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Sound Insulation
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nhibberd
Hi,

I am moving house soon and have saved up some cash to make one room into my home studio. I was thinking of those bumpy pads that you can get and also some strange metal layered plat type things that apparently kill the bass through the walls. It's a wooden house so it's quite important I get it right.

Does anybody know where I can get info on if it actualy works!?!? Does anybody have experience with this? And maybe some stats on what size of room is best for the accoustics and so on.

CD
Aquarian
Fine tuning a room for accoustics is a complicated thing. Just throwing around bass traps and isolating material could just worsen your sound quality if you don't know what you're doing(and make you lose alot of time and money). So before you do anything, make sure you have at least a basic idea of how your room works accoustically - where your frequencies build up, how the angles of the walls reflect sound, etc. I suggest trying different listening positions as well as different speaker placements to see which ones work best. Sometimes what seems like a good placement on paper may sound different when applied.

Rules of thumb;
-Avoid having a bunch of corners - curves and angles on the walls and ceillings are a good thing
-foamy materials (egg cartons, commercial foam, curtains, etc) absorb mid to high frequencies only
-bass builds up in corners (this is where you'll generally put bass traps)
-don't go excessive with sound absorbtion, it makes the room sound completely dead and very unpleasant (this also means you probably shouldn't carpet your floor). Positioning of speakers and listening positions is most important.
-make sure the room is symetrical. Don't put your work desk in a corner, and if you put something on one side, try to put something similar on the other - this way the frequencies coming out of your speakers will bounce in a similar fashion on both sides, giving you a more accurate impression of the stereo image.
R2Project
nhibberd ,

Are you talking about sound insulation or Acoustic treatment of the room. The two are quite different (as I'm sure you know) the first is designed to stop the sound getting out of the room (so we are taking about floating floors, "air lock" doors etc). the second is to give the room an acoustic quality, dead for a monitoring room, slightly alive for a vocal room etc.

Anyway, here's some links to a well respected (and somewhat ammusing) tutorial on accoustic treatment:

http://www.samplecraze.com/tutorial.php?xTutorialID=28

http://www.samplecraze.com/tutorial.php?xTutorialID=29

http://www.samplecraze.com/tutorial.php?xTutorialID=30

Before you go spending lots of money on accoustic foam take a look at these:

http://www.readyacoustics.com/

Andy
thesuperfunk
The SOS forum will be an essential read before you head into any project like this ...

http://www.soundonsound.com/forum/p...=&view=&sb=5&o=
Diginerd
Look up my studio buildout tread, there are a ton of links in there (The BBC ones are very good)which should answer many questions.

Also i'm happy to chat offline about my build in what looks like a similar situation..
zenperson
For a project studio, don't think too too much into it.. basically, just put your rig in the corner, put some sound absobers in the angle of reflection corners, and curtains work quite well on the walls... u just wanna create a degree of compression in the room...Where sounds are being just absorbed and not reflected... A really good way to see where your angles of reflection are is to take a mirror, and stand against the wall, until you can see your speakers in the mirror. That way, you'll know right where your angle of incidence is.

I had a well known sound reinforcement engineer tell me this.... really well known guy.. did front of house engineering for Tool, KISS... also, has done professional sound design and installation in some well known clubs, like Axis/Radious in Phoenix...



:)
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