Apollo Studio Acoustics (Part 2)

Today the second layer of acoustic material was sprayed on the ceiling. It is drying now overnight and we just hired a painter that will paint it black tomorrow. I got some questions what material I used on the ceiling. Here you can see it in the picture. It is called Relius Hoeka Akoestikpleister. Don't expect miracles from this because this stuff on its own doesn't do much. And I don't want the room to be dead right away. But it will help better than the concrete ceiling I had before. And the structure makes it look nice as well. But that structure makes it also difficult to paint it over and that is why we decided to hire a painter to do this job. He thought he would need two layers of paint as well to get it covered.

In the picture on the right you see the material being sprayed on. It is a nasty job I can tell you. The smell is not so nice and down in the basement there is not much ventilation yet. The second layer still was not as thick as we thought it would be. It seems that the 1.5 centimeters we anticipated actually was based on a different kind of material than was initially planned. Ah well we will see how things turn out. We can't change it anymore now that it is already applied. The sprayer had a little set back this morning. It turned out that the plastic he put on the wall to prevent the material to get on the wall had fallen down. So he needed to put new plastic on in the studio before he could get to work. This took him about an hour extra I think. Ah well I'm glad this is done now. I think this is the last time you will see a white color on the walls and ceiling :)

I already bought some acoustic panels as well that we can use to filter out reflections in the studio. I bought these panels from a German company named AIXFOAM. You can find their website here if you are interested:
http://www.aixfoam.de/. You can get this stuff in a lot of different sizes, colors and structure. I chose grey because I think it will look good on the black walls and ceiling. But I don't know yet if I will have enough. We will have to measure and put them in several places on trial and error basis to get the optimal result I guess. Luckily my friend Hanz know a lot about acoustics and this will be his little project. But I'm very curious on the end result later on in the process. The acoustics in my current studio are very bad, that is why I work a lot on headphones and I hope I can use them less in the future.

Another thing you might have seen in the movie I recently uploaded is the separate server room located next to the studio. It is about 1.5 by 4 meters and holds the power distribution, but also a 19" cabinet that will hold the noisy equipment later on. Most PC's and switches have fans that make a lot of noise and I want to try and keep them out of the studio as much as possible. So in this way the server room is a bit related to this acoustics thread as well by keeping the noise level lower in the studio. But it wont return anymore in this thread of posts since I will be opening a new one soon about the cabling project of the new studio. That will be a completely different story all togheter. OK enough for today. We are going to prepare for some days of painting.