Magickman's studio makeover and construction thread

[Magickman]

This thread will serve to document the process of our acoustical makeover and bass trap construction techniques. I have opted to place this thread here as opposed to the "Bass traps, acoustic panels, foam etc" forum as it's primary focus is on construction. I have started a thread in the "Bass traps, acoustic panels, foam etc" dedicated to the acoustical aspects and room tuning process. That thread can be found here:

Magickman's room tuning thread

I have extensively documented the construction process, but do keep in mind this was an existing studio, so the construction details will mostly pertain the modular acoustical devices that I have designed and built. The control room is nearing completion, and some work has been done on the live/tracking room, but more is planned. The iso booth is next up, and I will be documenting our upgrades to the live room over the next couple months.

I'll begin by showing some images of the control room before we started. There were numerous problems with isolation and basic design/implementation of the room, like the 3 inch gap through the wall the entire length above the sliding glass door which was simply covered up with a piece of trim!!! Or the placement of the main entry door in the rear corner of the room. Or the observation window that, once the window casing was removed, had gaps around the framing that you drive a Honda Civic through, not to mention the use of 1/2" Plexiglass in conjunction with 1/4" glass for the two pains. I could go on. I don't know what these people were thinking.

As we dug into the walls, etc., it became evident that whomever designed the place probably actually knew what they were doing; however, the implementation of that design was completely bungled and, I suspect, was altered by the studio owners with no regard for the acoustical ramifications of their decisions (the entry door in the rear corner of the room is a good example).

At any rate, here's some images of the room and the "treatment" (and I use that term lightly) they applied.

[jwl]

Looks cool, but you might consider putting this in the build diaries sub-forum.

Photo diaries of recording studio construction projects - Gearslutz.com

[Magickman]

Originally Posted by jwl

Looks cool, but you might consider putting this in the build diaries sub-forum.

Photo diaries of recording studio construction projects - Gearslutz.com

Good call. I'm never in that forum, so I forgot it was there.

How does one go about moving a thread from one forum to another?

TIA,

-MM

[Magickman]

The first order of business was dealing with the door to the iso booth.

In the original construction, they placed that door right at the first reflection point; I mean, this door is like 7 feet wide, so pretty much wherever the mix position was, there was a big piece of glass at the first reflection point. And since it was the access to and from the iso booth, we couldn't simply cover it up with treatments or we'd lose our access to the iso booth. Besides, the door was really wimpy glass, and there were huge gaps all around the door framing, so isolation between the CR and iso were pretty much nill!

Also, since the main door to the control room was located on the rear wall in the corner (which would not allow us to treat that corner), we decided to ditch that door, and use the iso as the main entrance to the control room. Not ideal, but at least it would allow us to properly treat all corners of the room.

So we went about removing the sliding glass door and replacing it with a proper observation window and solid door. We pushed the window and door far enough back in the room so that proper treatments could be applied to the front half of the room.

Our design intent is/was to create a modified LEDE/RFZ type room.

That's my father-in-law in the photos. You'll be seeing a lot of him, and not much of me, since I'm the one holding the camera!

[Magickman]

Once the rough framing was in place, I began caulking everything up for a nice air-tight seal! I had to grind away some concrete anchors that were originally holding the bottom plate in place in order to make room for the acoustic threshold that will eventually go in there.

[Magickman]

Here we are hanging the new door and getting it all leveled out properly.

I never would have been able to do this without the help of my father-in-law. Here's been a carpenter for most of his life. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into!

This will ultimately be a "Super Door" as described in Rod Gervais' book.

You can also see the preliminary framing going in for the new iso observation window.

[Magickman]

Here's the wall all sealed up and the new window frame installed, and the glass going in, and finally the window stops being installed.

We're using 1/2" and 3/4" glass for both the iso observation window, and the main observation window. I would have gone 3/4" and 1", but my budget wouldn't allow it.

[Magickman]

The live room is a shared space with two separate control rooms and iso booths attached. I really need to be able to work in my control room (and iso) if the live room is in use by the other control room, so we decided to beef up the existing walls.

Existing construction was double-wall with 1 layer of 1/2" and one layer 5/8" drywall on each side of the wall. We decided to add two more layers of 5/8" drywall (with green glue between each layer) to each side of the wall, bringing it up to 8 layers of drywall total!

Here's the first layer on the CR side going up. Although you don't see it in the pics, we applied a layer of Green Glue to the drywall before it went up.

Drywall was held back from all corners about 1/4". All the seams were mudded up and the corners calked up with a butyl caulk. You'll notice the sloppy seams where the drywall meets: That's a combination of my lack of experience cutting drywall, and the odd shape of the wall. You see, I had cut all the drywall the night before in order to save time for John, my father-in-law. John wasn't too pleased with my work, and made certain he was present for all further drywall cutting!

[Magickman]

One of the other things we did to in crease the TL of the wall was to convert the AC outlets to surface mount. We also mudded up the hole where the audio cabling passes through the wall. There was a lot of sound coming through those holes. They were simply not done properly in the original construction.

Pretty crude approach, but very affective!

[Magickman]

I'm telescoping forward a little bit here, but I wanted to show you how those surface mount conversions turned out.

Please excuse the construction dust.

[Magickman]

Okay, time for the second layer of drywall. You'll note how much nicer these cuts look. Everything is tight and pretty. Thanks John!

You can see my tourettes cropping up in a couple of the shots.

Seams were staggered, and once again held back from the corners and floor 1/4". Then all the seams were mudded and/or caulked.

[Magickman]

Next, we took a detour into the live room to build these Helmholtz devices.

[Magickman]

That process went something like this.

First, there was a whole lot of drilling! Something I've done a lot more of since!

[Magickman]

Next, we cut all the pieces to build the boxes, which included creating bevels on some of the framing members and creating a lot of angled pieces.

These boxes are extremely rigid and heavy being made of 3/4 MDF and 2-by dimensional lumber. The faces are 3/4" cabinet grade maple plywood.

[Magickman]

Once we had all our pieces cut, we went about assembling the boxes. This is pretty simple construction, so I won't go into any great detail there. I think the pictures are pretty self explanatory. However, if anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask.

[Magickman]

As these are Helmholtz devices, these boxes needed to be sealed up air tight, so everything was glued and screwed, and then all seams were caulked air tight.

[Magickman]

Once the boxes were all assembled, we went about prepping the perforated panels to be attached. This included applying fabric to the inside face of the panels, and then either filling the box with fluffy glass, or applying OC703 directly to the panel, depending on which box it was, and how broadband of an effect we wanted out of that box.

You'll note in one pic that I am applying weather stripping around the edge of the box. This is to ensure an airtight fit when the perforated panel is attached to the box. This way, the panel can be easily removed for re-tuning, etc.

BTW, I used Chris Wealey's calculator to determine the design parameters for these devices.

[Magickman]

Let the first couple pics in that last post serve as a warning of the dangers of "crack"!

[gullfo]

if you sell enough "mind wash" to people who viewed the cracks, it could help pay for the construction

very nice workmanship overall!

[DanDan]

Magick, I am sure if you ask Jay, he would move the thread to the more appropriate forum sub section. May I ask, how did you calculate the Helmholtz details?

DD

[Magickman]

Originally Posted by DanDan

Magick, I am sure if you ask Jay, he would move the thread to the more appropriate forum sub section. May I ask, how did you calculate the Helmholtz details?

DD

Which sub-forum is it that would be more appropriate. It seems pretty much like a build diary to me.

[Magickman]

Originally Posted by DanDan

May I ask, how did you calculate the Helmholtz details?

DD

As stated above in post #17, I used Chris Wealey's calc.

DanDan, please pay attention! tutt

Originally Posted by Magickman

Once the boxes were all assembled, we went about prepping the perforated panels to be attached. This included applying fabric to the inside face of the panels, and then either filling the box with fluffy glass, or applying OC703 directly to the panel, depending on which box it was, and how broadband of an effect we wanted out of that box.

You'll note in one pic that I am applying weather stripping around the edge of the box. This is to ensure an airtight fit when the perforated panel is attached to the box. This way, the panel can be easily removed for re-tuning, etc.

BTW, I used Chris Wealey's calculator to determine the design parameters for these devices.

[DanDan]

Sorry Magic, I am confused by posts 2 and 3 above. What are they referring to? This thread is of course in the right place.

DD

[DanDan]

Apart from not noticing the earlier mention of Whealy, what I really meant to ask was-
How did you use a calculator given the angled front? I didn't think Whealy caters for that. Plus, what was your target frequency range and how did you chose it.

DD

[Magickman]

Originally Posted by DanDan

Sorry Magic, I am confused by posts 2 and 3 above. What are they referring to? This thread is of course in the right place.

DD

It was originally in the Studio Building/Acoustics forum, but I asked Jay to move it on Day 1.

[Magickman]

Originally Posted by DanDan

Apart from not noticing the earlier mention of Whealy, what I really meant to ask was-
How did you use a calculator given the angled front? I didn't think Whealy caters for that. Plus, what was your target frequency range and how did you chose it.

DD

We were going for very broadband low frequency absorption. This room is not that big (~25'x20'), so there was just a lot of general modal resonance. The traps on the wall are designed to hit frequencies in the 100Hz-500Hz range. The big traps in the corner are meant to target 100Hz and below (they are very deep).

As for calculating for the angled front: Basically I calculated for the shallow end depth, the middle depth, and the deep end depth, and that gave me the range. I decided where I wanted absorption to end, and reflection to begin, and that gave me the distance between the holes. Once I had some basic parameters, I shuffled things around in Whealey's calc until I landed on something that gave me what I was looking for. Obviously, I'm borrowing heavily from a lot of people (i.e. - John Sayer's, Jeff Cooper, Theodore J. Schultz, Chris Pelonis, Wes Lachot, our own Avare etc., etc.)

Once again, these are designed to be pretty broadband, although contained to the low mids, bass and deep bass. They aren't meant to target specific frequencies. It's a very general kind of treatment. Also, the panels are all a little different. Different sized holes; different spacing; different perforation percentages. As I say, it's very broadband.

Does that answer your question?

[Magickman]

Okay, after our segue into the live room, we were back in the control room.

Our next order of business was rebuilding the main observation window.

As previously stated, the observation window was really mucked up in the original construction. The window framing material was 5/8" (pretty wimpy), and there were 1/4" gaps around the entire perimeter of frame such that, once I pulled the window casing off, I could see right through into the live room. Not a drop of caulking to be found anywhere! Not only that, but once we removed the "glass", we discovered that the thicker of the two pieces was not glass at all, but rather plexiglass! I can't imagine what these people were thinking, but they certainly weren't thinking about isolation. So the glazing consisted of one piece of 1/4" plate glass, and one piece of 1/2" plexiglass.

So the first thing we did was to strip the everything back to the studs.

[Magickman]

Next, there was a lot of discussion about the best way to proceed. Then we measured twice and then cut our 5/4" hemlock window framing stock to size and set about putting the frame in.

We used a good layer of Green Glue between the frame and studs to ensure a nice airtight seal, and then nailed the framing members in place.

[Magickman]

Next we measured and cut the inner stops. We used 1"x2" hemlock for the inner stops.

[Magickman]

Once the frame and inner stops were in, I caulked everything up with a good butyl caulk for a nice airtight seal.