Designing & Building our new studio in S/W France

[soul4t]

Hello All,

Any input welcome, (no pun intended) as long as its balanced.

We are moving our studio from England to S/W France, so its start again time! The new home is in a 1825 Manor house (Maison de Maitre) originaly built for a Parisian poet.

The Control Room is about 26m2, The live room is about 52m2 and is about 3.6m high

We have put the build project onto a website:

Moving my Recording Studio to France - Welcome

What do you think of the layout etc.

We're starting by making the control room, here's the plan:



The live room is the other side of the window, but is not in design yet...soon, here are some poor quality photo's as a starter:



I look forward to your thoughts!

[DirkB]

You've got some great space to work with there.

Why not hire a professional designer and really make it great?
1. It will save you money
2. The results will be far better than what you could reach yourself.

Don't get me wrong. I can see you have put thought in it, but, having gone through the process myself, I can also see it is not designed to reach its full potential.

My points 1 and 2 apply if and when you hire the right guy. PM me if you are interested getting in contact with somebody who can really help you.

Best of luck!

Greetings,
Dirk

[David-Morpheus]

Hire somebody who knows his stuff. You'll save a lot of money in the long run. Thanks to the "knowledge" of my first "acoustician" I had my room redesigned completely and will have to tear the old CR down and build a new one from scratch

lesson learned.

[Tom Higgins]

That's great. Near Bordeaux, I see - lovely

I agree with Dirk - do it properly and thank yourself for it!

Good luck!

[soul4t]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the advice, we've built a studio in England and learnt quite alot from it.

The other bit of information worth bearing in mind, is that we have all the materials, and the equipment from the last studio plus a few additions. There isn't really much more we need.

Can you see any immediate flaws in the design as it is?

The celing has been built:



The window frame is almost finished, details on the Website

Thank you for the replies!

[erikdrink]

Sweet!

[DirkB]

Originally Posted by soul4t

Can you see any immediate flaws in the design as it is?

Yes, not nearly enough absorption to start trapping seriously in the bass region. Most likely you hear large peaks and dips in the sub 250Hz area when you listen at different spots in your room.

That doesn't mean you cannot work in the room, but low-end balancing will be a guessing game.

At least that's what I would expect.

If the room works for you, then certainly don't let anybody talk you into fixing things .

Best of luck,
Dirk

[soul4t]

Originally Posted by DirkB

Yes, not nearly enough absorption to start trapping seriously in the bass region. Most likely you hear large peaks and dips in the sub 250Hz area when you listen at different spots in your room.

That doesn't mean you cannot work in the room, but low-end balancing will be a guessing game.

At least that's what I would expect.

If the room works for you, then certainly don't let anybody talk you into fixing things .

Best of luck,
Dirk

Excellent mate,

Thanks for the pointer, I'll check it out!

[judah]

Lovely space to work with. I'd skip the panel approach and go for full walls. You can then stuff'em anyway you like it but (at least to me) they look much better than hanging panels.

The live room is big and the ceiling height not bad, much luck with it.

BTW, if you had a sketchup file for the entire studio we could all see exact dimensions and give you better suggestions. Just a thought.

[soul4t]

Originally Posted by judah

Lovely space to work with. I'd skip the panel approach and go for full walls. You can then stuff'em anyway you like it but (at least to me) they look much better than hanging panels.

The live room is big and the ceiling height not bad, much luck with it.

BTW, if you had a sketchup file for the entire studio we could all see exact dimensions and give you better suggestions. Just a thought.

Cool, Thanks, definitely something to think about, we're toying with another possibility of making the panels on the walls movable, then we can experiment with different configurations, but certainly consider the full wall idea.

I'll definitlely be putting the full live room and control room setup into sketchup soon, I think that will definitly help!

Thanks!

[soul4t]

Hi All!

Just thought I'd explode the walls on the sketchup and add a couple of measurements to make the scale clearer, just to make it easier to see the size of everything.



Hopefully getting the window mostly finished today!

Thanks again for the reply's!

[SPUMD]

Hi nice location.

Please find a better solution for your monitors.
You have chosen nearly the worst case by placing them on the desktop.

Please get yourself a measuring mic and software and measure your room after every treatment step to see what you need to do and how it develops.

Regards

edit: I took a closer look and saw that you did not place the monitors on the desktop.
But does it make sense that the height of the chassis are at the level of your breast?
Any chance to place them higher? Maybe to the level of your ears?

[soul4t]

Originally Posted by SPUMD

Hi nice location.

Please find a better solution for your monitors.
You have chosen nearly the worst case by placing them on the desktop.

Please get yourself a measuring mic and software and measure your room after every treatment step to see what you need to do and how it develops.

Regards

edit: I took a closer look and saw that you did not place the monitors on the desktop.
But does it make sense that the height of the chassis are at the level of your breast?
Any chance to place them higher? Maybe to the level of your ears?

Thanks,

Yes, thanks for the thoughts, the position of the monitors and other equipment will be given lots of thought and will develop when we put them in.

[soul4t]

Hi All!

The Window structure is coming along, check out: Moving my Recording Studio to France - Building the studio
to see the latest developments.

Here are a few of pics:

[soul4t]

Hi All!

Here is a basic sketchup of the live room and it's relation to the Control room:



We're not sure how to treat it, as it's larger than what we've used before. We're thinking Bass Trapping in each corner for starters, and in the middle section of the ceiling; squeazing some Rockwool in between the beams.

Where to go from there?

We don't want to completely take away the sound of the room, but obviously need a level of control to at least tame the modal resonances of the room. The dimensions are: 366cm (H), 598cm (W), 879cm (L), the ratio being (H:W:L) 1:1.63:2.40 which we believe to be near a recommended dimension?

Of course we will being doing mostly trial and error with different ideas, but it would be great if anyone has experience with larger rooms like this one?


Also, Here is a more up to date version of the Control room plans:



The early reflections should be dealt with by the absorbsion in the ceiling, the window structure (lower half) and the panel on the right (lower) side. The plan for the window was for it to reflect frequencies to the ceiling, hopefully never to return (wishfull thinking)!

Any more thoughts on this plan? We're mainly looking for acoustic treatment thoughts at the moment, but all comments are welcome!

Thanks All!

[soul4t]

Hi All,

We are just experimenting with the panels of Rockwool on the sides of the room.

Here are two options we are considering, or indeed perhaps a combination of both might be preferable?

See the 2 panels on the left hand wall (cream coloured wall)...



We're thinking that the slanted panel might offer a slightly broarder frequency absorbsion than the straight up panel.

It would be interesting to know if anyone has any thoughts.

Thanks to all!

[soul4t]

Hi All,

We have almost finished the Window structure, it is in, and absorbs a great amount of sound from the Live Room, to be tested thoroughly at a later date, also, final finishing touches will be done when the bulk of the work is done!

Here it is:



The right hand side will be covered by a large bass trap in the corner...more details are available on the blog: Moving my Recording Studio to France - Welcome

Next are those panels!

[soul4t]

Hello All!

Finally, we're back on the build!

We've built 4 floor to celing panels with 100mm thick Rock Wool RW3, which we intend to spact 100mm from the walls at prescribed places according to the first reflection zones and other areas where needed:



We've decided not to attach them to the walls fully until we're sure where they are needed; we are going to fit the corner traps, then probably make at least 2 more panels, after that we will use software to measure the acoustic response from the room and go from there.

I'll keep you updated, I'm looking forward to building the superchunk corner Bass Traps, we have Rock Wool RW45 for this purpose, which should be better than RW3 as it's less dense!

[Syncamorea]

Your space looks very nice!

I'd be concerned with the off-center window behind the monitors in the CR. You might need to have a move-able panel to cover the window.

[soul4t]

Hi,

Yea it's a great space! Thanks.

Hmm, yes we're hoping that it won't cause any great problems, but we'll be trying the room out before we finalise the attachment of the wall panels, we're in the process of making 2 more, hopefully finished in the next day or 2. We've got some ex BBC panels (grey metal perforated casing) as well, then we can walk them, and our panels around any suspect areas.

With the 4 panels in the room at the moment, there is a huge difference! We were going to be building the corner bass traps today, but as we couldn't get the wood (most of France doesn't operate on Monday mornings), we started on the other 2 panels. I'm looking forward to hearing the difference once these foundation pieces are in place!

Keep ya posted!