VO Studio Setup: Voiceover Recording Booth Upgrade Part 1

At a certain point, every voice actor working from a home-based recording setup starts considering whether to invest in a freestanding, dedicated isolation booth. To start with, it’s a significant investment. Beyond that, there’s the nagging feeling that the booth will arrive and it won’t actually address the core issues. Any acoustic solution has tradeoffs and getting a recording booth is not a golden ticket solution. A standalone booth simply changes the equation of how to create good, usable audio. 

Voiceover Truth: Audio quality matters more than visuals

Here’s a voiceover recording fact: you never have to show a client where you record. In working with voice actors around the world, I’ve seen an amazing array of booth setups – ranging from tiny closets stuffed with pillows to fully built out studio spaces with state of the art acoustic tuning. The only thing that matters is the quality of audio. The location doesn’t have to look pretty for things to sound good. 

I will say there are direct benefits to having a dedicated space in which to work. Whether a free-standing commercially available booth or a room which has been devoted completely to the VO recording process, the ability to have a consistent space remains a huge time-saver. 

My first setup had to be broken down and stowed when not in use. That meant always having to take time to set things up and connect cables, then test to make sure that everything sounded right. When matching client work from several months before, it usually took a few iterations of adjustment to obtain an identical result. 

Key benefit of a dedicated VO booth

A booth provides consistency. Being able to jump behind the microphone without having to set anything up while capturing the same tone and quality of recording is a glorious thing. 

I’ve been enjoying the benefits of my secondhand Vocalbooth for 10 years. As with most things which get used regularly there had been issues which got “patched” rather than truly addressed. It gave me good, consistent results because I knew all the weak points in the system. 

However over the last couple years, things certainly changed.  Neighbors working from home meant more vehicle traffic and general activity. Local delivery trucks drove by more consistently. Meanwhile, the load on the studio increased exponentially. More sessions… heck… virtually ALL sessions took place remotely which meant some of them occurred during less quiet times of the day. 

The final straw came in the form of flaking foam. Over the last year, I started finding more bits of grey acoustic foam on the floor. It was worse near the booth door handle, but closer inspection revealed that it had grown generally more brittle everywhere. 

Upgrading my pre-built VO recording booth

I’d had the booth for 10 years, and it had some miles on it when I bought it. It also explained why perhaps I was noticing some hay fever-like symptoms after extended sessions. All of which led to a crazy thought: could I upgrade my booth’s innards? The challenge was making this happen while still getting auditions and produced work out the door, as well as teaching classes and workshops. 

The two main variables of audio quality are always isolation from environmental sounds and treatment of reflections within the space.  

In the case of my Vocalbooth, both could definitely be improved. With the older model I’d found, it has a very lightweight door, which has been addressed with design changes. But it meant that my setup was a bit more acoustically porous than might be desired. 

As with many booth designs, it uses Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF) for the main walls. That’s basically an engineered wood which uses wood “residuals”, wax and resins compressed under heat and pressure to create something similar to plywood. It doesn’t warp or react to changes in heat or humidity, which is good.  But since the wall panels are basically 4’ x 7’ sheets, they basically act like a drum skin. 

Egg-crate type acoustic foam had been adhered to the inside of those walls. The result being that the foam tends to deflect the mid-range frequencies, but the lower frequencies are not really absorbed and get bounced around inside the booth. (I had reduced that with creative bass trapping). 

Objectively, that creates a structure which will be both reasonably porous to loud environmental sounds – since those will energize the walls and transfer the sound into the space, and also will have a characteristic tone – a room mode where a specific frequency (or a few) will tend to resonate. 

Before changing anything, I had to figure out how to address each of those issues effectively. 

Next: Solutions and a deep-seated urge to DIY

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