Drum room/studio basement build

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ScotcH
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Drum room/studio basement build

#31

Postby ScotcH » Wed, 2021-Mar-31, 14:14

Basically in the home stretch now! Finished the return air baffle box, and the electrical and wiring.

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Built a 2" door, with 2x 2/4" particle board, and 2x 1/4" MLV sheet in between

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After some measurements, I rebuilt the front wall. Beefier framing, and tuned the monitors on their side for a wider stereo image. Also added a big metal plate VPR type absorber on the front wall, and rebuilt the speaker boxes to beef them up. I also performed an ampendectomy so I could get rid of the cooling ducting. Finally finished it off with some 3/4" walnut plywood on top of the 3/4" MDF. Moved some gear in place, and just about ready to rock!

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Starlight
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Drum room/studio basement build

#32

Postby Starlight » Wed, 2021-Mar-31, 14:39

Arek, that is looking so good.

I have one question as it looks as though all of your wall traps are away from the wall at the top but touching at the bottom. Is that the plan? Or would you benefit from adding a spacer lower down on the back of each trap to keep them away from the walls and thus get better performance from them? Like this:
2454sidetraps.jpg

Edit (later on in the evening): It has only occured to me now that you have not finished the room entirely. My observation probably sounds like someone unhelpfull nit-picking. Sorry, that is not what I intended.



Jag94
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Drum room/studio basement build

#33

Postby Jag94 » Wed, 2021-Mar-31, 16:10

Arek,

Your room looks fantastic. I hope you get the acoustic results you're aiming for. Your attention to detail is top notch. Thanks for sharing.



ScotcH
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Drum room/studio basement build

#34

Postby ScotcH » Wed, 2021-Mar-31, 17:46

Starlight wrote:Source of the post Arek, that is looking so good.

I have one question as it looks as though all of your wall traps are away from the wall at the top but touching at the bottom. Is that the plan? Or would you benefit from adding a spacer lower down on the back of each trap to keep them away from the walls and thus get better performance from them? Like this:
2454sidetraps.jpg
Edit (later on in the evening): It has only occured to me now that you have not finished the room entirely. My observation probably sounds like someone unhelpfull nit-picking. Sorry, that is not what I intended.


You're probably correct that the performance would be better ... and I might measure it with fully spaced, but I did it that way to basically save on some space. As this is primarily a jam room, I wasn't willing to lose 8" to the room :) But if it measures much better, I might use a "temporary" spacer or brace for when I'm mixing, then just remove it for jam time.



ScotcH
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Drum room/studio basement build

#35

Postby ScotcH » Thu, 2021-Apr-01, 00:58

In case you're curious, here is how the room measures. Considering I really didn't set out to build a control room (it is a drum room after all!) it actually turned out pretty good. I can probably get it cleaned up a bit, but that's low on the priority now ... the room sounds great, very controlled for drums (it's certainly not a live room, but that's fine for the size).

Here is the room measurement as it sits right now (empty, no drums in it ... with drums you can really see what freq each drum is tuned to in the waterfall!):
baseline.jpg


Spectrograms. There is a room mode at 27Hz, and it shows up here ... I probably can't do anything about it, but I can live with it. The other issue ~62Hz I might work on ... it's in the realm of possibility :)

Left:
spec-L.jpg

Right:
spec-R.jpg


Corrected using sonarworks (did it very quickly just to test it out ... will redo with more precession at some point). This has the B&K curve applied, so it a bit tilted. Sounds great for music!
corrected.jpg


And here is the averaged L and R, 1/3 smoothing:
average.jpg



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Soundman2020
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Drum room/studio basement build

#36

Postby Soundman2020 » Wed, 2021-Jun-30, 21:32

the room sounds great, very controlled for drums (it's certainly not a live room, but that's fine for the size).
:thu: Mission accomplished! :yahoo:
Wow!
It looks great, and sounds great, so you should be celebrating! ... And making music!!!

- Stuart -



ScotcH
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Drum room/studio basement build

#37

Postby ScotcH » Sun, 2021-Jul-04, 11:40

Soundman2020 wrote:Source of the post
the room sounds great, very controlled for drums (it's certainly not a live room, but that's fine for the size).
:thu: Mission accomplished! :yahoo:
Wow!
It looks great, and sounds great, so you should be celebrating! ... And making music!!!

- Stuart -


Thanks Stuart, glad to see you back!

When you have time, if you're so inclined, I'd love for you to read over the posts and see if you spot any places I could have improved. Unlikely I will change anything as the room is "done", but I think it would be a great resource for others doing a similar low budget build in an existing space.



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Soundman2020
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Drum room/studio basement build

#38

Postby Soundman2020 » Sun, 2021-Jul-04, 17:44

ScotcH wrote:When you have time, if you're so inclined, I'd love for you to read over the posts and see if you spot any places I could have improved. Unlikely I will change anything as the room is "done", but I think it would be a great resource for others doing a similar low budget build in an existing space.
Excellent idea, Arek! I really don't want to appear to be criticizing what you did, though, since it looks great and seems to work just fine too. But here's a couple of things I noticed that perhaps could have improved it even more:

1) For insulation between the leaves, you used 1.5" of XPS plus 1" of fiberglass. It probably would have been better to do that with 2.5" of mineral wool. The XPS doesn't have a lot of acoustic absorption properties (absorption depends on "gas flow resistivity", which as the name implies, depends on the material resisting the flow of air through it, within a certain range of useful values). XPS also has very little mass, and it is closed-cell foam, so there's no usable air penetration (completely blocks the flow of air through it, thus its gas flow resistivity is basically infinite), and thus no absorption. But you do have 1" of fiberglass in there, so that's something. It probably also would have been better to sacrifice an extra inch of space in the wall cavity, and get your air gap up to 3.5": The 2.5" you have is a bit low.

Inside-out wall panels going up.
:thu: Excellent! Inside-out is, indeed, the best way to do it.

Silencer box. Best effort here with what I have to work with.
Looks pretty good to me!

Was going to do surface mount, but I think this will be sufficient for my needs.
For inside-out walls, you don't really need surface-mount. You can if you want, but it's fine to just have the outlets and switches like you did it, mounted on wood blocks. The important things is to have only one penetration of the leaf, if possible, and it looks like you did that.

The silencer boxes are not touching the joists or the floor above.
:thu:

{Suprchunkcs}... Just the usual stacked triangles in the corners. 24x24 with a ~33" diagonal across the corner. This is not the cheapest way, but it's the most effective from what I have found, and it's damn simple to build.
Right! It is a simple, fast, and effective method.


The room sounds pretty dead, so I might add more hard surfaces to liven it a bit,
Often, using some type of plastic sheeting over some sections of the insulation will get you some of the high end back again. Different thicknesses of plastic give you different ranges. I suggest testing with REW at each stage in the build to see how things are going, before progressing to the next stage. So in this case, you could have tested before putting the fabric on, then tried a few other tests with different amounts/thicknesses of plastic, until you got the amount of life you wanted.

After some measurements, I rebuilt the front wall. Beefier framing,
:thu: Always necessary for speaker soffits!

and tuned the monitors on their side for a wider stereo image.
It probably would have been better to move the speakers physically further apart, rather than rotating them to horizontal. Here's why:
Speakers-mounted-vertically-and-horizontally-standing-up-laying-down-on-side-interference-patterns.jpg
The effect isn't huge, and only covers about an octave either side of the crossover point, but it can be noticeable with some speakers. Best avoided, unless the speakers are specifically designed to be used only horizontally.

it looks as though all of your wall traps are away from the wall at the top but touching at the bottom.
That's not necessarily a bad thing: It means that the panel is not "tuned" to one specific range, but rather covers a broad range. I say "tuned" between quotes, because those are broadband panels, and not really tuned at all! But changing the spacing can affect things a little, and it might or might not be useful.

There is a room mode at 27Hz, and it shows up here ... I probably can't do anything about it, but I can live with it. The other issue ~62Hz I might work on ... it's in the realm of possibility
One phrase: "plane wave base array". Adding a sub (or even better, a pair of subs) along with careful locating of the subs, and careful tuning of their timing, polarity, and EQ, can work magic with low-ens issues in a well treated room like yours. That said, 27Hz is probably nothing to worry about, since there's no musical instruments that go that low anyway, except concert grand piano and the cathedral pipe organ (and maybe canon fire, if you plan to mix the 1812 overture in your room!). Probably not an issue. But even so, you could clean up some of the other issues with subs.

It would be great if you could post the actual MDAT file, for more in-depth analysis. But overall, it looks rather good.

Once again, congrats on a job really well done! :thu:

- Stuart -



ScotcH
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Drum room/studio basement build

#39

Postby ScotcH » Mon, 2021-Jul-05, 23:32

Thanks Stuart! great analysis and points. I did not know about the speakers on their side effect! I did build the framing in such a way that I could replace the speakers with something like Neumann KH 310s if the budget ever became available!

As for the XPS, yes, excellent point. Let me address: The intent of the XPPS is as a moisture barrier and thermal break. Those are outside walls, and since I'm in Canada, there can 50ºC difference in the winters! I probably could have done a 1" XPS with larger fluffy filled cavity, but in my case, the outside wall transmission was not really an issue I cared about (much). But for anyone else looking over this build, great point!

Your final point about subs and tuning the low end: Again, excellent advice. I did consider this, but as the room is 80% jam/recording room, and only occasionally used for mixing, I think it will do fine for now. Certainly a possible future upgrade if I do more serious mixing.

I'll post the MDAT once I have my laptop back (I also use it for race car tuning, and it's at the shop!)




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