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I'm going to construct a personal studio space over the next six months and I need some help.

The space will be one room. It will be a practice space as well as serving both live and control room-recording functions. Music will generally be rock-type. I am most interested in the room sounding good when recording/playing/listening and I want it to provide as pleasing ambient sound for recording as possible.

Given the constraint of floor space (it's a 20X20X12 concrete box right now), I've got to make a construction decision - when I cut off space to provide good modal dimensions, should I splay the facing surfaces?

Research so far is still inconclusive. Most puzzling has been F Alton Everest. His says, as I read it, that splaying the walls only changes where modal concentration takes place in the room. He tells me that I should sacrifice floor space for a good surface ratio and take care of resulting problems with room treatment (diffusers, traps, etc). This seems contrary to lots of other stuff out there in the world (ex. floor plan for Studio A). Note that I could just misunderstand this, and if you are going to hand my ass to me for misinterpreting it, please do so with some guidance about how to reconsider what I've read.

Since this room needs to be multipurpose and I will be spending lots of time in it, preserving usable space is a premium.

NYC acoustic consultants are pricey. Besides, I'd rather learn myself than pay someone else to know for me. I appreciate any advice; I'm self educated on acoustics, so my teacher is just as dumb as I am.

= Justin

hey justin-
i'm in a similar boat and in the process of builing a studio in my newly purchased house. though i don't know the answer to your question - a couple good resources i've found are:

http://www.recording.org/cgi-local/ubb/ ... ysPrune=20

wes lachot /ethan winder have been real helpful w/questions, and the times i've asked about who to talk to "professionaly" they've in effect said, why pay someone, ask your questions here for free.

if you go here and scroll down to resources - there are some other great links as well...

http://www.recording.org/users/acoustics/

i'm on the yahoo group acoustics list, and every day there are probably 20 or so posts. too much to keep track of even.

also - the f. alton everest book seems a little dated. (first edition i think!) but - physics don't change over 60 years either!

hope that helps some - if you didn't already know that...
nick

JFQ,
I am also in the same boat,although my conditions are a little different. I will second the recommondation to visit to the acoustics forum at recording.org, it's been very helpful to me, and there are a lot of acoustic DIY projects. Your particular case is a little more difficult because you are using one room for everything.

From what I've read, for a listening/monitoring room you will typically want your front wall (the one behind you desk) to be dead, the side walls to be reflective and your rear wall to be diffuse, and your ceiling to be dead above your mix position and diffuse closer to the back. This will let you accurately monitor what comes out of your speakers, while retaining a natural listening enviornment from the reflections of the side and back walls (as opposed to a completely dry room which will sound unnatural and may result in an overly "wet" mix to compensate for the lack of natural room ambience). Since you want to use this as a multipurpose room however, I don't know what to tell you. Ethan Winer, one of the moderators on recording.org, built a multipurpose room in his home studio and could probably give you some real good advice.

In regards to your room dimensions, having any surfaces of equal dimensions is the devil. Since all four of your walls are 20',all of your problem frequencies are doubled (Im not 100% on the math, it might not be exactly "doubled"). I would say that you should probably take care of that first and foremost, even though it is probably the most time consuming and expensive solution (and it cuts down on space). However, by building another wall within your room you can make several improvements to your space. You can slightly angle it to reduce the amount of parallel surfaces, in turn reducing flutter echoes. The air gap between the walls will help keep the sound from escaping you apartment and can also act as a bass trap.
I think that splaying walls is a much more challenging solution, and it is more suitable for control room acoustics, as it mainly increases your "sweet-spot". If you want the room to be useful for tracking, practicing and mixing this may not be the right solution.

I am far from an expert on this, so please take this into consideration. I thought I would just share what I have learned so far in my research.
For more reliable advice, I highly recommend the acoustics forum mentioned above.

Also, there is a current edition of Everst's book which is quite helpful as well. I believe he also has a relatively new book that is geared towards acoustic solutions for home/project studios, but I cannot recall the name of it.

Good Luck,
mike