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Ideal Acoustics

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Loco Mo:
If you could create your own studio for either listening to or recording music, what would be your design?

I have dreamt of being able to do so, especially if I had millions of dollars to invest in it.

So, let me ask a few questions:

1)  Would a listening room be different from one in which you record music?
2)  How much do you think it would cost you to create your ideal "music room?"
3)  Would an ideal acoustical room have any carpeting or would it be bare floor only?
4)  What would the floor be made of?  Wood, marble, etc?
5)  Windows in the room or solid walls only?
6)  Doorways or entrances - how would these be constructed?
7)  How high would your ceiling be?
8)  Room - square or round or other shape?  I think sound would travel differently in a circular room.
9)  When recording, where would you position microphones?  Equally spaced throughout or individually placed according to instruments being recorded?
10)  When recording, would you utilize headphones to listen to your music or would you prefer to listen to an open air environment?
11)  Would you want to create artificial sound environments such as wind, rain, chimes, storms, etc?
12)  When recording, how would you determine the attention accorded to the various music instruments in the room?
13)  When recording, what would you prefer?  The entire band simultaneously or breaking up the parts and mixing them together later if you could have band members record their pieces separately.
14)  Would you want a "live feel" to your recording?  Or do you prefer the sort of quiet studio feel?
15)  What about echoes and ambience?  By ambience, I mean sustain.
16)  What do you think of overlaying music on top of other music?  This is not exactly an acoustical question; I just thought of it offhand.

Thanks for your input!  Have a great day, artists, musicians and experts of one sort or another(s).

nimrod:
I'll try to answer Loco.

1) No
2) $90k ish could be more, Im not sure. Depends how state of the art you want.
3) Carpet (thick)
4) ....
5) No Windows, sound insulation on walls and ceiling.
6) Insulated fire doors
7) 9ft
8) Rectangular
9) Individually placed
10) Both
11) Yes
12) Id give much attention to drums mostly I suppose then equal
13) Record each instrument individually, unless you want to sound like Neil Young :)
14) Quiet studio
15) You would need to buy a high quality spring reverb unit OR be happy with digital reverb/sustain.
16) You mean multitrack recording ? For me its the best way.

17) Could be...... do you prefer analogue recording or Digital ? For me Digital every time. The aforementioned Neil Young recrds eveything on an analogue tape machine, like the old days. He refuses to record digitally.

18) The ideal for recording or listening should be a completely 'Dead' room ie no outside noise, no echo, sound deadening walls, thick carpet.

Moogmodule:
Would you want a listening room to be dead? I’d have thought a room with nice natural echo would be the most pleasant to sit and listen to music (as opposed to monitoring for recording) purposes). I was in an anechoic chamber once and it wasn’t a pleasant listening experience.

Besides that Nims covered it well. I would say you can get some decent acoustic tiling that will deaden your room and prevent things like standing waves not too expensively. But if you want the rolls Royce including sound baffling then yep, big bucks.

You can also have non dead spaces for recording provided it has pleasant sound reflection. Sort of like people used to record in the bathroom because the natural echo was cool.  But getting that good room sound can be difficult. So for most of we home recorders, as Nim said, keep it dead then you can apply effects to it ( that, importantly can be turned off or altered if you don’t like them).

One handy thing I have is a reflection shield for vocals. It’s a small insulated piece that fits on your mike stand around your microphone. It significantly cuts down on room echo and deadens the recording. Not as good as a proper vocal booth but a lot cheaper.

nimrod:
My main career was an HVAC design engineer and interestingly the hardest project was to air condition a recording studio when I lived back in LA.

To make things more difficult it was in an old factory with concrete walls. Fan noise or even air movement noise was a no no. But boy it got hot in there, what with equipment, people (usually smoking). The latent and sensible heat gain was huge, luckily very little solar heat gain though due to only one south facing external wall.

Moogmodule:
^^^
Cool job. Not literally of course.

I learnt from experience that you want to sound insulate toilet pipes very well. At least one recording I did had the very audible sound of a toilet flushing.

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