What are some basic principles of acoustics to remember when designing and/or building a recording studio?
In general, a recording studio should be as big as you can afford to make it. There is no such thing as a recording studio that is too big, but there are lots of them that are too small. If it’s small then it has to be really dead. Otherwise, the room mode resonances of the place will interact with the music. The bigger it is, the more densely packed the natural frequencies are; they’re not so strong in a big room. Its the boundary reflections and to a lesser extent the reverberation of the room that gives it its acoustic and musical character. If you get rid of that by making it completely dead you might as well perform out in the middle of the desert, you don’t get sound coming back. A lot of people make mistakes in the ceilings in recording studios. The ceiling should be a diffuser, or a relatively good absorber, because you don’t want a specular reflection off the ceiling. I have been in lots and lots of studios that had just plane surface ceilings, even if angled, if it is a plane
