Floors?

[twistedtom]

I am thinking of redoing the floor in my music room, I have been looking at putting in a wood floor. I have carpet now and it is old and has some stains so I am thinking of some time this year when other projects get done of doing the floor. The room is 30 feet by 30 feet and this should give space for the sound to develop. What do you think about hard wood VS carpet for sound? What about floating floor VS nail down?
I see a lot of hard wood in studios.

[stephentayler]

Is this a recording room or the room where your system will be? Might be good for recording, but may be a problem for your monitoring setup.

My favourite ever control room had a concrete floor covered with carpet.... I used to use a Visonik speaker system with a sub (long time ago!) and it sounded great. That system never sounded good on a hard floor.

Most studios I have used have carpeted floors with maybe a hard area for chairs to roll about on. I would be wary of wood depending on the other surfaces in the room, but it also depends if you have any acoustic treatment.

Probably doesn't help much!

Cheers

Stephen

[twistedtom]

I have some treatment now, the room is in my home and it is just my own play room, it is just one big room for every thing. One other thought I had was to go 1/2 wood and 1/2 carpet. Just batting it around right now, thanks you did help.

[daniel.sneed]

My 2 cents :
Depends of your ceiling.
My rule is : Hard floor OR hard ceiling, not both. Smooth floor OR smooth ceiling, not both.
Ceiling is much easier to treat deeply, so hard floor and smooth ceiling is my way to go.

[HCMarkus]

Carpet absorbs from about 1kHz on up very well, but it doesn't even touch low and lower-mid frequencies. As Mr. Sneed correctly observes, deep absorbers (necessary to tame low frequencies) are hard to walk on, so better put them on the ceiling and leave the floor reflective. Spot rugs are still a good idea to tame any pesky reflections.

On the other hand, carpet is sure easy... I just had a floating engineered wood floor installed in my new control room. Will be busy installing fiberglass & cloth clouds and corner traps for the foreseeable future.

[bigdaddy]

I'll toss in my $0.02 - I just converted my attached garage into a single room studio. Dimensions are 20' L X 13' W X 9' H. I decided to go w/a laminate floor all around and use rugs to mellow the room a bit. Nice thing about the wood floor, if I want a more live sound, I can roll up the rug and toss it in a corner. You can't do that if the entire room is carpeted. Just a thought. Good luck and let us know how it turns out.

[twistedtom]

Thanks guys, i will even run some math on the room to see what standing waves I may get. I like the through rug idea where I can adjust the sound.
Bigdaddy it is good to see you back here, on the old site you were a big help to me a few times, there are some very helpful and nice people here, some are even nice just to chat with.
I have gone to the big blue quite a bit also and saw you running the DP topic there.

[bigdaddy]

Well thanks for the kind words. Another thing I picked up when building this studio - Popcorn paint is a natural sound diffusor. 3 of the 4 walls and the ceiling in this garage were covered in popcorn paint when I moved in. I noticed right away that no matter where I went in the room, doing the clap test, I could not get a flutter echo.

I built a 4th wall (covering the BIG garage door) and covered it in popcorn paint as well. So far, the acoustics in the room are very good. No excessive bass buildup in the corners, a nice natural sound for acoustic instruments, etc... I haven't built or installed any bass traps yet, and judging from the sound of my mixes... I may not have to.

Not saying this will work for everyone, but it's working for me.

p.s. In case you're wondering "What the heck is Popcorn paint?", it's a paint/joint compound combo which, when applied with a very rough textured roller, leaves behind a random, bumpy texture. Seems to act like tons of little Auralex pads, without killing the high end.

[davedempsey]

I agree with bigdaddy about the rugs. Both rooms in my studio have stone floors - Grecian marble above wood. I've got rugs in both rooms, as well as wall and ceiling treatments and soft furnishings etc. Not all the floor is covered so there's a good live/dead thing going on. The cement rendered, non-parallel double-brick cavity walls really help as well.