John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum

He, he....I won't let you down
A quick loft google of johnlsayers.com gives me 1320 pictures, so there is inspiration to find at least...

My most important room will be the control room. This is the room I will put the most money into to improve.

For the recording room I'm not quite sure how thorough I will be.

It will clearly leak sound through the windows, so I am not sure how much effort I will put into for instance the floor. Is it any value in making a floating floor? Or maybe to rephrase, with a room as shown in the above pictures and drawing, where is it most important to do sound isolation efforts?
With my small dB test of the drums in our main house, the current construction reduces the noise level with approx 25-30 dB. With your knowledge of typical (garage) lofts, what measures gives the best results. With the least effort. In the cheapest possible way, hence "cheap" records....

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Do you have a post(s) in the garage below supporting the loft floor above? Or do your loft floor joists span the entire distance?

Where you live, do you have building codes to follow that will get inspected? Or will you be free to build as you please?

"Most of the loft studios I have watched on this forum over the years never get reported as finished on this forum. I don't know if folks don't publish their results or just bail out all together. "

I haven't bailed out yet, I cud do with being financially bailed out.
My control room and machine room is in a loft with the 3 tracking rooms below, bedroom, toilet, lounge...

The advise given to me on this forum before i even bought a single sheet of plasterboard was to study the principles of soundproofing until they became clear. I personally found rods book to be very clear and concise and it was a wonderful reference to me during my build. I am no expert when it comes to studio construction but I am very happy with the results thus far. My drum room is directly below the control room and I can record drums at a comfortable monitoring level with very little bleed from the drum room below. There is no disturbance to my neighbours or to the rest of the residential property. If I can be of any help to you feel free to ask...

all the best - hally

Rod's book is arriving tomorrow. I'll do some reading this weekend I think and then post back if I somehow see the light. Or not

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Rods book isn't going to cover flanking in an upper level wooden framed structure.

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Brien Holcombe
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Sound: You can't stop it, you can only try to contain it.

Any suggestions for good reading that can support this type of construction?
I´m not expecting that Rod´s book will give me the recipe, but I hope it will give some general good advices...?

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After you read Rod's book and start to understand more about isolation, check out my old thread here. I was gonna have drywall/green glue/drywall on all walls hanging by Resilient Channel. My floor was gonna be OSB/green glue/OSB. It was the best design I could find without spending giant dollars.

I think in Rod's book he makes a statement of something like, "Reality is that you can't get isolation from a simple elevated wood deck. Period." Now once on this forum when I was warning someone of the difficulties of building in a room above a garage, Rod posted and said it could be done. Rod recommended a layer of 2" 703 under the floor might help.

Yes, but I'm pretty sure that was for a different purpose. That works great for impact noise, and somewhat for airborne noise, but still isn't a substitute for a 6 inch concrete slab on grade, when it comes to isolating!

I personally saw a case like this here in Chile, where a drum rehearsal room was built on the second floor of a brick building, and that second floor was indeed a concrete slab! It just wasn't "on grade", and wasn't damped at all. The walls and ceiling around that room were correctly decoupled two-leaf MSM, with three layers of 15mm drywall and an 8" fully insulated air gap, but the isolation from that system not good: The walls and ceiling were working fine, but to no real purpose since there was a lot of flanking going on through the floor. I'd hate to think what that would have been like if the floor would have been a typical wooden deck...

The general mantra is that in order to stop sound, you need mass. Lots of mass. A couple of layers of plywood separated by a layer of 703 just doesn't have much mass.

If you want to understand floor isolation better, take a look at IR-766, RR-168 and IR-811. You'll get a pretty good understanding of how things work from those.

- Stuart -

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I want this studio to amaze people. "That'll do" doesn't amaze people.

Here's the link to the actual post. Maybe I don't fully understand it, but he seems to recommend 703 over light concrete. It's really hard to get lots of mass for a garage loft floor without a lot of expense to build the structure to hold up the weight.

Exactly! That's pretty much what I recalled. Here's the actual quote form that thread:

That's the impact noise thing I was talking about, and note that he says "multiple layers of plywood". As in: "more than just one or two layers". That's how you get mass. Of course, Rod also makes it very clear, both on the forum and in his book, that you always need to make certain that your structure can handle the load you are going to put on it! Plywood weighs about 60 pounds per sheet. 4 layers in a 16' x 12' room would be nearly 1500 pounds of extra load, plus whatever else is going in the room (isolation, treatment, instruments, equipment, people, HVAC, etc). That might be fine for your floor, or it might not. So you do need to make sure that your existing floor can handle that extra load, and the only guy who can tell you about that for sure is a qualified structural engineer.

And Rod was talking about wooden decks, not concrete:



In relation to light concrete, he said this:

So if flanking is the issue, then light concrete is not the solution. What IS a solution is:



In other words, if you are going to float your floor and use a light concrete deck, then it needs to be properly isolated to avoid flanking.

Ted White also added a comment to that thread, saying basically that you could probably do it that way, but on top of an acoustic mat. Then also points out that, like everything else, there's a trade off with that plan too: Concrete is great for isolation, not so great for flanking.

The point that was implied here, but not really made clearly, is that getting high levels of isolation for a second floor studio is not easy: floating just with wood by itself is not a good solution (due to the lack of mass), and if you do decide to go with a floated concrete deck, then it MUST be isolated correctly, or that won't work either due to the flanking issue.

But the major point Rod was actually making in that post is pretty much: "Live with what you have. If that's what you have, then that's what you have, so just do the best you can with it." So if the ONLY place you have available for a studio is a second floor, then either you give up and do nothing, or you do the best you can with that space, within the limitations of time, budget, space and structural integrity. If you can only get 40 dB of isolation, then that's what you can get, so figure out ways of working around that limitation, and live with it. It's either that, or no studio at all! Given the choice, I'll always go with "something" over "nothing"!

That's why I suggested looking at IR-766, RR-168 and IR-811: there's a huge amount of excellent data in there, with dozens of different floor systems that have been tested in laboratories, with full results of the isolation obtained for each one, and the full details of how it was built. Looking through there is an education! I think a good approach is to look through it, see which ones are similar to YOUR situation, and then narrow down the field to ones you can afford, and build easily.


- Stuart -

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I want this studio to amaze people. "That'll do" doesn't amaze people.

Thanks for good advice's and info. I have started to read Rod's book. Will take me more than a weekend though...

In addition to the challenges with my loft, there are quite some language related challenges as well. Sound isolation and acoustics (or maybe it is more the construction jargon) are not so well known in my vocabulary, even less know in English. Also I'm a metric guy, so I constantly need to convert dimensions... But the book is written in a way that makes it quite easy and entertaining to read, so I'll manage given enough time.

The references in the above post, I assume it is related to these documents?
RR-168
IR-766
IR-811

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I´m now reading chapter 10, putting it all together.
It takes time to read, but I must say a big thank you to Rod for writing this book.
I really have the impression of reading a book by a person who has a lot of knowledge he like to share. Thank you!
I still need more time to digest and formulate some good questions, cause I think I have more questions now than before reading the book. Somehow I think that is a good thing...

On a structural note, I have learned that my garage loft is calculated to hold 200 kg/m2 internal construction + the weight of usage (70 kg/m2).
I think that gives me some good options when designing my studio, or?

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Hi Hally,

I briefly read through some of your earlier posts, it seems that you were in quite a similar boat as I am in now. I have also finished my first read through of Rod's book. Now I need go back and start reading again, even though I now understand more of the terms which are heavily used/discussed in here.
But my question to you, I was wondering, do you have any final description of how your construction ended up? Links, pictures... materials used...etc...?

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