Sound control / acoustical treatment on the cheap?

[tuco]

Greetings,

I have a 10 x 20 workshop I'd like to turn into home recording space for spoken word, hand drums, and Native American flute.

The existing rectangular space has a concrete floor, exposed studs (no insulation yet), and a wood-paneled ceiling. Needless to say, a very reflective room with no absorption at all.

Any ideas on how best to acoustically treat this room without spending a ton of money on commercial sound control panels? (I already have a solution for quieting the computers).

Open to all ideas.

[basilbowman]

This would probably be better suited in the Studio Construction/Acoustic Treatment forum.

[tuco]

Thanks, I must have missed that, will re-post over there ;-)

[basilbowman]

No problem

[Ethan Winer]

Any ideas on how best to acoustically treat this room without spending a ton of money on commercial sound control panels?

Room treatment is a deep subject, and a complete answer requires far more than will fit into a single reply here. So here's the short version. All rooms need:

* Broadband (not tuned) bass traps straddling as many corners as you can manage, including the wall-ceiling corners. More bass traps on the rear wall behind helps even further. You simply cannot have too much bass trapping. Real bass trapping, that is - thin foam and thin fiberglass don't work to a low enough frequency.

* Mid/high frequency absorption at the first reflection points on the side walls and ceiling.

* Some additional amount of mid/high absorption and/or diffusion on any large areas of bare parallel surfaces, such as opposing walls or the ceiling if the floor is reflective. Diffusion on the rear wall behind you is also useful in larger rooms.

For the complete story see my Acoustics FAQ.

There's a lot of additional non-sales technical information on my company's site - articles, videos, test tones and other downloads - linked under my name below.

--Ethan

[basilbowman]

By the way, Mr Winer, you probably don't remember this, but I asked your advice on building a studio about a year ago, for my school, well, we built it, and it worked out very well indeed, and right as it got finished, I graduated, and haven't gotten to play with it yet. But the basic tests I got to try were pretty good,

Nathan