Making a studio in a small room

[mountainstorm]

Im looking for some advice, and this appears to be a good place to come for it :)

I've got a small room which I have managed to wrestle control of from my wife. its about 3.3mx2.6m in my victorian terrace house. I don't have problems with neighbor noise (at the moment) and I'm looking to make my room sound ... erm, better.

At present I have it setup like this (be aware that there's loads of junk on the shelves in real life and about 8 guitars littered around the room.


You can see the frequency response as created with FuzzMeasure. So I tried moving my monitors around to fire down the length of the room (they were mounted on the ends of an ironing board so not the most stable of platforms). Thus it looked like this.


My question is, are these really bad frequency responses? Remember Im not trying to make this room perfect as it still needs to be acceptable to the wife AND usable to store all the junk on the shelves in/iron in etc. How bad realistically are they?

From what I've read (and what I've seen) it sounds like I should use the second configuration for my monitors but perhaps place the bookcases behind me to create a bespoke "Ikea Billy Diffuser" ... thus something like this but with some acoustic foam add at the mirror points.


Have I got the wrong end of the stick? What can I do to make the room sound better? How bad are these response graphs? should I just go cry in the corner and save for a bigger house :)

Thanks in advance

Rich

[gullfo]

with that small a space you need plenty of corner trapping and some absorption on each of the walls and ceiling to get the reflections under control. i don't advocate a dead room, but you definitely want bass trapping in each of the 3 corners and maybe something on the wall-ceiling corners to save floor space. start there and add 1 60cm x 120cm x 100mm absorber on each wall and on the ceiling. the entire room is pretty much a reflection point so maybe 2 absorbers on the wall across from the desk... get rid of everything else you can in the room - make some measurements - then bring in other things like guitars, keyboard etc. find another place for the bookshelves.