Presenting the new and improved mastering room!

My wife and I had long planned to move into a better school district before our son starts kindergarten. We finally took the plunge last August. My old room was 300 square feet with a mic closet and vocal booth, comprising the entire second story of the house. Gavin Haverstick of Auralex Acoustics helped me design the space, and I was quite pleased with it:

Still, there was room for improvement. Ideally, I'd sit further from the wall, with my back to the long end of the room. The foam acoustic panels are effective, but it takes a full weekend with the vacuum attachment to clean them! Every couple of months a panel would droop and I'd have to glue it back in place. I wanted something more professional looking, easier on the allergies, and ideally more effective. Finally, while my workstation was perfect from an ergonomic standpoint, it allowed for a first reflection off of the desk.

Apart from the school district, a good room for mastering was the prime concern in our house search. Most housing tracts don't have a single floor plan that works! Newer homes tend to have large open community areas and small enclosed rooms. After a year of searching, we bought a house built in 1975 with a rectangular 370 square foot family room. The kitchen and dining room had been expanded, allowing us to convert the dining room into a family room and still have a large living room and kitchen for the rest of the family. Here's a photo of the studio-to-be:

We absolutely needed to close off the room from the rest of the house ASAP. Our contractor installed a solid core door with a sweep, and put in eight recessed light fixtures, on the day we took possession. We quickly replaced all the carpet in the house with tile and laminate, for reasons both acoustic and allergic.

I tore down and sold my old Omnirax Force 36 desk and ordered a new Dual 15 workstation from Argosy, built specifically for mastering:

The angle of the racks is such that with the speakers behind the desk, there's no way to get a first reflection off the desk surface. Of course, now I had to put my Dynaudio BM-15A's on stands, so I ordered a pair from Sound Anchors.

Within a few days of moving in, most of the heavy lifting was done - or so I thought. Before I could put up any acoustic treatments, the room needed to be painted. The guy from the painting company pointed out some water damage above the slider in the studio. We were told by the seller that the damage was from the old roof, which was replaced last March. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. To make a long story short, water had been leaking from the bathroom above for years. The subfloor was rotted out to the extent that the entire bathroom had to be gutted. As if that weren't enough, the ceiling in the studio had to be cut open to replace some of the rotted boards. Painting would have to wait.

The termite company, the inspection company, and the sellers all chipped in to help cover the damage, but the cost of remodeling the upstairs bathroom fell entirely to us. Not only did it set us back financially, but it sucked up two and a half months of my time, and the bathroom still isn't even functional.

While Googling for acoustics information, I discovered a series of very informative posts from Ethan Winer of RealTraps. This guy knows his stuff! I spent hours reading through his site and watching his videos before e-mailing him for advice. Using a free program called Google Sketchup, I drafted this mockup of the room for him (oh yeah, I forgot to mention I bought a couch):

I told Ethan I had $5000 to spend and he put together a package for me, with instructions on placing each of the panels. Because of the way the room was laid out, there were a number of compromises. Panels wouldn't fit in two of the corners because the door and windows were in the way. To maintain symmetry in the front of the room (the righthand side of the sketch, where the fireplace is), I would've had to put panels on stands. In the back of the room, where symmetry isn't as crucial, I would've had to put panels on the garage and bathroom doors to approximate a single panel in the corner.

There were other problems with the windows besides their location. When it rained, the big window leaked. No surprise, since they were the original aluminum windows. More importantly, even though the sellers and their agents knew that I was planning to use the room as a recording space, they neglected to mention that the neighbors operate a day care out of their home. Sound isolation was practically nonexistent. Fortunately, there are only six kids enrolled, and I rarely hear anything unless they wander over to the side of the house adjacent to the studio. Nonetheless, I wanted to monitor at 85 dB SPL without cutting short any naps.

With all that in mind, we decided to replace the windows and slider. My contractor suggested shifting the size and location of the windows and back door to accommodate panels in all corners. It cost quite a bit more, but I'm glad we did it. We ended up with three new doors, two new windows (well, technically six, as you can see from the photos), and one new slider. Exchanging the acoustic panels was an expensive proposition, because the shipping both ways was on my dime, and it cost an average of $40 per panel to ship.

Moving the window and door locations left a lot of new drywall to be textured. After consulting with Ethan on the acoustic consequences, I decided that we might as well remove the crown moulding, since it would be difficult to match the rotted portion that was already cut away. Believe it or not, the contractor discovered mold underneath. There was yet another leak from the new toilet we just put in! If we'd kept the crown moulding, we may not have noticed a problem for months or even years. At least this leak only set us back a few hundred bucks. After repairing the drywall and texturing, the room was ready to be painted.

Alright, so now things are finally starting to come together, right? I've got a room, acoustic panels, a desk, gear, speakers... but nowhere to put my stuff! I hired California Closets to design a built-in against the left wall, between the slider and the window. It's slightly behind the listening position, with no side panels at ear height to disturb the symmetry of the room. The wall unit provides a large desk space for my printers, USB hub, and phone, plus lots of storage for files, mics, cables, my CD inventory, shipping supplies, and miscellaneous office stuff.

A couple weeks for painting and hanging panels got me to here:

I was hoping a pair of panels above the listening position would be the final touch, but while the bass was tight, the room was still too live. Flutter echo off of the parallel side walls was particularly troubling. After a couple more RealTraps orders and exchanges, I put up six more panels to fill out the back of the room. I also took Ethan's advice and ordered a thick rug and rug pad to help control the floor-ceiling reflections, along with a smaller version of the same rug and pad to put on the floor in front of the microphone while recording vocals. The rug, a RealTraps Portable Vocal Booth, and the panel behind the singer do a great job of keeping room sound out of the mic.

After three months of nearly constant attention, the mastering room was done! Someday I'd like to do something about the fireplace, but other than that, I'm delighted with it. It's by far the most accurate room I've ever worked in. Of course, that accuracy came at a steep price (most of which I'll be depreciating over 39 years, if I live that long):