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advice for treating my living room?


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Unfortunately, i am one of those who has to do his mixing in the living room. I have not yet done anything to treat the room acoustically, i haven´t lived in this apartment for very long yet. The walls are all thin wood panels. The surface panels are only i few milimeters thick. They are probably filled with glass wool.

 

I have made a very bad sketch in illustrator.

 

The top part of the sketch shows the part of the living room where i have my setup. To the right there is a wall-mounted IKEA-cabinet, apx. 5 inches deep and 6 ft. wide containing cds and dvds. This cabinet has frontdoors with a smooth surface. I couldn´t possibly fit this anywhere else.

 

To the left is a window with drapes and some very thin curtains, and a glass display cabinet.

 

The blank space shows the rest of the living room. There are windows on almost all of the short wall opposite from my computer. What can i do to improve the acoustics in this place? I still want it to be a living room......

livingroom.jpg.442d5ecab580dd75b488a5f08218f24e.jpg

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Treating the corners in the studio end would be a good place to start. Rockwool panels, (get the really dense stuff) 2' x 4' x 4" wrapped in some fabric and hung diagonally in the corners will tighten up the low end and curb some reflections. Maybe put some on the sides as well although you might get away with just some foam there.

 

Alternatively, you can make rockwool triangular columns to fit in the corners.

 

I made some panel style ones for my studio and I used only fabric, no frames, to keep the weight down. Made them like pillow cases and glue gunned the ends shut after inserting the rock wool. The cases were very slightly large to get the rockwool to fit and then I sprayed them with water and blowdried them to make the fabric snug.

 

Some useful discussions here on the triangle method:

 

http://www.logicprohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=36227&highlight=

 

http://logicprohelp.com/viewtopic.php?p=161509&sid=843e78d0ef6c10b41cf38c315d5b6a9b

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Thanks a lot for the advice!

Will look into it immediately. :)

 

Is there a lot to gain by building a back wall for the studio space? will make it smaller, but give me something to put more dampening on?

 

edit:

How about some pictures of the ones you have made? :)

 

Also, should i focus on the upper part of the room where i work, or is it crucial that i also do something with the part of the room where my couch, tv, etc, is?

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Ok, here's a cautionary tale. My tracking room in my studio used to have one large open space on one side - about half the wall was open to another part of the basement. I left it that way for a long time because I had a strong suspicion that closing it off would have a negative impact on the sound of the room. But for various reasons (keeping sounds out, keeping heat in, more professional "look") I recently built a wall there. The initial result was that I closed off what was effectively a bass/low mid escape route for frequencies that I didn't need in my recordings. This meant that I had to do more EQing on my tracks than I would have liked and also resorting to various other exotic fixes. I ended up buying Paul Frindle's amazing DSM to help with this so it wasn't all bad. But I'm still tweaking that space.

 

You may find that the advantages of putting a wall in there outweigh the disadvantages. If you're only working ITB then that's one arena you don't have to worry about. But if it ends up being a tiny boxy space that wall may be a sonic nightmare. Vocals could end up being very boomy and boxy sounding. Not to mention what happens to your mix environment. The space will probably benefit from some treatment no matter what you do.

 

I'll try and get a photo up later of my panels....

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I've done up my tiny studio with a boatload of acoustic treatment and made a little blog about it. You can see how I put together corner traps as well as all the other ones. As it was so small, it needed all that treatment to actually become usable as a mixing environment.

 

You don't need to attach the traps to a wall either if you don't want, you can lean them against one. I opted to attach them as I own the house :)

 

http://www.timothyallan.com/studio-design/

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Lots of very good info on both expensive and inexpensive room treatments here

 

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/studio-construction-acoustics/

 

Really worth reading up, just for the extra knowledge! I am now deeply deeply in lurv with bass traps.

 

And if you have access to Sound On Sound magazine, they do a 'Studio SOS' each issue, treating peoples home spaces and showing how to make removable panels for people living in apartments etc.

 

Coolio.

 

Cx

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  • 10 years later...
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  • 2 weeks later...

If it were me I would make the larger room area the studio by centering the workstation-computer on that wall.

Which in your picture is currently your "Back Wall". You can always get free advise from GIK Acoustics.

*Oh just noticed this was from 10 years ago???

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