The Sonic Ark Studio Building diary

[nikodemos]

Hey everybody here is a couple of shots from the building of the Sonic Ark Studio in Thessaloniki - Greece....It took about 3 years of researching and designing and allmost 6 months of building it....but we're quite proud of it

Check these out and i'll get back with floor plans and construction details, wiring plans etc...

part A : space and the floating floor

[nikodemos]

part B : construction....











I'll post later lots more pictures from the construction including pics from the control room....here is the live room and 2 booths

[nikodemos]

part C : ....finally

[AnthonyRochester]

very nice

[TLR]

Envy...

[Colonel Blues]

Pfew ! What a nice place you made !!!

[sameal]

i like the combination of the lighting and the decor.

[nikodemos]

thanks guys!!!

a few words about the design - construction regarding sound transmission loss etc:

Al the rooms are built uppon a concrete floating floor (a completelly different one for each room) based on elastic pads acting as springs resulting a pretty low natural frequency of about 8,5 Hz. The walls are also a MSM design consisting of 3 layers of 12,5mm of gypsum on 75mm studs on each side and about 20cm distance (that's about 35cm including studs) and the cavity is partly (about 50%) filled with 50 kg/m3 rockwool. The ceiling is suspended through elastic suspensions and otherwise is the same as the walls. However in 2 booths and the practice room we decided to use steel studs and completelly decouple the inner cell from the structure (nothing is attached to it the wholle inner cell is a stell cage uppon the concrete floating floor). All windows and doors are laminated glass ranging from 1.5cm to 2.5cm (outer windows), dual on completelly different frames.

I'll post some sketches of the walls etc later

[pkole]

Congratulations on your new place.
It looks amazing.
I hope i will manage to visit you soon.
Cheers.

[nikodemos]

Originally Posted by pkole

Congratulations on your new place.
It looks amazing.
I hope i will manage to visit you soon.
Cheers.

thanks man!!!

[threshhold]

To studio einai poli omorfo ! Na ste kala

[Royal Music FND]

Looks Amazing! Great work.

Would you be able to talk a little bit more with specifics about the floating floors?

[nikodemos]

Originally Posted by Royal Music FND

Looks Amazing! Great work.

Would you be able to talk a little bit more with specifics about the floating floors?

thanks mate

The whole concept behind the floating floor was to create a proper MASS - SPRING - MASS system with the lower possible natural frequency (fn) on which the rest of the inner structure would be sited on.

In Europe , where most buildings have a continues reinforced concrete structure having a "heavy" true floating floor is pretty much unavoidable.

So we decided to go for a concrete floating floor using elastomer pads as springs. These were properly designed pads with a specific deflection rate in order to provide the proper "spring" behavior under a specific load. In our case we used dual layer of the pads to expand the deflection to about 3 mm in order to get the lowest possible fn without sacrificing height. So, and based on the specs of the pads and calculations we made we poured 12cm of reinforced concrete , using hardwood as a permanent base upon the elastic pads, covered with plastic sheets to avoid water from the concrete to leak to the hardwood. Between the pads we used 50 kg/m3 mineral wool to cover the cavity and reduce the resonances that could rise in there. We used thicker mineral wool to decouple the floor perimeter from the existing concrete walls (we removed these after the floor was ready).

Since we wanted to lift the whole inner structure on the new concrete floor we had to calculate the load of the inner walls and use a larger amount of pads throughout the perimeter of each room to avoid the "crown" effect due to excessive loading on the perimeter of each room.

Everything worked fine and we are very happy with the results...the fllor is supposed to have a natural freq of about 8Hz resulting a pretty nice respond to low end sound transimision having a really effective structure regarding transmition loss down to about 30Hz.