Garden mix room near Nottingham, UK

#226

Gareth, your time lapse video is like a quick reminder of what has happened so far and an encouragement to get going on the next stage in my studio. Thank you.

#227

garethmetcalf wrote:Source of the post

I also lined my intake external silencer with the new, correct duct liner today so that can be out the house and installed tomorrow. I borrowed the idea of using those insulation mounting discs to hold the duct liner in place, alongside spray glue.

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Hi Gareth!

Hope you're well. I'm really struggling to find this Duct Liner in the UK. can you share your supplier please? I see Duct Wrap everywhere but not the liner. I guess it isn't very popular...

Cheers!

Sam.

#228

Hi Sam, it was from u-spec insulation ltd. I've send you the invoice so you can see the details.

It came on a pallet as minimum order was 15m and I was lucky to sell the half I didn't use to Jennifer (Endorka)!
Cheers
Gareth

#229

Hi hard grafting studio builders

It’s been a long time since I posted, and that’s because I’ve spent the last 9 months focusing on learning about marketing, promotion and business process improvement. I did an accelerated course and then it’s been a slow journey but I’m starting to get somewhere. I’m sorry to have not been part of this community and giving back what others have given to me but my brain can only handle so much at one time!

I used the room as built from summer 2021 until January 2022, getting a feel for how mixes were turning out and doing a little bit of tracking. Results were mainly positive but, like most studios, I was still experiencing inconsistent results with some songs. You may recall I’d had conflicting advice from two paid for acoustics consultants, both of which advocated serious rebuilding.

Around the start of this year I was talking with Glenn and in the end he designed a couple of suggested upgrades for my space, which I have spent the last 6 months slowly implementing, and will describe over the coming posts for completeness, because I promised him I would, and in the hopes it’s helpful to others....

#230

Phase 1 – improve the soffit mounting

Glenn proposed that my soffit mounting wasn’t working as well as it could. In the first incarnation, despite calculating, measuring and cutting carefully it seemed my boxes were compressing the sorbothane hemispheres more than they should, so the speaker vibrations were travelling into the box and therefore into the structure.

The first step was to take apart those walls to implement a redesigned speaker mount, create more air flow between the cavity behind the soffit fronts and the lower cavity and add more mass to the soffit fronts. The aim was to reduce speaker vibrations from reaching and actuating the soffit walls.

I used my 150mm hole saw (bought for adding the external) to cut three large holes in the soffit shelf, to let sound travel down to make more use of the bass trapping underneath.

I ordered some more hemispheres and set about building a new version of the speaker boxes with adjustable mounts that meant I could set the pressure to be applied on the top of the speaker box and also on the sides. I have seen variants of this design in various studio builds on this and other forums and I know Stuart also uses a more extreme version. My design ended up as a box inside a box, kind of, with unsecured pieces of wood above and to the left and right of the speaker. The box was also moved out 18mm to bring the front of the speaker flush with the thickened soffit front.

The speakers were sat on six rather than four hemispheres, to better spread the weight. I used four turnbuckles to adjust how hard the ‘floating’ top panel clamped down on the top speaker (separated by more hemispheres), and bolts screwed through captive nuts to push the ‘floating’ side panels and their hemispheres against the sides of the speakers. Once I’d set these as best I could for 25% compression of the hemispheres I used locking nuts to hold the bolts in place.

I then reconnected the speaker heat ‘exhaust pipe’, added some mesh over my new holes in the shelf and put all the lovely rockwool back in to the cavity.

#231

I then set about adding a new, third, layer to the front. Previously I’d had an OSB then a plywood layer, so I bought some 18mm MDF and added that between the OSB and ply.

At the end of what felt like a lot of work, the room looked exactly the same as it did!

In the most unscientific way I could tell there had been an impact because when I placed my hand or ear to the wood soffit front I couldn't feel or hear as much vibration through the wall as previously.

I did some new readings and shared then with Glenn to confirm I’d made an impact, and moved on to phase 2.
Here is the REW file showing the before and after of these soffit alterations:

Gareth new soffit 2may22 for upload.mdat: (17.81 MiB) Downloaded 508 times

Gareth new soffit 2may22 for upload.mdat: (17.81 MiB) Downloaded 508 times

#232

very good! what's phase 2? :-)

#233

Phase 2 – prepare the room

Before I describe what was added to the room, I’ll recap to explain what the room had by way of treatment already. The soffit walls had hangers underneath the shelf, and rockwool stuffed in the cavity above the soffit front – this can be seen in my last pictures in my previous post.

The side walls had 100mm rockwool at the first reflection points, but the rest of the walls were still open stud bays to the plasterboard. This can all be seen in post 184. The rear of the room had angled hangers from floor to ceiling – 60cm deep at the sides and around 40cm deep in the middle of the room. Finally, the ceiling was all infilled with 100mm rockwool. The room sounded pretty good but of course the rear half was more live sounding due to the bare plasterboard.

Glenn’s suggestion, which reinforced one of the other consultant’s ideas, was to add some reflective panels in to the room to bring some life back to the mid and high frequencies, but let the lower frequencies be absorbed by the rockwool. He designed some panels that I could build myself, in keeping with my seemingly obsessive use of cheap plywood.

Before I could get to that, there were some preparatory steps needed.

First I needed to add some support beams to the ceiling, side and rear walls for the panels that I would be hanging. That meant taking out some of the staples that held the ceiling material up and removing my (poorly made) side material panels.

I added some 2x3 across the ceiling bays to provide something strong to screw hooks in that could take the weight of flown reflective panels:

I took down the commercial 4’ x 2’ panel that was at an angle in the middle at the front of the room and replaced this with triangles of rockwool – a mini superchunk:

And added the material back over the ceiling:

Then I needed to fill all the stud bays with rockwool, which made the room really odd sounding to talk in – a bit like I would imagine it would feel like to have your mouth filled with cotton wool!

I decided to change the way I was going to finish the room, as my attempt to make panels from thin wood, wrapped in material and then held to the studs had not worked well, and instead staple the material directly to the stud and cover the staples with thin strips of wood.

In the end, in order to minimise the number of thin strips of wood, I went a step further and affixed thin strips of wood to the vertical studs to staple in to, thus bringing the material 18mm further out from the studs. This was partly because my power sockets etc had already been installed to protrude that far (to allow for the wooden strip material panels) and also because I realised I could staple material to the back of a piece of strip wood and then screw that piece of wood to the top plate of the stud wall, allowing the material to then flow over the front meaning now visible staples at the top. This is hard to describe in words so hopefully it makes sense in the pictures:

PICS 10, 14, 15, 16, 19

#234

Long time readers may remember I was debating what to do about the heater, and in the end I affixed 18mm MDF to the stud wall, thus level with the material that surrounded it, and fixed the heater to the MDF. The material is therefore behind the MDF rather than directly behind the heater.

Finally, I cut a corner off my rear wall material panels (which had worked the best) to make a removal section to get to the power distribution board, should that be required.

After that preparatory work I had supporting wood on the walls and ceilings ready to affix my reflective panels to, rockwool in all the walls to absorb as much as possible, and cosmetic work mostly complete.

On to phase 3…

#235

Phase 3 – reflective panels

Glenn had made a great job of designing something I could make as an amateur woodworker, that would be cheap and would look good (not to mention have a positive impact on the sound). He designed two panels, one larger and one smaller, and I would need to make 5 of the smaller ones and 5 of the larger ones (technically 4.5 of the larger ones as the bottom would be cut off to make space for the heater).

The panels comprised a piece of 12mm plywood with slots routed in at predetermined spacings, with 18mm thick plywood sections of predetermined sizes glued to the front, to both look good and create an element of diffusion.

On paper this sounded easy enough, and luckily B&Q will cut 8’x4’ sheets of ply into smaller chunks in store, so off I went to B&Q for some 12mm and 18mm ply. I got the Titan table saw my brother-in-law and I co-bought (for £89) back to the house and set about cutting lots of strips of 18mm ply. As with most cheap table saws, accuracy is not its forte so I had to use some clamps and extra bits of wood to ensure the fence was actually parallel to the saw blade.

I ended up with 2 piles of 18mm thick strips of wood, ready to glue on once I’d routed slots in my 12mm panels. Little did I know that cutting the 18mm strips would be the easiest bit….

I studied a few youtube videos about cutting slots and knew I could route them consistently by making a jig.
I did own a little handheld router, which I’d used for the odd jobs during the build like installing door hinges but it wasn’t great and didn’t have a plunge mount. Makita have recently released a cheaper line of products, made in china I think, so I got their new plunge router for £60.

I made a jig that would allow the router to slide left and right with end stops to ensure the slots were all the same length. I then installed wood guides to the underside so the jig could slide up and down my panels.

WHAT A MESS! The large panels had 19 slots in them. I think the first panel took over an hour to route all the holes, covering my drive in sawdust which of course got blown around by the wind. I very quickly realised I needed to wear a mask, and earplugs.

I probably spent a whole day making the jig and routing the one first panel. And I had 9 more to go…

From routing the slots, I then took my 18mm strips which needed sanding to remove rough edges etc (about one hour per panel’s worth) and then finally these could be glued to the panel.

Glenn’s design suggested a French cleat to mount the panels, so they could be removed if required, so I also used the table saw to cut some lengths of 40mm x 70mm wood at 45 degrees.

Finally, this was screwed to the wall and back of the panel, with a strip of 40mm wood lower down the panel to space it from the wall, and the first one was mounted.

All of the above took place over several months, as with covid out the way life was back to its normal set of commitments, as well as a 4 day a week job, bits of studio client work and the odd gig.

#236

Next I moved on to the smaller panels, of which three would be ceiling mounted, two at an angle and one flush. I got some screw hooks and chains ordered and proceeded to make and mount the first of these.

However, I hadn’t appreciated how bendy 12mm ply is and realised as soon as I started trying to hang the panel that it was bowing. Not only would this look silly, and likely have terrible acoustic artifacts, I was fairly confident it would cause the 18mm ply to start falling off.

I knew from making my previous material frames from 18mm x 28mm wood that it didn’t bend much, so figured I could make a H frame slightly smaller than the panel, and glue and screw it to the back of the panel. Thankfully this worked and also provided something to screw through when mounting the flush panel to the ceiling joists. I’d taken a risk and not added support beams for both edges of this panel, hoping that I could screw one long length of it to a ceiling joist that ran across the width of the room and the other long length of the panel just at the mid point, to the pair of joists that run down the middle of my ceiling (my ceiling is a series of H shaped joists.

Luckily my risk worked out – I screwed through the front and through the frame around the edge of the panel into the joist and it’s still there now!

Next was the side wall and rear wall panels – repeats of the first with French cleats holding them in place:

Finally, the most complicated mount, a panel in the two front corners, at 45 degrees from the side walls. It took a couple of attempts to cut the angle right for the French cleat mount that would fix to the soffit front but I got there in the end:

Finally, I stapled material to the back of the corner and angled ceiling panels so that I could pack behind them with rockwool to (hopefully) absorb more low frequencies. For the corner panels, I then laid rockwool on top of the material, and then covered that with more material, stapled in place. This way I could lift the corner panels on and off their mounts and the rockwool would come with them. It also stopped stray rockwool fibres flying around the room.

The two ceiling panels had rockwool stuffed between them and the ceiling, and then I covered the edges of the rockwool with off cuts of material (for visual and stray fibre reasons). I added LED strip lights to the edge of the first angled panel, and voila – some 6 months after I started!

How does it sound? Good! The room is more natural to speak in, and when I go and sit on the sofa it sounds pretty similar to the mix position.

I will do some readings and share them with you all, but the only thing I am likely to do after this is use my aging Behringer FBQ box to smooth out any peaks – digital tuning. This I will also need help with, so that’s budget dependent.

All I have left to do now is fit the remaining skirting board, and tidy my garage as it’s full of boxes of tools, spare materials, screws, glue, sealant etc etc.

I started in December 2020, and it’s nearly done in under 2 years. I reckon that’s OK.

#237

Well done, it's an excellent job, and under 2 years is superb.

I'm looking forward to seeing those new readings!

Cheers.
Jennifer

#238

nicely done! as a general note, i do recommend finding a local CNC shop to do the routing bits

#239

Looking Great Gareth!

Edwood woodwood wood be proud! :lol:

#240

Thanks guys! A friend of mine in the granite kitchen worktop industry suggested CNC routing, and in fact reached out to someone he knew. However supply of materials alone was much more than I was willing to pay… so I just put the time in (slowly!)

Will share readings once I have them.

Gareth

Soundman2020 - Studio Design Forum