Studio Design Assignment

Recording Studio Design Assessment task details and instructions

Introduction

This assignment looks at the application of acoustic treatment to a room in order to achieve a specific acoustic objective.

Background

You have been given a room for a creative audio environment of your choice. The room has the following internal dimensions. Length=10.60m, Width=9.80m, and Height=3.50m. Visual observation reveals that the walls are made of painted plaster board, and the floor and ceiling are made of concrete. There is one door 0.8m wide by 2.5m tall on one of the longer walls and the other long wall has three triple glazed windows that have dimensions of 1.50m wide and 2.75m high, starting at floor level. Heres a plan of the room, not to scale.

Diagram of Room Floor Plan:

Assignment

You must write a report on the conversion of this room into a creative audio environment of your own choice (live room or control room). You only have to design the internal acoustic treatment. Do not concern yourself with isolation or ventilation issues. You can, and should, use commercial units available which can be found online. Add your own designed products (eg: low frequency Assessment Information/Brief 2024/25 2 0.8m 0.85m 0.85m 1.50m 1.50m 1.50m absorbers; diffusers) for higher marks. Use products for which you can find performance parameters such as dimensions and absorption coefficients. There is no budget limit. Your report should and be written in a fashion that someone else could:

- Appraise for complying with design guidelines and requirements.

- Realise your room design in practice without having to consult you.

Your report should contain the following:

• A section that discusses, and calculates the initial performance of the room with respect to reverberation, critical distance and modal frequencies.
• You should then describe what treatments, with appropriate calculations, you are going to apply to this room in order to achieve the acoustic environment that you desire. This should include a description, with technical justifications, appropriately supported by references and drawings, of how you would design the treatments proposed to achieve the creative audio environment that you desire.

Your report must be structured as follows:

1. An initial room analysis section that discusses, and calculates, the initial performance of the bare room with respect to

• Reverberation
• Critical distance
• Modal frequencies
• You should have technical justifications (i.e. citing textbooks or papers) and calculations (i.e. indicating formulae used), including tables or graphs of results, for this section. Note: this will require you to use the library resources both physical and electronic, e.g. the AES Electronic Library, JASA, IEEE, Acoustics textbooks, etc.

2. A design section comprising of a short description of your design, including how you approached the problem and anything particularly clever that you did. This section should tackle the following issues and have specific subsections for:

• Location of elements Include a plan with location of speakers, desk and listening positions relative to architectural elements of the room (doors, windows, columns, etc).
• Solutions for dealing with early reflections - Include positioning of treatment in the room and justifications for these decisions. You may use drawings (by hand/ruler/protractor, CAD or Acoustic Simulator) showing paths for 1st order reflections in the horizontal dimension with respect to chosen source (instrument or speaker) and receiver (microphone or listener). You should use before and after treatment representations of the impulse response (may be hand-drawn neatly on a graph like grid) with the expected level and time of arrival of first order reflections, which you have calculated, demonstrating the merits of your design. Include your calculations. Include your own design of diffusion panels, if you are using them, for extra marks.
• Solutions for dealing with room modes Include tables of modes in the room. Present a map of where low frequency absorption might be placed and which particular modal regions that absorption will address, including the order of modes (axial, tangential or oblique). You may also include figures of merit for modal response, which you have calculated using your own programs (excel, matlab, java, etc) for extra marks. You can also include the design of your own bass traps for extra marks.
• Solutions for dealing with excessive or deficient reverberation including graphs of before Assessment Information/Brief 2024/25 3 and after treatment RT in octave bands (250Hz-4kHz) and calculation of critical distances.

3. A brief discussion/conclusion of the merits and problems of your design and how it compares against published standards/recommendations.

4. A references section for the citations you used, with an approved referencing standard, in your paper.