Hi, moving house and gonna be building a new Vocal booth…not gonna be square and the walls are gonna be offset to avoid standing waves,
a question though…would you agree that a section half way up the booth behind the singer extending out another metre with three 4inch absorption panels set 20 inches apart would help reduce frequencies in the 200/300Hz area…the boxyness area so to speak?
I know it gets all technical with sound waves…specially in the lower frequencies but wondering if this would make a difference.
I don’t know that any of that can be figured out with anything less than a computer model, scale drawing, material absorption coefficient graphs, and so on. There’s a book by Philip Newell I have on Kindle called “Recording Spaces” that deals in non-rectangular architecture. I guess he has other books. (here, for example – not sure how legitimate that is. )
I suppose Everest’s Master Handbook of Acoustics is always a good place to start. (my review of the 5th edition tops the list at Amazon if you’re not already familiar with that book and want more opinion.)
In the end, it’s not very practical to do the math. Just test the booth. Ahh – but you haven’t built it yet. I once had a similar studio building dream, so I know that anxiety. Possibly the best action is to build a cheap mock-up version out of 2x4’s and drywall, the sort of thing where you can nudge the walls around a bit. Then see what works?
In my more modest reality, I’m partial to the live-end / dead-end approach with not so close micing. I’d say concentrate on killing the 1st reflections.
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