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ProNounce - Tips on Acoustics for Your Home Studio


You need a quiet room, an acoustically treated room and a room sized and shaped to eliminate the negative affects of standing wave.

Room dimensions directly affect its sound by altering its standing wave. Very little can be done after a room is built to change its characteristic standing wave without considerable time and expense. Keep these tips in mind if your are picking a space or building a new room:

  • Larger rooms move standing wave frequencies below areas of concern. When in doubt, make the room larger. But when applied to audio frequencies however, large means 15 feet plus... Smaller rooms averaging five to ten feet accentuate resonances that are right in the range of your voice making it sound unnatural.
  • Keep the three dimensions from being the same. Its width, length and height should be differing dimensions. A nice dimension for a voice room is 7'x8'x12' where 7'x7'x7' or even 15'15'x15' is extremely undesirable.
  • A mistaken belief is that using foam and fiberglass can fix poorly dimensioned rooms. While absorber panels and tiles are effective at higher frequencies, badly designed room sizes manifest their problems around 300 Hz while tiles and panels are most effective above 1000Hz.
  • Folks that already have smaller rooms or rooms with unfortunate dimensioning can use broadband bass traps. A common bass trap which can also help higher frequency reflection is a custom built Helmholtz or slat resonator. For custom acoustic assistance, contact David Rochester at Technical Audio Services. For premanufactured solutions, quite a few companies make broadly tuned bass traps like RPG, RealTraps , Ready Acoustics or GIK Acoustics.
For a room to be quiet, you should do your best to keep sound transfer from noise sources low. Obviously, some of these tips apply to new construction but can be incorporated in existing rooms, too. The more you apply, the better your room will be.
  • Locate the room away from noise sources like overhead traffic areas, stairs, outside windows, electric garage doors, HVAC air handlers and the like.
  • Locate the room against a basement wall or (even better) a basement corner which is under ground or at least partially backfilled.
  • Build the room with as few rigid contacts to other structures in the house as possible. Ceilings linked to second level floor joists transfers acoustic energy like foot steps. The ideal room is a box sitting on a concrete floor with nothing touching the rest of your house.
  • Airborne acoustic transfer happens most at the weakest points such as doors and windows. Keep the count of doors and windows to a minimum. If you must have windows, separate two panes with an air pocket, secure the panes with neoprene and keep them decoupled so structure-borne sound doesn't transfer to them. Use solid core, double hung doors and keep the seals tight. If you can find them, use cam-lift hinges that sit your door on its threshold when closed.
  • HVAC is one of the most overlooked topics when voice booths are designed. You need air conditioning and heating yet they must be quiet. Keep air handlers away from the room. If this isn't possible, route ducting past your room and back again to effectively lengthen its path. Also route both ducts through baffle ducting to help deaden air handler noise. Have your HVAC contractor slow the air handler fan speed by re-tapping the motor or using different pulleys and use oversized ducting to help eliminate rushing noises. Use no grates on outlets and returns.
  • Walls are best made out of wood studs with as many layers of dissimilar substrates as possible. Sheetrock, then plywood, then fiberboard all screwed and glued makes a good wall and ceiling covering. Use carpet glue and paint it with a roller; don't squeeze out beads from a tube. Closer stud spacing and the use of purlins helps reduce wall resonance. The idea is make a layered monolithic wall and ceiling.
  • Keep noise makers like electronics with fans outside your voice booth. If you need a computer in your room, pierce the wall with one well sealed 4" PVC tube and run keyboard, mouse and monitor through the pipe, then stuff the pipe tightly with foam rubber to seal it. The same goes for audio ties to/from your codec if it has a fan.
  • Keep fluorescent lights out of your room away from your mic and preamp. By the same token, keep dimmers away from your mic and preamp. Both radiate EMI which can induce noise in your otherwise pristine audio signal.

Once your room is built to be quiet, you might need to work on it's internal acoustic properties. More than likely, your new room will have parallel walls, counters, ceilings and other flat surfaces that will reflect internal sounds. While some reflection is a natural thing and actually preferred, an untreated room will benefit from wall and ceiling treatment. Just remember, these treatments have nothing whatsoever to do with preventing unwanted sound from entering your room.
  • Place acoustic panels with respect to your position. For example, if you will sit in the middle, place a 4'x4'x1" panel immediately to your left, right, front and back. This allows the natural reflections to exist while quelling the major ones. Keeping in mind you might have to treat your ceiling if you voice over a counter. Better yet, you might want to somehow reduce the reflective space of the counter itself.
  • Wooden floors are very natural sounding and preferred for acoustic environments but still can be extremely reflective. Killing the vertical reflections can be as simple as using rugs or using drop ceilings (suspended ceilings) designed for acoustic absorption. Use one method or the other; both is redundant.
  • Corners are always areas of artificially enhanced bass. Play some music and listen in the corner of the room. You will notice a pronounced increase in bass. For this reason, keep your mic in the middle of the room and treat the corners with small, broadband bass traps.
  • Refrain from over treating your room by covering it entirely with absorption panels. A totally dead room is unnatural and more expensive even if it does look really, really, really ridiculously cool.