Soundman2020 - Studio Design Forum

Hi folks. I'm a few months into a studio build in a converted workshop at my house, and have a trouble spot that I need to figure out. I'm going to be putting in two sets of 2' wide x 4' deep cabinets, one on either side of my desk. An issue that I hadn't put much thought into is the doors, and specifically how much clearance I'd need from the other things in the room to open them without banging the doors into stuff. This turns out to be a bit of a problem if I went with traditional hinged doors, on closer inspection I'll be able to open one side 90 degrees before hitting the desk, on the other side it's more like 45 degrees. So I'm looking to find some other clever ideas.

The cabinets have yet to be built, so there's room to play with the design. One of them is going to have my computers and hard drives in it, so there's a little bit of a sound isolation factor I'd like to be able to get in there, but fortunately the computer is virtually silent, and the external HDD drives I'm using aren't overly loud, so it doesn't need to be a massive amount of sound isolation.

Does anyone have experience with a similar situation, and if so do you have any recommendations on sliding doors or barn doors vs pocket doors? I don't think that I'll need access to both doors open at once, so bypass doors could work. The only potential issue is that I was going to store guitar cases up top, they might be tricky to shoehorn in, but it could be that the top of the cabinets have swinging doors above the height that they'd hit things and I use sliding or pocket doors down below.

Either way, I'm sure there must be a way to do this, and I thought I'd see if anyone has any suggestions. Thanks!

Hi there GreenWire Music, and Welcome to the Forum!

I'd suggest that you look into acoustic-rated sliding glass doors. A pair of such doors back-to-back (one in each leaf of your wall) can get you high isolation. Eg:



How much isolation do you need between your rooms? Some manufacturers claim upwards of 50 dB isolation for a a pair of such doors with a good-size air gap. Even up to 55 dB. That's about as good as it gets, realistically.

These units are not cheap, but they do the job remarkably well. If you can get by with low isolation, then even a pair of Home-Depot style sliding glass patio doors would do something useful, as long as you leave a decent gap between them and apply insulation properly around that. I have some photos of a studio I did like that somewhere...

Note that the upper photo here shows the doors placed at al angle to each other, not parallel: That is not really a good idea, as it can lead to reduced isolation in the low end. The original idea behind that was that the parallel surfaces between the pair could lead to some type of resonance in the air gap, robbing you of isolation at the resonant frequency. That's true to a certain extent, but it is offset by the losses due to having a narrow air gap at one end: that's a bigger issue than the resonance. Thus, it is better to keep them parallel and as far apart as you can. Ideally, the air gap should be many inches: over 8" (20cm) at least, and preferably more. 12" (30cm) is pretty darn good. The smaller the air gap, the higher the MSM frequency, and thus the lower the isolation (for the low end of the spectrum). Thus, the lower image is more correct, with the doors parallel and spaced far apart.


- Stuart -

... continued...

Found what I was looking for, about the Home-Depot style patio doors. One of my clients in Australia did that with the studio I designed for him, for the doors between the vocal booth and control room. He originally did it with patio doors because he needed to get it done urgently for a session, planning to order the higher quality acoustic rated doors later. But it turned out to be just fine for what he wanted (isolating vocals during tracking sessions), so he kept them permanently:








I don't recall exactly how much isolation he got from this setup (it was a few years ago!), but I'd estimate somewhere in the low-to-mid 30 dB range.


- Stuart -

Found another photo of the same studio: The owner actually used the isolation booth for drums occasionally!


In addition to using it for vocals and a Moog! (I'm just a little jealous of that...).



So the isolation must have been reasonably good, even with the patio sliders.

One caution about the sliders, if you do go that route: Make sure they have very good weather seals on them! And add your own additional seals. Isolation for any door or window is only as good as the seals.

- Stuart -

Hey Stuart, thanks for the speedy and super detailed reply! The doors in question are actually just on the 2' x 4" cabinets, so sliding glass doors would be much more isolation than I need. The noise to isolate is a MacPro and three HDD drives, so it's pretty minimal, I'd imagine that even some flimsy bifold closet doors would give enough noise reduction, although it wouldn't really fit the aesthetic I'm after.
This sketch is incomplete, but it's the synth station that the doors would be running into. There's a door right next to the synths, big diffusers on the back wall and the left wall has a door to an iso booth, so the options for moving them to another spot are pretty limited. One option is to move the computers to the cabinet closer to the right side of the desk and just have drawers on the right cabinet where it's currently labeled "Computers", that'd at least eliminate one cabinet door. But I'm open to options.

Thanks!

Jeff

How about a concertina door, or a roller door (like a garage door) ?

In my old place I installed an Ikea fabric roller blind in front of a storage cabinet. Cheap, effective, but not very classy Would only work where you don't have any acoustic isolation requirements though.

Whatever you choose, watch out for components rattling, moving or buzzing when your monitors are playing back.

Cheers,
Jennifer

Another alternative, guaranteed rattle free and may offer some acoustic side benefits: For the bottom part of the door that may foul on your synths, don't use a door, use an acoustic absorber panel instead. Attach little feet onto it to keep it upright.To keep more acoustic noise from the computer from getting out of the computer cabinet, attach an 18mm plywood panel behind the absorber. Simply drag the panel out of the way when you need access to the computer, and push it back into place when done. It's basically a small gobo.

You could attach similar acoustic panels onto the doors that can properly open for a unified look.

Cheers!
Jennifer

Hi Jennifer, thanks for the suggestions. The cabinets in question are going to be pretty visible from my mix position so aesthetics are going to be pretty important. The more I think about it, the more it seems like the solution might be to have traditional cabinet doors on the sides closest to the desk, and since the plan was to put drawers in the outside cabinets anyways, not have a swinging door in front of them at all, just finish the fronts of the drawers nicely and have them go up until they're above the height of the synths. Above that point it can be a cabinet door up to the top and not worry about hitting anything. But thanks very much for the responses, I've been thinking too hard about this and it was good to get some outside voices in there!