Hi Adrian
Let me know if I can be of help. I’ve got a few rooms on the drawing board for this summer, but there’s always room for more.
One thing to keep in mind while looking at "The MGA Way" is that I don’t dampen the sound but restore it. When I sound proof it is done with a separate layer that isn’t a part of the inner core of the room. Folks need to be careful when soundproofing because it’s easy to screw up the pitch of the room. I replace many room mess ups that could have been avoided if the listeners’ plan before doing. I do make and sell lots of products after people make their rooms but I always preach to make that room in pitch or tunable right from the start. Obviously I have my plans for sale, or someone can get on retainer with me or have us build the rooms here and ship them, but there are some basic guidelines to good room designing. One of them is, don’t follow any designing that is based on killing the sound. I can not tell you how many folks get ahold of me heart broken that they spent their money on an audiophile room plan and after a year they are just sick that it sounds so bad. I have 20 or 30 of those guys on call constantly almost desperately afraid that they have ruined their hobby.
You usually don’t hear about the bad room designs cause those guys are so tortured that they sunk their money into a bad plan, that they don’t want anything to do with HEA anymore. Without giving away my recipe, let me share with you a major point when designing your room. Your best results are when you are of the frame of mind that your speakers are suppose to couple with the room. The speakers are the room and the room is the speakers. If you build your room to be In-tune with the speakers then the room has the ability to be a natural amplifier of the speakers. Done correctly it puts less stress on the speaker and amplifier combo. And that means the whole system is less stressed which give you a DB up instead of a DB down situation. Another thing that is horribly wrong that many do is staggering studs and double drywall and or quiet rock. If someone is soundproofing always design a double wall setup. Meaning the outer "soundproof" wall is separate and not touching the inner wall. I build my inner rooms to sit inside of the outer room (room inside of a room) design. The inner room is for tuning and the outer room is for keeping the sound from the rest of the house.
I’ll give you an example: we designed two rooms in Nashville for testing and showing the local studios how to make better sounding rooms. One was a typical audiophile room and the other the tunable room. After done playing in the audiophile room you had to spend time trying to find the speaker placement that dialed in a recordings soundstage. The tunable room you didn’t have to toe in the speakers at all to give the stage. The speakers and the room where working together. When giving a demo in these rooms with my speakers I can point the speakers 360 degrees and in the listening chair you can still hear a full soundstage.
The whole concept behind tuning is working with the sound and not against it.
Always keep in mind that there are two main physical functions of sound, one is conduit travel and the other is sound pressure. Your room is going to have sound that is traveling and the room is also going to produce Pressure Zones. These pressure zones work their best when In-tune with each other.
Michael Green