When it comes to designing acoustically treated rooms such as the Studiobricks recording booths, there are plenty of aspects to be taken into consideration. First of all, it is important to think about the use of the space. Are we talking about a voice recording booth, does the recording booth need to be flexible in case of a relocation, do you want to record an instrument in there and generally will it be used for recordings or to play the instrument only? Another option could be the use of a sound isolation room to mix your projects or to have uninterrupted business calls.
Different use cases have different requirements and when optimizing the properties of your room there are many different acoustic phenomena and characteristics to be taken into account. Key terms such as isolation, reverberation, diffusion and resonances of different frequencies should be analyzed and treated, as these aspects lead to either having a live/wet and colored room or a dry/dead and neutral room.
Our passion and competence at Studiobricks are the analysis, modification and treatment of these issues – all impacting your recording quality, your freedom of being as loud as you want and leading to an uninterrupted space inside, optimized for your use case.
Isolation means not hearing the outside sounds from the inside and vice versa and plays a key role when thinking about acoustic booths. While you definitely do not want to have any external sounds entering your recordings, you quite probably also do not want to have your neighbors hearing you doing several takes of the same chorus at full power over and over again. Neither do you want the engineer in the control room to have any other sound entering his ears, than the sound coming out of the monitor speakers he is using. The same counts for having uninterrupted business calls or when speaking about confidential information – you definitely do not want anyone to hear you and you do not want your office neighbor to be heard by your client when speaking about serious business.
To optimize isolation in our portable, meaning easy to assemble and disassemble, recording booths, we offer options of either double or triple-wall isolation systems, which are filled with either a double or a triple layer of our highly absorbing eco friendly filling material, made out of recycled PET. Of course, the triple wall isolation will provide you the best isolation to and from the outside world. Although on average our booths isolate 45db for a double wall and 47dB for a triple wall, depending on the frequency they can isolate up to 50db and 60dB. This means you can only hear around 0,0156 times the loudness perceived inside of the recording cabin.
The amount of reverberation, measured in reverberation time over the different frequency bands, defines whether you call a recording or isolation booth a live or a dead space, or you could also say wet or dry. Basically, we are talking about the time it takes until the amplitude of the reflections the walls emit after treatment, falls below a certain threshold (-60dB).
As described, an acoustic booth can have different qualities depending on what you want to use it for. When using it to play your instrument only, you might not even care about a bit of reverberation, maybe you even want to put some diffusers in there to be able to enjoy playing in a more live environment. If you do want to record your instrument however, the sound should be somewhat dry, depending on the instrument and your personal taste. To treat this, we need absorbers. What do they do? Absorbers will deal with the reflections of sound waves resulting in a dry sound, while Diffusors will create a more live atmosphere, for example for instrument recording, by reflecting and spreading the sound waves in the room.
For a maximum of clarity, vocal recordings should be as dry and uncolored as possible. This can be achieved with using a professionally treated, acoustically absorptive small room or a very neutral sounding larger room. For both options, Studiobricks offers a great solution.
Our soundproof booths are available in variable sizes, configurable for your space and requirements, giving you the best modular configurable studio booth on the market, having a great dry and uncolored sound. For your own premises, our absorber products can help you achieve the best sound possible regarding both, absorption and diffusion. Our absorber units are available in different sizes to treat the full spectrum of frequencies. Needless to say, that our modular diffusion units, can be placed almost anywhere inside of our booths to create the amount of live sound you like.
Another big challenge for recording environments are room modes and low frequency resonation. Those are a bit harder to control, but the Studiobricks triple-wall system, the modular characteristics of the walls as well as an acoustically detached footing system already fixes a lot of resonation potential. Further Studiobricks offers bass traps for your corners, specially framed absorbers for low and mid frequency bands and the absorber panels for your walls for the mid range and high frequencies – we have the whole frequency spectrum covered.
As you can see, our technology is well designed, thoroughly calculated and tested and we are ready to prepare your modular recording space as well as your already existing recording premises to the maximum potential. What can we help you with? Contact us!
