What Is The Ideal Ceiling Height For A Recording Studio?
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- Опубликовано: 27 июл 2024
- FREE Acoustic Treatment Guide: www.soundproofyourstudio.com/...
You may have visited some professional recording studios and noticed that the rooms had high ceilings, especially the tracking room. Now in your home studio do you need a high ceiling? In this article I will talk about why higher ceilings are beneficial and some of the room acoustic theory behind recording studio room design.
1) High Ceilings Are Great For Drum Recording
A very basic, but important reason large pro studios have high ceilings in the tracking room is to give the wave forms enough space to develop before hitting a surface and reflecting back to the microphones and your ears. This is especially true when recording drums or large ensembles like an orchestra.
In most home studios an 8 foot ceiling barely gives you enough height to place the overhead mics. You will mostly pick up the cymbals in a lower studio and the reflections from the ceiling will create a "harsh" tone. This is a very practical reason for having larger ceilings, but what about the physics of room acoustics? How do room acoustics improve with higher ceilings?
2) Room Modes
To really grasp why higher ceilings are beneficial in a room, we must first understand some basic room acoustic physics. All rooms create reflections where sound waves bounce off of. When sound emanates from a source, say a speaker, the air in the room is excited by the sound waves. The sound travels in all directions from the speaker and bounces of the walls, ceiling and floor. When the sound bounces off the surfaces it then returns back into the room. The reflected waves then encounter new sound waves coming from the speaker and they interact with each other. The sound waves either create a boost because of constructive interference or they create a null known as destructive interference.
These peaks and nulls in the sound waves create acoustic distortions. Now, there is a slight difference in how higher frequency sounds behave versus lower frequency sounds. Sound waves above 250Hz perform more like a "ray." Meaning they travel in a direct line and don't have as much energy as sound waves below 250Hz.
Sound waves below 250Hz and especially below 100Hz have much more energy and have much longer wavelengths. These sound waves create what we call room modes. These room modes or are areas of high or low pressure due to those sound waves running into themselves after bouncing off your rooms surfaces.
Okay, that was a bit complicated, but it is very important to understanding why high ceilings are important. The reason is that we ultimately want larger rooms to allow for enough space for those low frequency waves to fully form or at least form as much as they can before hitting a surface. Depending on the distance the waves travel from a source (speaker) and a surface (ceiling) the room modes will change.
3) Room Ratios
This brings us to the next point about ceiling height. The ceiling is only one part of the room. We must also consider the length and width of our room when designing a recording studio. Over the years some acousticians have come up with room ratios that create a pleasing acoustic environment for sound reproduction.
These room ratios should be considered a starting point and are by no means the end all be all of acoustic design. You may be wondering as I did why we don't know the way to design the perfect room for a recording studio. After all, if we can measure room modes and use room ratios to reduce them why not build the perfect mathematically correct studio?
The answer is that, acoustics is as much an art as it is a science. Just because one room sounds good to one person does not mean it will sound good to another. In fact, the way we perceive sound is uniquely human. We do not hear everything the way the math works out in physics. We hear how our ears and brain perceive sound in a room. This makes the job of designing your studio that much less precise, but also gives you the freedom to design a room that is pleasing and does the job you need it to.
All this said, we can use room ratios to get us in the ballpark with a room that will have less acoustic problems and thus cost less to acoustically treat in the long run.
Some common room ratios are from the acousticians, Sepmeyer, Louden, Volkman and Boner. Below is a diagram of some of their room ratios.
Read the full blog article at - www.soundproofyourstudio.com/...
0:00 - Intro
1:21 - Room Modes
4:36 - Room Ratios
8:30 - Room Mode Calculator
12:53 - Conclusion
FREE Acoustic Treatment Guide: www.soundproofyourstudio.com/acoustic
Please, never stop making these.
I don’t plan to! Thanks for watching
Great video
Thanks!
Another great episode, thanks! Thoughts on the additional complication of a vaulted ceiling? Obviously a million variables there, but wondering about your space specifically (I’m building out a similarly sized shed)
Yes, with oddly shaped rooms aka not rectangles the room ratios are not as accurate. In this case you are designing based off of volume and overall ceiling height. My studio has its own sound and it’s own problems. You will work through those after.
Great video. How would I go about calculating if I have a peaked ceiling? What measurement should I use?
Good question! With a peaked ceiling you would need to do more advanced calculations that would require powerful room design software. My ceiling is peaked so the room ratios don’t fully describe how my studio works. In the end you could try to get the walls and peak ceiling height in line with the ratio but with sloped ceilings the room acoustics are completely different. In your case don’t worry so much about perfect ratios as much as getting a larger volume and then testing the room after it is finished.
It's fascinating how sometimes the simplest places surprise us! My barn's acoustics are amazing, and what's even more incredible is that there hasn't been any intentional acoustic treatment. The well-insulated ceiling seems to work its magic naturally! 🎶🏞🔊
That is the beauty of acoustics. The science always is trumped by our subjective appreciation of sound in a space.