Small Reamping Room / Enclosure

[philby82]

Hey guys

I am looking at building a smallish soundproofed enclosure to house my Mesa cab and a couple of mic stands so i can reamp at home without either the missus or the neighbours going crazy.

I only have a fairly small space to use, but i was looking at using a rockwool type of sound absorber to line the enclosure, to both reduce outside noise and hopefully absorb enough reflections to make it sound good.

I am only going to be close micing the cab, used mainly for high gain sounds so i was wondering how small i can realistically go to get a good result. I was also going to use bass traps in the corners.

I was hoping to get away with around 1500mm x 1500mm x 2800mm sized enclosure? 100mm thick high density sound panels surrounding in all directions.

Would this work or is it a lost cause? I may be able to get a lil bit more size, but its not going to be alot more.

Cheers

Phil

 

[Siguros]

You might be better off looking at some ISO boxes than building one to house a whole cab. I imagine that'll cost a lot and it definitely won't be small!

 

[philby82]

Small might not be the right word. Medium sized might be closer.

I could probably squeeze up to 1800 x 1800 x 3600 (6 foot x 6 foot x 12 foot).

Has anyone had any experience with this before i start spending some cash?

 

[hsnyder]

I am planning on doing something similar... Though not for a month or so. Being a physics major I wanna do the math first.. But being a physics major I'm in the middle of exams right now. My guess (no calculations) is that you'll want to pad the living f*** out of that box to absorb frequencies as low as possible. You'll need to HPF the signal most likely as I doubt you can get rid of enough of the bass. Thats okay though, since most people do that anyways. Again, no calculations have been done, but I'm guessing you might want to leave one surface (possibly the far wall partially bare, and angle it so its not parallel to the speaker (if that makes sense). Just thoughts, not a lot of math or experience here.

 

[Firaxis]

You'll need something under the cab to stop the bass just going through your floor as well.

 

[vespiz]

Just the wool itself won't be enough, you need mass to really isolate things.
2 layers of plasterboard, maybe a layer of plywood and then add wool and you're talking isolation on some level.
Even one layer of plasterboard with wool would be better than just wool itself.
And even then it needs to be sealed tight; think of soundwaves as kind of like water here: where there's a leak it will escape!

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/stud...tics-treatment-reference-guide-look-here.html
http://www.stcratings.com/assemblies.html

 

[hsnyder]

it depends on if your primary objective is isolation or the inside of it actually sounding good. IMO, you can get away with attenuating it down to the volume of, say, a vacuum cleaner, but you might want it quieter. What i was referringto above was about treating the inside, not increasing sound isolation. the above posts are correct in that regard.

 

[philby82]

Cheers for all the info guys.

Not looking for entirely sound proof, just trying to get it down to a level where i wont piss the neighbours off. I'll only use it during the day so that will help.

Getting good useable tones is my biggest concern, so i might have to look at even more padding? angling the face facing the speakers is a good idea i'l try too.

So the tones should be usable if i can get enough mass in there?

 

[hsnyder]

Well generally speaking... You can get around a small room dimension by padding the fv*k out of the interior surfaces. I mean if you're worried about early reflections, then a wall 2 feet away thats perfectly padded (dreaming here) is theoretically as good as a wall that is infinitely far away. I don't have a lot of practical experience in these matters though - i couldn't tell you how much of what padding you'd need to get close enough to that state.

 

[lolzgreg]

Small might not be the right word. Medium sized might be closer.

I could probably squeeze up to 1800 x 1800 x 3600 (6 foot x 6 foot x 12 foot).

Has anyone had any experience with this before i start spending some cash?

A 6x6x12 room for is very far from idea for reamping or for any audio reproduction for that matter. All those dimensions are multiples of one another.

If noise is really a big issue, I'd get one of the Randall isolation cabs and call it a day. Your other option is to just get as much rockwool as possible and surround the guitar cab from all directions, as well as isolating it from the floor. I have done the iso-cab route, and smaller cabinets, and the rockwool around the cab works best IME.

 

[philby82]

Cheers, guess il give the Rockwool enclosure a go, but plan to make the walls even thicker, and not make it all right angles.

 

[ProjectHamsterdam]

There's a guy who did a DYI enclosure for his 2x12 - looks a bit suspect though because of the thin isolation layer:

http://www.amptone.com/diyisobox.htm

I'm thinking of building something like this soon; that's why I'm aiming at getting a nice 2x12 - a 4x12 seems just too big for this.

 

[philby82]

that guys one is alot smaller than i was thinking. and your right, theres basically no wool in there to absorb sound? I'm going to go 3 sheets of the sound absorbing wool we have over there, so should be 150mm thick. Won't be sound proof but will hopefully just reduce the noise enough to be able to reamp at home.

The stuff i'm gonna use is called Roxul 200 slabs and its 60kg/m3 i believe, which is meant to be pretty decent for audio use like this.