I am not sure if you guys have lost it or have you not noticed that the carpet is ALREADY IN PLACE. Nobody has suggested 'adding' one.
Much more importantly, the proposed overall treatment is absolutely minuscule relative to surface area.
So minuscule that I have already recommended doubling the side reflection and corner treatments just to get to my normally recommended absolute MINIMA.

The ceiling area is 209 square feet. Proposed treatment is 32 square feet over the listening area only. 15%
Any of you acousticians here, are you seriously recommending that he rip up the carpet? Or is most of this thread just pointless hypothetical bickering about a non existent fully pro build in some other dimension on some other planet?

If that carpet were to be ripped up, and the ceiling treatment left as proposed or even doubled in area the room would go absolutely bat shit crazy with horrible harsh flutter echo.

Let's get real here for the OP's sake and cut out the piddling competition.


DD

Being hobbiest, I would be plenty happy if I could get 90% of the way there with what I'm proposing already.

I was hoping for straight answers because I know that room acoustics, like nearly everything else, follows the law of diminishing returns.

Put simply, what measures will yeild the greatest amount of improvement per dollar or per effort. That's really what I'm after.

As for the question of ripping up carpet, I'm buying the house with the carpet already in place. it will not cost me anything to rip it up and have concrete vs leaving it there. So money really doesn't come into play.

This new question would really need a budget to bring reality to the table.
But without that, I can assure you that the minimum recommendation that I have made, including reflective fronts on the corner traps, will deliver a comfortable work space. And, the reasonably treated listening zone, noting that I have doubled the side treatment, will facilitate decent recordings of vocals etc as you described. You will probably be amazed and delighted to be able to hear your speakers and instruments clearly with the normal harshness caused by modern decor. Those old style living rooms, bordellos, gentlemen's club, LOL, had a nice tone.

If a budget were introduced we might scale this up. e.g. Could the ceiling plasterboard be removed and the gaps between joists filled with fibre to create a deep overhead full area cloud? Or would you install say 20 or so hanging panels or even a full dropped ceiling? If this were the case I would be happy to lose the carpet. It will of course cost significantly to install a replacement floor surface. 209 Square feet of anything will cost. But seeing your willingness to rip it up, maybe that carpet is a bit old? I quite like properly painted concrete.

DD

The budget is irrelevant. if it take 50 panels to make it a great room to mix in, I'll do it.

From what I have read, my room dimensions are fairly decent. combining that with the fact that I will not be recording that many acoustic instruments, I shouldn't have to go too far to get a decent mixing room. I hope.

Can I suggest that a combination of carpeted areas and hard floor is the way to go. A hard area around where your chair will be is a good idea in terms of mobility, and, if the ceiling above that area has a absorbent cloud, then there should be no flutter issues.

Having a strip of carpet around the room at floor/wall intersections is a good way to prevent high frequency "bouncing" at those intersections (assuming the wall is a hard surface). Carpet at the loudspeaker end of the room makes sense to me as well.

The end of the day, the decision to retain or remove the carpet should be part of the overall acoustic design.

Tim.

Gradually the presented situation is changing in little increments.
Top down.
Great Mix Room, Pro standard space, 8 feet is not enough. Different property required or a rebuild of this part of it. Newell suggests 3-4 Metres height as a min.
Working within the current building, hire an acoustician. If budget is irrelevant it is a waste of otherwise creative time to try to learn another's possibly lifetime skill.
Another level down, as recommended, radical ceiling treatment. But increase the thickness or size of the front wall corner traps. Make a 'serious' entire back wall trap. This could be a couple of feet of fibre, hangers, VPR's. Maybe a combo. A booth to quieten amps or computers or both, with stud/plasterboard wall AND a thick fibre trap on the listening side, plus diffusors on top if you want.
Another level down, as we are, the recommended Minima, keep the carpet.
Sorry if I misread your intentions but if you read through the thread borrowing my eyes for a minute, I think you will see how and why react/advise as I did.
Asking for free advise on an internet forum, when perhaps there is possibly a choice of building, possibly a decent budget, and very conservative domestic looking sketching, can give the wrong idea.
DD

Dan, I already describe and publish my (and NOT only my) way of treating small control rooms long ago in my papers (AES, Telfor, white paper), so there is no need to talk about "hypothesis", at least not in my case, I proved my approach already, many times.

Again, I see NO purpose of wall to wall carpet in the (small) control rooms, because they even cannot help with frequency response compensation for floor reflections (what may be a problem), which is always from 100-200Hz, roughly, where carpet won't work.

I will repeat, I always treat full ceiling (together with all other boundaries except floor), AND, after that I propose fully hard floor, without any soft layer below, glued to the concrete slab. So there is no "partial cloud" in my recommendation, because it is not effective in the small rooms, where LF problems are much more expressed than in bigger rooms (where partial cloud may have some purpose...)

Also, damping only flutter echo in the small room is a long way from acceptable small control room treatment...

Well... I recommend to people, and always do something similar to this:


or this:

boggy, how do you finish that ceiling in the first picture? Some kind of material/fabric fastened on each stud?

yes, then binary diffuser slats
as you can see below...

wow, that is quite something! Very interesting. so you have that on all 5 surfaces with a hard floor? No panels or bass traps then I imagine?

Boggy, there is no doubt as to the quality of your designs and build.

The problem here in this thread is a very common one. i.e. How much? How much treatment, build, is possible here? What is 'acceptable'? Is the goal is a professional room to some pro spec, or a 'reasonable' hobbyist thing? Acoustically, there is no disagreement on the matter of what is best. i.e. Full ceiling treatment, thick enough to deal with vertical modes. This would allow the carpet to go happily. Nobody has suggested installing carpet. Nobody is suggesting removing it UNLESS an extensive ceiling treatment is installed.
You and I know what we mean by extensive. Please explain to sitman and others how thick the treatments you use are. And what you would recommend in this 8 foot high living room.
Floor reflections are commonly accepted, because there is little choice. Some people chose to remove the HF aspect by carpet with underlay or more sophisticated vertical blocking methods.
When it comes to early reflections within the listen zone, most of us agree gone is good.
Whether one regards this as worthwhile 'good 's not is a taste call. A matter of tuning for purpose. Many studios chose to soften the floor bounce as I have shown and related. As I have said before hypothetical text book room/speaker designs with flat frequency response and decay do not work in terms of mix translation. Those of us that Mix, Record, and Master, should be listened to in order to avoid continuation of the massive mistakes seen in CR design over decades.

EDIT, an interesting floor idea http://www.domesticimperfection.com/...rs-a-tutorial/

DD

yes... something as that.... it is cheaper way for serious treatment, than building every piece of trapping separately, covering with fabric, lacquering, etc

Thank you!
From what I read above, i conclude that OP may be interested to build serous treatment instead of "treat flutter echo only" (Game Without Frontiers, from my experience)... it is possible that I didn't understand well everything what he wrote here:
About prices... hmmmm .... for bigger room shown above, which have dimensions about 8x5x2.7... price for only bass treatment (what you actually see as "under construction) is about 2000EUR for construction wood, screws and other construction elements, ~30m3 rockwool and glasswool, without labor.
It is not easy to throw money and spend real estate space without later satisfaction... So this is a relative question.
Flat frequency response within +/-5dB below 300Hz, at 1/24oct smoothing.
Better than that, is even more acceptable.
What is "hobbyist", and what is "professional"?
Do we have a real "pro spec"?
Do you know any hobbyist that will accept -10dB dip (or two, three of dips at different frequencies) below 300Hz in frequency response?
Translated: -10dB dip at 51Hz mean that you cannot hear bass note in Sting's "A Thousand Years"... e.g. that is not acceptable for many people I know...
Problem is that if you treat only flutter echo in the room, you are still at the beginning... you will still have bass problems and room will be unacceptable for any work, even for music listening (serious music listening)
Treatment need to be thicker than 10" (20" is ok).... if we like to have some absorption below 100Hz.


It is not about thickness of treatment, it is about people's money and real estate (something is always needed to spend) and real satisfaction after that... No matter if someone thinks about himself as professional or hobbyist... it is not mine to "decide" what is goal for someone... this is not helping.

Thanks for those thoughts and info boggy. I think the earlier statements from to OP particularly the treatment plan and sketch suggest a treated domestic room rather than a pro mix room. But as the thread has progress I can see willingness and excitement perhaps to go much further. All good.
sitman, as you can see boggy's system looks good is easy enough to construct and the measured results are excellent.
Could you live with a 7 foot ceiling? Do remember my earlier suggestion of removing the plasterboard and installing this cloud in the gaps between joists. That can keep your height and deliver a full cloud. Boggy's plan entails a fully hard floor and a fully absorbent cloud. Personally I like how this sounds and consider it pretty much an ideal. But there are other great sounding perfectly workable well established systems. From way back the BBC have shown that distributed traps with bare areas in between works very well, delivering a scattered liveness. This applies to walls and ceilings. This is how and why RealTraps, GIK, etc. can work very well too.
Here's something I am working on, hopefully to give you some more inspiration. To clue you in to dimensions, the cloud is GIK 244's and the back wall will be have 12'' of fibre behind those slats. The big corner traps will be covered artistically with laths also. In fact I am told the carpenter has decided to have curved lathed faces on some of them. There will be equipment racks at the sides so those bare ceiling areas will not be facing bare floor.






DD

One way I've addressed this issue (since I have a 15x14x12 room with carpet) was to send my room specs to Auralex, who then kindly sent me a picture of where I should place their absorption panels. Instead of spending the $1,200 for Auralex I built a number of Roxul panels and traps covered in felt and placed them pretty much as Auralex suggested. But the real help has come from using Sonarworks Reference 4 software to compensate for anomalies in my room after treating it. After using a calibrated Behringer ECM800 mic with reference 4 measure software, both my Beyerdynamic DT 990 Pro headphones and my Dynaudio LYD 48 studio monitors have their own presets that allow me to hear a relatively very flat frequency response in my room. You just have to remember to turn off the Reference plug in before bouncing or exporting your mix. Hope that helps.