2) I notice in most home studio construction guides (including John Sayer's SAE material) that there is a second frame built out from the plasterboard, filled with insulation and covered with cloth. Have I got this right or am I going mad? What kind of effect does this really have on the sound of the room? If it helps with reflections, would it do any good to build such a construction just on the wall facing the monitor speakers? There really isn't enough space to do this throughout the room.
3) I also note that any studio designer worth her salt cringes at the mention of carpeted walls. I understand the acoustic principles behind such a reaction, but considering that I can cheaply purchase fire-retardant carpet designed for schools, is there any merit to be had for strategic application of this material on walls? If part of the walls were carpeted and split up with proper absorbers/diffusers/bass traps in the right places, would this give me a flat-ish response (carpet absorbing high/high-mid, traps absorbing low/mid) or have I completely misunderstood the science involved?
Thanks guys!
Hence my asking if there were any acoustical detriment to its use. I saw it merely as an easy way of making the place look okay before any real acoustic treatment is added.