Its a concrete basement of 40cm thick walls. Its basically a huge resonator
So I currently have two options in mind for the side walls.
Just isolation strait onto the wall or with an air space between and top it off with a cinema curtain?
Or space between the curtain and the isolation?
concrete/air space/isolation/curtain
concrete/isolation/air space/ curtain
Or a combination of the two so there are 2 air spaces?
Make a second wall with isolation in between from wood panels.
Same prinsiple as example one regarding the layers.
On top of option 1 I can also place some defuser pannels from would to keep some livelyness in the room. I’m just not sure how much isolation would be too much and would make the room TOO dead considering its a concrete cube.
For the wall that seperates the iso botth from the mixing room I’m going for wood/isolation/air-space/isolation/wood. So its basically a double wall with an air space in between.
Then the front wall where I’m mixing I’m realy thinking about making a massiv rockwool wall of at least 0.5m thinkk.
For the ceiling I’m thinking of leaving the concrete on itself alone, and work with floating panels attached with hooks on the ceiling. Also to keep a little bit of life in the room. Also some defuser I guess. But I was thinking that adding defusers is maybe easier if you do it over time?
Pretty much any room is going to be a resonator, whether brick or drywall.
What do you mean when you say “Isolation”? Your room is underground. It’s already very well isolated unless you have people making noise above you. You just need to control the sound bouncing around inside. There’s nothing inherently wrong with concrete. In fact, I’d rather have concrete walls than drywall. Concrete is probably a bit brighter, but high frequencies are trivial to absorb. Putting drywall would be largely a waste of time, money and space unless it was serving some other purpose.
Get as much bass trapping as you possibly can in there. Then treat the walls/ceilings with broadband absorbers and probably some diffusors. You have plenty of wall space, so you’re going to want to get that treated. You can probably hit your 10k budget just in treatment, but you do it for a lot less if you make it yourself.
Wherever you possibly can, leave an air gap between the wall/ceiling and your absorbers. It’s hard to get away with that on a wall, but you can get away with in on a ceiling.
I built my own panels for treatment, but I’ve been renting so I needed stuff I can take down and move to the next place. I use these eye bolts… you can get long ones that go into the panel frame. I put nails in the wall and just rest the circular part of the eye bolt on the nail so I could just lift them off and move them when needed… it provides some separation between the panel and the wall.
Well, atm when I’m in there, it feels like all the walls need to be coverd at least a littlebit cause the echo/reverb is insane. If you talk regularly, the reverb is so loud that it is annoying to have even a simple conversation.
I was thinking about maybe a few inch think rockwool, and sort off tuck it in with cinema curtain to make it clean.
Or do you think that something like a cinema curtain placed a bit away from te wall would be enough for that, and then start adding bass traps and stuff?
I’m also gonna make em my self. Too easy compared with the price of pre made one’s o.O
Also defusers. But thats gonna be a long job kutting hundres or maybe thousands, depending on how nerdy you wanna get, small wood sticks, (or how do you call that? can’t find the right translation) and glue them in weird paterns to a board. But with some patience the result and also estetically could be nice.
right, but even with drywall, it would still be bad. Drywall doesn’t absorb much at all. It’s just an unnecessary step that will cost a lot and accomplish almost nothing. The main advantage would be aesthetic, which may be worth it, but don’t expect drywall to provide any real acoustic advantages over concrete.
You’d be much better off putting that money and time toward acoustic treatment that works. Bass traps, broadband absorbers, diffusers, etc. will be orders of magnitude more effective for the money.
I would think of it the other way around. Bass traps and broadband absorbers being your #1 priority. Curtains can be icing on the cake if you are wanting super dead sound, and also convenient because you can open/close them when you need. But curtains aren’t going to absorb much if any low end, so you’ll end up with a really boomy sounding room if you are relying on curtains for your main absorption material.
You are likely better of spending time and money on low end absorption instead of diffusion. Diffusion is helpful for high frequencies (mostly loud woodwinds or bright strings or bright pianos) not the problematic lows (75hz-350hz).
I have 2 skyline diffusers because I do a lot of shrieking woodwind stuff…but imo they fall into the “luxury” realm rather than necessity.
So yeah, I built it, and it turns out I cooked the transformer, so he’s sending me a new one so I can correct my rookie mistake! I’ll do a proper shootout once it’s working. In the meantime, I’ve been doing a mic shootout on a couple of the cabinets that I have here… switching out mics, mic positions, preamps, and a couple of different amps. I’ll probably do a full post once I’m done all that stuff too.
There are 8 contacts that get soldered to the PCB. If you heat one and solder it and move directly to the next one, you can damage the teeny copper wire that runs throughout. I didn’t wait very long between soldering each contact so the heat buildup cooked the copper wire. Confirmed from testing with my multimeter and some back and forth with Peterson who runs DIYRE.
Oh ok. I always place an alligator clip on leads that want to protect from excessive heat. It sinks enough heat to protect the device and still allows it to solder correctly.
Is it that extreme to do all the walls like that ?
Thats why I was thinking of a putting rockwool behind it, or is this not going to do much when using it only a few inches thick?
So instead I should just go strait to making basstraps?
I also saw a video of a guy talking about room treatment, and he said that what made the most difference for him was those cillinder shaped isolation thingys, can’t remember the name. Do you have any experience with those ?
Yeah, I knew it was not for the lows, but doesn’t it also get used to scrambling early reflexions all around your listening spot ?
Was also thinking above the drum space ?
Thanks for the input guys ! and sorry for the short reply summery, but had a 13h work day so I’m a bit short now haha
Depends on how much emphasis you put on the highs, most cases lows are the biggest issues and highs can often be handled easily in post. However, If you can make a diffuser yourself without spending much and if you enjoy building them, sure why not…
They are tube traps . I have been in rooms with those. They get expensive but they are good for rooms with less than ideal shapes and location. Or often for converting a home living room into recording studio. If you are starting from the ground up, you may not need these as you are building with design specifications and complete control. In your case you can anchor broadband traps evenly and treat the corners. You will have a very good room response for the money spent.
It’s pretty much a 100% guarantee that you will need bass traps, and that you will need more than you can fit in your room. Basically, the more the better.
You will also need braodband absorbers. And based on the size of your room, you can get away with putting a lot of those in there.
If you want some liveliness in your room for tracking drums, it might be a good idea to add some diffusors. At least, diffusors will be much better than a bare wall. But anything is better than a bare wall. Even hanging pictures on the wall is better than nothing.
Curtains could be useful if after all that, you still want switch between dead and less dead depending on what you are doing. There are times where dead is good. There are times where dead is less good. Curtains let you switch between the two pretty easily. But again, that would by my last priority.
I don’t have any experience with those, but it depends on what they are made of, and what you want them to do.
I don’t like thinking of diffusion as just scattering. I mean, it does scatter, but more importantly, it blurs reflections. A diffusor will take a reflection and spread it over space and time so that you get less of a hard slap back off the wall.
And actually, in my experience, even crappy diffusors have a huuuuuge effect on the sound of the room. Here’s a before and after impulse of an empty room where I added super cheap styrofoam diffusors on the wall. The difference is pretty obvious. I think the room was about 10x10x10 office space.
curious about these… from my understanding a diffuser works on reflecting sounds in different phases from different depths and phase cancelling the reflections to ease off the sonic energy front. Will styrofoam reflect the sound as efficiently as wood ?
I doubt it. I’m guessing Styrofoam does absorb some high freqs, but I don’t know how much.
The real lesson I learned from those things it to be less judgmental about “crappy” diffusors, because even the crappiest of the crappy had a significant positive impact on the room.
I just might order one… I do want more diffusion in the 4-5khz range but the time involved and cost of the skyline diffusers have always been the discouraging factor. If the styrofoam works even to a lesser degree, I have to try.
