Ideal listening room size for new structure?

One mort thing:

Use Simpson Strong ties to secure all rough construction. If you get stormy weather in your area, it takes not all that much wind to lift an eave.

When that is loose the roof comes up and the walls collapse.

Get the ties. Build to Florida storm code standard and you won’t need to worry.

 

Yes, very important. Its special property is that it stays elastic, which helps deaden sound. I would use two different thicknesses of sheetrock, if practical. An alternative is to use something like QuietRock -- already fabricated of two layers with a resilient core.

Sound travels through openings. When you install the sheetrock, you should put acoustic caulk around the edges and put putty pads around outlets. A brief instruction sheet can be found here. Make sure there are no gaps or holes that are not filled. I suggest you try to read as much as you can about proper installation of QuietRock, because those tips will apply to your construction, too.

I built a sound room in our basement, using QuietRock and all its accessories. The noise level in it is about 25 dBA -- really quiet! One can't hear the HVAC system in the next room when the doors are closed.

 

+1 to that. Hospital grade are good enough IMO. Fancy outlets beyond that are an extravagance.

A few other things I learned.

• If possible, have the main door of the room open OUTWARDS. Otherwise, you may find the best listening position is infeasible because it blocks the door.
• Run plenty of Ethernet lines. Again, easy to do when you're at studs.
• Likewise, on't skimp on AC outlets, even in areas where you don't expect to need them. You may, someday.
• For best sound insulation in the ceiling, don't use ceiling lighting fixtures, especially cans. Instead, use freestanding lamps.

 

I'm not familiar with the climate control unit you're planning to use, but you might look into a de-humidifier at some point if the Mitsubishi unit doesn't keep it dry enough. The problem with de-humidifiers is they are noisy so you'd need to turn it off during listening.

I'd love to come take a look during the building process. I'll get with you once construction is underway. In the meantime, anytime you're in the Westfield area you're welcome to come have a listen here. My room is 24x27x8, a far cry from the 12x12 room you heard my system in last.

Curious if you are planning on getting your hands in on the build process?

 

Will a de-humidifier potentially cause a problem with static buildup? Where I live, the air in winter especially is often very dry and static is a real pain, prompting many people with turntables to use humidifiers to overcome the issue.

 

Good point. Here in central Indiana we have similar problem during winter months. During the summer months though, the humidity is very high and a dehumidifier is essential for personal comfort.
My house has a partial basement and a crawl space over about 25% of the house. I use a dehumidifier in the crawl which is adjustable. I would consider the noise made by the dehumidifier's compressor more of a problem. But the unit has an on/off switch.

 

This is a nice project. Please post pictures of your construction if you can. It will be interesting to see.

 

You might contact Cardas for more info and let them know.

 

I know that things are changing from reading your thread. But I think that having a 20' x 20' room or larger is excellent for audio.

I like not having all parallel walls. The wall behind the TV is 6' back from the wall /corner to the right, out of the frame.

It is about the size of a normal 20' x 20' garage, but for the increased square footage of having this rear wall on an angle that takes it back 6' over a 20' length.



I like the ability to have a furniture grouping in the center of the room and combining stereo and HT together. My guests like to come over for dinner, movies, music and socializing.

I installed a split AC/Heat system and can highly recommend you doing so. They are very powerful and can heat and cool down the room quickly and efficiently. They are also extremely QUIET!



This is directly to the left of the walls, which are fixed windows on the back left of the above photos. To the left of the photo is the front door. For the first 6', the wall indents 3' deeper that the window wall in the above photos. All this helps in not having a square or rectangular room with standing waves.

Quiet Rock is nice but is too expensive. You are not building a recording studio. Just use two pieces of sheetrock and forgo the Green Glue, for regular drywall glue.

I would stay away from skylights in favor of fixed windows in the walls, for two reasons. I like to avoid cutting holes in any roof and skylights are very noisy in rain. In heavy rain, they create a LOT of racket!

I would make room for a small kitchen for entertaining and a half bath, for convenience sake. This room I found to be a very workable all purpose room for my needs.



Even if you don't build out the kitchen and half bath at this time, you can always rough in the electric and plumbing and have it inspected and in place, for build out at a future date.

 

Wheels are finally starting to turn! After waiting, waiting and waiting on a drainage permit for weeks, I found out that it had gotten lost in the shuffle and was just sitting there waiting to be reviewed, which took them all of about 20 minutes . So now, after all that, the footer and insulated slab are scheduled to begin Monday or Tuesday with framing to follow quickly after. Still pulling my hair out over this Green Glue stuff though. It seems that most of the reviews are praising it for it's soundproofing qualities. I am not so concerned about that, as this room will be far enough away from anything/body that I really doubt that it will be an issue (I also don't blast the music when playing, usually). What I do not want to over look though is if it offers a fair amount of sound improvement overall making it worth the additional cost?

Also, there are several different ratings/products for the Roxul; which one is considered the one to get for this purpose? I'll likely order from Amazon, so if anyone could send a link to the recommended product, that would be great!

Finally, one more question on my mind - do I want a smooth ceiling, a slightly stippled/knock-down or a more heavily textured one?

Thanks all - photos coming as stuff starts happening!

 

Here is something that I discovered, quite accidentally.

Back in 2008 the Motel's investors did an interior restoration of the property. The motel had been built back in 1957 and was all cement block and concrete, with a poured cement floor. There are a lot of plate glass windows and the interior walls and ceiling were plastered.

At the time of the restoration, this room was completely empty and I would stand there and think that there was no way on Earth that you could ever set up eaen a half decent sound system in this 450 sq. ft. room, with hard surfaces and echo everywhere.

My goal for this room initially was to set up some kind of basic surround sound system so that we could watch movies on the 60" rear projection TV that I bought from a friend for $200.

I bought a small home-theater-in-a-box unit, because I needed something to decode that surround sound and basic amplification. There were some workers doing interior construction in a condo across the street, they left so discarded speakers that they had been discarded from the construction project. Since the were better than the ones in the "box", I used them.

This is after the crew had finished with out interior restoration. I had to say, that I was quite surprised, the sound in the otherwise empty room was not as bad as I had imagined that it would be.

Here is the room as it looked back in 2012, early when becoming an audio-visual room.

As my thoughts were turning as to why the room didn't echo like a canyon, I realised the reason why.

While the original walls and ceiling were hard plaster, during the restoration, they had sprayed "knockdown" on the walls and ceiling, before painting them.

While the knockdown is textured and looks like plaster, it is not, it is some sort of a soft vinyl type product with much lower density than plaster. On top of this, the paint is vinyl based.

There were two factors which came into play here.

First, was the with the textured surface, the surface area of the walls and ceiling are greatly increased.

Secondly, the soft vinyls would absorb some of the sound, with the texturing trapping some of the sound and also acting as a diffuser for first reflections, making the "impossible" room very possible for audio.

The first photo in my post above is from early in 2014 with the newly acquired Klipsch La Scala's and a second (tan) sofa in place.

By 2018, you can see that the green sofa was replaced with a heavier more plush teal sofa and there were more drapes on the walls.

You can see the drapes on the front office windows to the left of the left rear corner speaker, in the above photos.



But this all probably would not have been possible if the knockdown had not been first applied over top of the existing plaster.

Hope this helps save you from later additional and unnecessary room, expensive room treatments.

 

We've encountered a few days of weather delays, but here is the progress so far. Expected to lay remaining blocks and slab by the weeks end, hopefully.

 

Hello everyone, especially builder of his music room
I'm dreaming about own listening room since i was 20YO, so 11 years already...
In the next year i plan to build a house, rather music room+kitchen and toilet
I'm really excited to see progress of your build, and of course what will be final results!

I would like to ask for your advice too, what size of listening room will be perfect?
I consider 40m, 60m, or 100m, in golden ratio of course, but don't want to build too much, because it can also make a problem i cant handle acoustically with normal budget.
I'm closest to 4 x 6.4 x 9.32/10.4m (1:1.6:2.33/2.6).
You can answer if you have any idea/advice on private message.
I consider golden trapagon of cardas idea, with wider, and higher wall behind listaning spot, and side walls spreads and ceiling goes up, as well round corners.

Good luck!

 

Quick question - is there anything to be gained (or hampered) by caulking around all the edges/seams where the studs meet the OSB to help seal cup the walls?

 

For sound isolation, it's helpful to seal (with acoustic caulk) area where otherwise there would be an open crack.

 

Typically no one goes that OCD, however if you are in a cold or extremely hot climate it might help with air leak since no matter how well you think you have filled the stud cavity with batt insulation there will always be air leaks. This however will not help with sound in my opinion.

 

How’s the progress?

 

Thanks for asking - I've been meaning to follow up here for quite a while - lots to share! The process began late last summer, and was completed by early November. I just created a Flickr account to share a bunch of photos here, so hopefully this works. I'll post another round in the next day or two. They should hopefully appear in chronological order. Enjoy!
Jerry Johnson has shared 17 photos with you!

 

Awesome! Im totally jealous.

Look forward to seeing the finished area! Thanks for the pics.

 

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Hi Jerry and everyone else! I am so glad I found this thread! I am in the process of mapping out virtually the same project you mention - a barn-style, concrete slab listening room. The idea was borne out of having the strange fortune of my first apartment (in South Bend, IN where I did my graduate work) having almost perfect acoustics, and getting better acoustics purely by accident when I built corner curvatures stuffed with insulation to block sound from my neighbor. In that place, my system sung. Then, after taking a job in NY, I moved into another apartment - the acoustics weren't nearly as good, but not too noticeably different - I moreorless only understood that I got less chills when I listened. The next apartment was about on par with that. This whole time, I'd never considered or learned anything about room acoustics - only building a killer, if affordable system (I now feel really stupid for failing to learn about or consider this as it seems so intuitive, now, but, well, then, I just had no idea. Then. Sigh. I bought a house. And my living room (which is my current listening room) . . . . is a cube. With Brazilian Cherry hardwood floors. And plaster walls. And openings on the front and rear walls in parallel corners causing me to have to butt my whole system (and the couch on the opposing side) to the side of the door - making everything wildly off center such that one side of the system is about 1ft away from the side wall while the other side is about 6 feet away. At any rate, it sounds atrocious, and I learned my lesson too late.

Here're some pics: Imgur

From this point I took to building sound absorption panels on the entirety of the back wall, a 1264 piece sound diffuser, and another diffuser behind the couch (which was a mistake). I can share pics of my obsession if anyone is interested. It's marginally better, but still sounds pretty terrible - boxy vocals more than half of the time, the highs are too harsh yet not detailed enough... blah blah blah. Basically every conceivable problem.

That said, your idea to build a dedicated room was exactly what I thought I should do, and finding your post about this has piqued my interest. As I've read, the sort of equipment matters in dimension decisions. So, here's what I've got (or the part of what I have that will matter).

2 B&W Nautilus 604s
1 B&W HTM1 Centre Channel
1 B&W 600 series sub
5channel x 150watts per channel Rotel Power Amp
bi-wired silver cables
2 cheap whatever tiny B&W in-wall rears
an 82" tv which puts space between my L & R speakers

The room I hope to build I want to be best suited for 2 channel listening - not theater - though it will double as a theater room. I need help determining the right dimensions (I know the various ratios, but there's so much information out there, I'm hoping my gear list and intentions make it clearer), and, well, anything else.

I have a space of about 14' x 22' to work with, and can go any set of dimensions within those boundaries. I'm glad to use a concrete foundation.


Humor me. Help me. Please. Go nuts.