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How to Build a Quiet Studio EnvironmentThere
is a lot of knowledge about how to build a home recording studio. Underneath
most of this is an implicit assumption that a recording studio is something
you build to keep sounds from going in or out of a room. After all,
the recording enterprise is an inherently noisy enterprise. Or is it?
In the past, when most home studios were designed for recording a "band",
you know, a 4-5 member group that has a drummer with a full kit of cans,
a couple guitarists with big-haired amps. A Bass player with his or
her stack, and the keyboard player with their amps. How to quiet your music creation room Lets
take a brief look at how professional studios do this to get a clue.
Pro studios are multi-room operations. At minimum, there are 3 rooms.
The "studio" where the performers play and are singing, playing
instruments and drums, etc. The "control room" where the mixing
board and patch bays and quiet outboard gear resides. Finally is the
"machine room" where, you guessed it, all the noisy stuff
goes. The problem for the home studio is that, usually, one room has
to fulfill all these functions. Sound Isolation enclosuresThere are companies making these now. They are expensive and may not totally eliminate the noise, but they will significantly reduce it to the point where you can work more comfortably. One of our members, Houston H, at studio-central forums has designed his own isolation enclosure. Really nice job. Here's a link to some pics and a discussion of the process. There's a cool tip there about using under the PCs in the enclosure. Check it out. The Closet Approach The closet approach is probably more problematic than the other approaches because putting your gear in a closed tiny room will actually make it resonate louder unless you take great pains to totally insulate the closet so sounds cannot leak out. You can cut down on the internal resonance in the closet by adding generous layers of sound absorbing materials, and installing a heavy door with weather stripping. Sound travels through air so it is important to seal the door as much as possible. Cable access becomes a problem here. if you think you can run the cables under the door, you will have too much leakage and you will still hear noise. The solution here is to drill a hole from the wall to the closet so you can run your cables through there. Once you have the closet sealed and tight then another problem arises: Heat. In a sealed tiny room the computer will eventually become like a furnace. It will not be able to dissipate heat very well if it is 100 degrees in the closet. You may be shortening your computer's life and worse, may be creating a fire hazard. So you need ventilation, which is much easier said than done. Assuming you do not want to re-route air conditioning ducts for this, you will at minimum need to install two fans where the back of the closet goes into the next room. One fan exhausts the air out while the other brings cool air in. The Put it in the Next Room Approach This, for me,
was the best way to go. I've had success at the Tweak Lab. Drill a
4 inch hole above the baseboard going into the adjoining room. Make
sure there is space in the next room for your computer and a rack
unit. Then make an inventory of the cables you are going to need to
pull this off. If you have a fire wire or USB audio interface, its
easier. Get a few USB hubs for stuff like the mouse and computer keyboard.
Perhaps the hardest are cables for the video monitors. VGA extension
cables are easy to use, but avoid the cheap ones as they may cause
ghosting on the screen. Digital video extenders are available too,
but if you carefully map things out before you drill you might find
a way to get the stock 6 foot cables on most LCD monitors to make
it into the next room into the back of the computers. Here's the list
of things I had to buy to complete this project. What is SBIR?SBIR (Speaker Boundary Interface Response) - This is a term to describe how the proximity of a speaker to a hard boundary (wall/ceiling/floor) will change the response, especially in the low end. This is something that not a lot of people understand nor consider when planning a room. Sound radiates from a driver in different ways. Higher frequencies act like a ray and move in straight lines from a point. As you get lower in the spectrum, they begin to radiate more like a sphere. By the time you get below 500Hz or so, you're getting pretty spherical radiation. By the time you get to 125, it's purely spherical. That said, imagine sound coming from a driver at say 100 Hz that is coming directly at you. There are other waves that are wrapping around the cabinet and bouncing off the front wall and then back at you. When 2 waves of the same frequency meet in this way (one direct, one having bounced off the front wall) there is an interface of the 2 waves (some describe this as interference). Constructive interference occurs when the 2 waves happen to be in phase with each other. This yields a reinforcement of that frequency or a peak in response. Destructive interference occurs when the 2 waves are 180 degrees out of phase. This yields a partial cancellation of that frequency (the bounced wave has less amplitude) resulting in a dip or null at that frequency. This can cause WILD variations in frequency response. However, one can sometimes use this to your advantage. If you play with speaker positioning in relation to the front wall (behind the speakers) and the side wall, you can 'tune' the response changes. This can be beneficial when attempting to smooth overall response. Let's say that you have peak at your listening position at a given frequency. If you can find a place that images well and works with the video positioning that will create a slight dip due to SBIR, the net effect is a smoother response at your seat. It's kind of like using an EQ without having to put one in your system. Generally, you're best off if the distance from speaker face to front wall, driver centers to side wall, and driver center to floor are 3 different dimensions in order to not reinforce any specific set of harmonics by having all the boundaries generate the same SBIR effect. If you still have issues, you can treat the walls directly beside and/or behind the speakers with appropriate materials to further reduce the intensity of the reflected wave to it's imact when interacting with the direct wave is minimized. If you have issues say from 125Hz up but OK below that, then a thinner panel may be in order - say 2". If you have problems all the way down, then something thicker may be appropriate. Also remember that there will be interactions between the sub and boundaries and also between the sub and mains and their boundary responses.
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