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[dirkb]

Hi,

I am rethinking my current plans and might be changing to a bigger one room studio instead of smaller CR and separate smaller LR.
I work in a (small) one room studio and there is a lot I like about working like that. Of course there are monitoring limitations during tracking, but I have learned to work around that.

I am a little puzzled though how to approach the acoustics. The room will be fairly large: 11.5x7m2 with a cathedral roof from 2.5m to 4 meters in the middle.

Is this a type of room where RT60 calculations start to make sense? I would love to have something like 0.5-1s of decay for drumrecordings, but with gobo's I would try to separate the CR part of the room during mixing and hope to have a neutral environment. I assume it would be easier to get even bass response since the troublesome roommode area is shifted to down to the lower frequency range?

What would be a good way to approach this accoustically? I have attached a first shot at it...

Thanks,
Dirk

[ruffrecords]

dirkb wrote on Sun, 22 October 2006 11:44

I am a little puzzled though how to approach the acoustics. The room will be fairly large: 11.5x7m2 with a cathedral roof from 2.5m to 4 meters in the middle.

I have a very similar situation and problem. My room is about 8mx4m with a 4m cathedral roof (it's an old barn). The old flint walls and brickwork are nice and uneven so they already scatter some sound. My current layout is similar to your pic except my lesser width means I don't have room for the storage areas either side of the mix postion but otherwise it is remakably similar. At present I have a carpeted concrete floor and several wall hanging gobos mainly for higher frequency control. As it is an old building th walls are not parallel so bass resonances are not too severe but I am still thinking of bass traps in each corner.

Ian

[Ethan Winer]

Dirk,

> The room will be fairly large: 11.5x7m2 with a cathedral roof from 2.5m to 4 meters in the middle. <

That's similar to my one-room setup. In metric my room is 10.3 long by 5.5 wide by 3.6 meters under the center peak. I use my room for mixing and also for recording. So I have it less live at the mixing end and more live for the other 4/5 of the length. It works really well! The downside of a large space is you need that much more acoustic treatment. But it's really great having a large room where all the walls are far enough away to avoid comb filtering and that typical boxy sound.

> Is this a type of room where RT60 calculations start to make sense? <

Yes, I think so. I'll be interested to hear what Fran says.

> I assume it would be easier to get even bass response since the troublesome roommode area is shifted to down to the lower frequency range? <

Yes, but you'll still need plenty of bass trapping. I have 18 traps 8 feet long plus another 12 traps 4 feet long in my room, and your room is even larger.

--Ethan

[franman]

I'm with Ethan on this one...  any large "Control ROom" must be kept from becoming an "out of control room" by properly treating it and not forgeting that bass trapping is still important. You can probably get away with more (almost all INHO) broadband trapping in this large of a room, but to the contrary, we are doing a very large Critical List Room right now and are incoporating lots of tuned traps at very low frequencies to control the lowest axial modes so that they dont get a chance to start ringing...

Just don't leave out the bass traps if you're going to make an all purpose/ dual purpose room... all of our typical reflection control rules apply as well (don't forget about the ceiling and 1st reflections in the mixing end!!).

You could do RT-60 calculation on the bare space and it would be valid, but you're going to spend a lot of time treating it (hopefully) and I think you'll get down to the point where Sagine and Ering equations will become invalid given the amount of sabines of absorption vs. Room volume (with the treatments, or course)....

[ruffrecords]

franman wrote on Wed, 25 October 2006 01:06

You could do RT-60 calculation on the bare space and it would be valid, but you're going to spend a lot of time treating it (hopefully) and I think you'll get down to the point where Sagine and Ering equations will become invalid given the amount of sabines of absorption vs. Room volume (with the treatments, or course)....

On a related note, how do you calculate the room nodes for a room with a cathedral roof?

Cheers

Ian

[franman]

The best you can do without a simulation for odd sized and shaped rooms (like Cara) is to do Minimums, Maximums and Mean dimensions for any side that varies, including the height... that's what we do..

[Toby M]

Im thinking along the same way. A Larger controlroom, with an iso damped iso big enough for drums and a seperate machineroom for noisy equipment.

This is a link to a Sketchup Sketch.. for how i?ve been thinking so for.


http://johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5802&highl ight=


My main reason behind it is, better communication, faster productions, no need to run through 2 doors just to change a mic. Positioning.
I feel a lot of work is done in the control room for creative reasons, so an often unused live room for me would be a waste of real estate.

A Hidley nonenvironment front control room (broadband absorption, reflective front, absorptive rear), combined with a Motown style dead below waist level "backroom" with a more lively upper parts. Also thinking about including a Malcolm Chisholm design feature with a reflective screen in the front of the ?play? area in order to give more acoustic feedback to our players since that there is no frontwall to play against anymore.

Of course i see drawbacks. The use of earprotection and the fact that we can no longer make fun of the performer behind the glass and that we also have to constantly be close to some smelly musicians.. We will get more "human" noises recorded but i personally find that quite a feature, think of old Bob Dylan songs complete with scraping stools and people entering the room. A performance frozen in time..

Thanks for a great forum!  Any critique and suggestions highly welcome. /Toby