Help with ceiling isolation in less than perfect control room

[mds]

Hey guys,

I've been helping some faculty members at a nearby university set up some recording capacity in a classroom. They have decent gear, and the tracking room is pretty big, but the control room is dismally small. It is a glorified hallway so it is long and skinny. There is about 6 feet from the monitors to the back wall. This sucks, obviously, but it is what we have to work with. I know I can't make this a good room, but I want to put in as much trapping as I can. My budget is pretty open(big private school with lots o cash), but I can't do any significant changes to the room.

I have a good handle on how to treat the walls and corners, but the ceiling is a problem. The back and side walls don't go up all the way to the bottom of the higher levels flooring, so there is some bleed from the hallway outside and the next room over. Fortunately there is good isolation from the tracking room to the control room. I know I can't solve the leakage problem, but I know I can at least mellow out some of it. I might just get some fiberglass or mat material and place it above the ceiling tiles so there is more mass up there. Anyone have a more elegant solution?

Thanks!

Mike

[matt thomas]

Ummm, if I am undestanding your problem correctly, a couple o cans of expanding foam from your local hardware store should do the trick, fill up all the gaps (if they are really big, use some wood or something too)and make it air tight.

Also, are your speakers pointing accross the "hallway" or down it, you should consider pointing them down the hall lengthways if they aren't already

narco

[Ethan Winer]

Mike,

> I know I can't make this a good room, but I want to put in as much trapping as I can. <

Sure, that will help the sound inside the room, but it will not affect how much sound leaks into or out of the room.

> The back and side walls don't go up all the way to the bottom of the higher levels flooring <

If you can't add new wall sections to continue up to the ceiling then you won't be able to improve this. Lightweight materials like foam and fiberglass do nothing for isolation. The key is mass. Could you at least build wall sections from heavy wood or MDF and lean them against the current walls?

--Ethan

[mds]

Thanks, guys. It is a difficult problem. Unfortunately the monitors face across the hallway. The room was just too narrow the other way to fit any of the stuff in there we needed. I tried to persuade a change in orientation, but they weren't into it(the setup did kinda suck that way).

I know absorption won't creat isolation, but I was trying to come up with schemes to cover the ceiling with some sort of mass to help out. I don't know if we're allowed to cover the area above the ceiling tiles, but maybe just covering the area with fiberglass or acoustic matting material would help. The best solution would be to just get the walls finished up to the ceiling, but I don't know if I can make that happen.


Mike

[Mike Chafee]

Kinetics Noise control sells two different high mass ceiling tiles, the Embassy, which also has absorption, and the quiet tile which mainly provides isolation.
kineticsnoise.com

Mike chafee

[mds]

Those might help a lot, thanks...I could put those in without annoying the facility people too much, which is definitely a consideration...

Thanks!

Mike

[jajjguy]

Originally Posted by narco

Ummm, if I am undestanding your problem correctly, a couple o cans of expanding foam from your local hardware store should do the trick, fill up all the gaps (if they are really big, use some wood or something too)and make it air tight.

agreed

the expanding foam narco refers to is closed cell foam, a different thing entirely from the "acoustical" foam sometimes used for absorption (which is open cell, and does not help for isolation). naturally, any big holes will be best treated with mass, but the expanding foam stuff can be handy for plugging small gaps.