How to Build a Small Budget Recording Studio from Scratch 4/E, 4th Edition

CHAPTER 6My Studio—How Big and What Shape?

The radio broadcasting industry nourished the “talk booth” concept in the early years. The size of the speech studio only needed to be large enough to accommodate one person (or possibly two for an interview), a table, a few chairs, and a microphone. This sanctified telephone booth-sized studios with very serious built-in acoustical problems. To understand the reason for these problems, we must realize that a roomful of air is a very complex acoustical vibrating system. In fact, it is a series of many resonant systems superimposed upon each other forming a super complex problem.

Let us consider a rectangular studio 12 feet high, 16 feet wide, and 20 feet long (ratios 3:4:5) as sketched in Fig. 6.1. First ...