Recording - May 2010 - 24

sidewalls such as guitars, along with absorbers, also makes for an aesthetically good look while providing simple but effective diffusion in your room. Remain pragmatic So, as you can see, everything that you may wish to have in your room can also be thought of as contributing to the acoustics of that room. By being pragmatic in these simple areas you can keep your space, your room’s shape, and hopefully more money in your pocket and off your walls and ceilings rather than spending it all on after-market acoustical treatment products that may be overkill. Ideally you can use these products sparingly, in combination with the

or other inanimate objects as they become items of absorption and reflection. A solution An example of using this information in a positive way may look like this. Most project studios need storage space for different items such as books, software containers, CDs, DVDs, etc. A perfect solution for helping you with this, plus giving you an area of diffusion and absorption, is a combination of bookcase and cabinet structure on the back wall of your control room area. Books and book-like items placed randomly and at different depths in the shelves work great for broadband diffusion, whereas elevated storage cabinets in the upper corners of the room can do a great job as bass traps. (See Figure 2). You can easily make a panel absorber/ bass trap and have it look like a raised panel cabinet door. The door panel plywood thickness can be calculated along with the depth of absorption behind it [see our previously mentioned articles and resources for help with this—Ed.], and you have yourself a panel absorber/bass trap helping your frequency cancellation problems and returning most of the upper mids and highs that you don’t want absorbed back into the room. You can also make the whole top storage area of the unit from left to right a broadband absorber, with the cabinet depth space, insulation in the space with barrier mat, and acoustic foam or fabric on top of the barrier mat. This is what I would suggest (per the figure 1 and specs) for our example room, to help trap our issues we have at the 70 and 140 Hz modes. As you can see in Figure 2 you not only have an aesthetically pleasing wall unit for storage but an acoustical treatment combo of absorption, reflection and diffusion. All things you needed, but probably did not think of as coming from one piece of furniture! If properly thought out and placed with some symmetry, hanging items on opposing
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appreciation, is where the sound ends up: your ears and then your brain. Even if you can’t make your room perfect (and who can?), you can still do great work in it because of your brain’s ability to adjust for its listening environment. Once you’ve designed your room and gotten it to a good place, you can learn to adjust to the remaining flaws and work with them. There is no better lesson in this process than taking something that you are very familiar with and know is mixed very well, listening to it in your room, and using that as a benchmark of learning how your new room reacts. Your mind will learn this and put it into memory with some practice. Naturally you’ll want to check your work in other places, but in time

Figure 2. This 12” deep wall unit has all kinds of storage space, not including the top set of shelves, where you can incorporate different kinds of membrane/panel absorbers and bass traps, making them useful as well as aesthetically pretty. The items on the shelves—books, boxes, CDs, DVDs, etc.—form an irregular surface that improves the room diffusion, and in this illustration we’ve added a couch for seating comfort and for added absorption qualities. Used on the rear wall of your room, and to some extent the side walls, seemingly “irrelevant” furniture like this can greatly benefit your room sound! items that already have to be in your room anyway, to achieve the best results. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of learning about a small room’s limitations and even learning how to work with them, rather than going down the expensive road of overtreating them. One other important factor in this, the last one I’ll mention because it’s the last step in the long chain from sound creation to sound you’ll find that your own careful listening can go a long way toward patching up the remaining issues in how your room sounds. Your clients and friends don’t have to think the room is perfect, so long as you can repeatably and reliably create great mixes in it! So forge on in setting up your new musical sanctuary to explore all your creative possibilities. A great room for creating great music doesn’t require great expense!

Brian Gadson (gadson@recordingmag.com) is a studio designer and studio owner, recording musician, engineer, and producer, with a general contractor background, available for consultation on studio design and sound issues. Find out more at his company website www.earsneyes.com.

http://www.earsneyes.com

Recording - May 2010

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