Studio Acoustics

[OG]

Hi! I'm a guy building a small project studio in a basement. I'm planning on building a room-in-the-room for recording purposes. I have a total area of about 200 sqr ft in one singel room (I know, not really idealistic, but it will have to work). On top of it all I'm on a shoe-string budget. Bottom line, I want to have a creative space for me to write and produce my own, and others, music. I have read various articles on studio acoustics and I almost know what I need. Diffusers, absorbers, bass traps. I think I'm going for panel type bass traps. They are cheap and easy to build. Best of all they can be all three things at the same time. Ofcourse it's a bass trap. The geometrical contruction, a curved reflectiv area, makes it a diffuser and if you want yoy can place absorbant foam on it, and it's an absorber to. So far so good. But how do I know how much of each I need? How do I measure it? Can I use my DAW for that? Should I use Bolts golden ratios for evenly space modes, or is that just mumbo jumbo? Much greatful for any help! /Oskar

[rold]

I don't know if you have already seen it, but bass trap plans are here: http://www.ethanwiner.com/basstrap.html In terms of modes, I'd just try and design it so the frequencies are less than 20 Hz apart, otherwise you will have colourations at those frequencies. You can calculate the modes using these: http://www.sysdevgrp.com/cgi-bin/calculator.pl5 . At the bottom of the page you will find a calculator for axial modes which is pretty straight forward. http://www.mcsquared.com/metricmodes.htm gives you axial, tangential, and oblique calculations. Hope they help! Best, Harold

[OG]

Is the goal to absorb evenly over all the modes? Because when I absorb in one mode then acoutical performance will be unbalanced, right?