A friend of mine and I are working on putting together an amateur studio/rehearsal space. I was sanding drywall the other day and thought "Hey, maybe I'll let some people know what we're doing and get some thoughts from some others."

http://www.austerityprogram.com/studio/index.htm

I meant to hit "preview". Sorry.

Anyway - we'd love to get some ideas from people who are interested in this kind of thing.

Okay,

= Justin

heres some general basic information. i am by no means an expert, but ive been planning and building my studio for almost a year now and ive gathered a lot of information. here goes:

you don't want parallel walls. when you can't splay, you absorb. supposedly walls splayed at 4.7 are enough to kill flutter. its very easy to absorb high frequencies, but very hard and takes up a lot of space to correctly absorb low frequencies. this is why carpeting sucks. you want your room dimensions to have a good ratio where all the modes are distributed evenly. you dont want a room with dimensions that are multiples of each other, i.e 8ft x 8ft with 16ft ceiling. there's a little program you can download called a mode calc, which you type in your room dimensions and it tells you if your room is a good ratio or not. if your mixing, you want a room thats completely symmetrical. if your room modes suck you need bass trapping, and lots of it.

i would check these forums:

http://www.recording.org/ubb/ultimatebb ... forum;f=34

johnlsayers.com has a decent forum but they arent that nice over there.

as well as this acoustic FAQ:
http://www.ethanwiner.com/acoustics.html

also, this is kinda gay, but how did you make those cool construction diagrams under "basic construction" were those hand drawn or did you use some type of cpu program?

wow, i was so blown away by those diagrams i didn't read your site. it seems you know almost all that i posted.

anyway, if i were you id splay the walls instead of leaving them parallel. your going to have to make the room rather dead to stop flutter. also think about this, to really absorb low frequencies properly, your gonna need atleast 2" of 705 fiberglass, spaced atleast 2" from the wall. so your gonna loose 4" per side, 8" total from wall to wall. id guess youd loose around that much, maybe a little less with the walls splayed and your room wouldn't have to be completely dead.

double post

checked out your studio plans... looks really nice, for a band space! my comments might be old hat for you, but it can't hurt to throw them out.

i'm guessing your amp locations in the diagram are just rough ideas, but in case they're not, you might want to experiment with moving the amps away from walls and corners.

the conduit you mention having run for power and for low-voltage signals... i know it's good to keep an eye out for running your low-voltage signals too near your high-voltage ones, especially parallel runs. but i'm not informed as to what effect the use of conduit for the low-voltage audio signal has on preventing these problems. did you look into that already, or are the conduit runs far enough apart that this couldn't possibly be an issue anyway? just something about the parallel run of HV and LV that got me curious...

something to consider with the design of your shelf-wall is what acoustic effect you anticipate it having. i know you had mentioned using bass-traps... depending on how you approach the design of the shelving cabinet, it could perform differently, acoustically. a search on google returned this site, it has some stuff that seems like it might be interesting for you...

http://www.saecollege.de/reference_mate ... encies.htm

http://www.saecollege.de/reference_mate ... .htm#panel

again, it looks like you're gonna have a really kick-ass space there. and for what it's worth, that's a really nice scream on your EP.

i am admittadly far from being an expert but was under the impression that halogen lights, low voltage or not, are going to cause significantly more noise than your normal bulb type arrangement.

maybe someone could confirm or deny this?

if proved wrong i am quite prepared to post up relevant embarresed smilie

aren't halogens just like normal incandescents only with halide gas inside the bulb? i know fluorescent, HID, and neon lights have evil effects on audio, but have never heard that about halogen. here's a site that gets into hum and buzz stuff and he explains the way dimmers work, dimmers being a source of noise.

http://www.ethanwiner.com/dimmers.html

but i don't think the bulb itself is intrinsically noisy like fluorescents or neons. here's an explanation of what separates halogen lights from "normal" incandescent lights.

http://home.howstuffworks.com/question151.htm

i don't have any direct experience with hum related to halogen lights. HID, fluorescent, and neon, yes. and anything dimmed, yes. but halogen, no.

cheers 'copter

think i was working on my experience with a stand up halogen lamp i used to have which made a godawful noise but upon reflection probably came from the dimmer not the bulb.

thanks for taking the time to educate me!

oh, and as promised

the site is interesting and informative. keep us up to date!

some suggestions:

photos--people love to look at things
information about cost--i'd be interested to see the budget for this endeavor