Reducing noise leakage to adjacent rooms

[silky smoove]

At $4.5 K, my bet is it won't be everything you hope for.

Agreed. Even doing something like John Sayers inside-out walls and building a DIY super door like Rod Gervais outlines in his book will quickly burn through most of that budget without even addressing a decoupled ceiling, floating floor, lighting, ventilation, finishes, etc.

 

[micguy]

For sound reduction between spaces, egg cartons work like a charm from a gumball machine.

Egg cartons can reduce low frequency bleed to an adjacent room, assuming you stuff the room completely full of them. The reason that works is that'll force you to remove the bass amp from the room.

Mass is what isolates low end. Egg cartons, while they do have mass, have very little mass. They may kill high frequency slap a bit within the room, but a good heavy drapery hung a few inches off the wall will do much better at that, and do a bit of taming of mids as well. Neither will give you low frequency isolation in any practical sense.

 

[Cownancy]

My rehearsal studio was in an office building and it had to be mostly soundproof..HA. What we did would not work in an apartment building, but I want to tell you anyway, so you know what it took. My acoustician, by the way, was Tony Bongiovi, owner and designer of Power Station, and he knew I had to do it on the cheap. The biggest issue to sound proofing is air space and an airtight room. We put 6" of sand on the floors (yes, the loads in the building were high enough for that), we put gobos with rubber around them in windows to make them as airtight as possible and we took plywood and cut it so the it overlapped the frame of each door with rubbed seals and dead bolts to close the door tight. We had a drop ceiling and stuff it full of insulation and built wall sized gobos that could be moved around to vary the room acoustics because after work hours, we didn't have to be totally soundproof. The live rooms, control rooms both were treated in this manner. We also treated all of the doors in the space. We had to change all of the lights in order to avoid any hum or interference. All of that work and you could still hear the bass and drums in the parking lot and down the halls. But the kids LOVED the room. A hole the size of the quarter lets out approximately 40% of the sound. LOTS of air space between the room and the next room is what is most effective and impossible for your application. I hope you are getting somewhere with it. But, I do agree that it's a lot of money for a temporary situation and it would be a real pain if you spent all of the money and the other people complained. There will be a lot of leakage.

 

[bholder]

Egg cartons can reduce low frequency bleed to an adjacent room, assuming you stuff the room completely full of them. The reason that works is that'll force you to remove the bass amp from the room.

Mass is what isolates low end. Egg cartons, while they do have mass, have very little mass. They may kill high frequency slap a bit within the room, but a good heavy drapery hung a few inches off the wall will do much better at that, and do a bit of taming of mids as well. Neither will give you low frequency isolation in any practical sense.

The things i've read about for isolating low frequencies are things like 2 double layers of sheetrock and studs with an air gap between them, in which is hung a suspended curtain of special lead sand impregnated vinyl (basically two separate double-sheetrocked walls with a lead curtain suspended between, all around the whole room). Pricey and not for rented / leased spaces.

 

[silky smoove]

in which is hung a suspended curtain of special lead sand impregnated vinyl (basically two separate double-sheetrocked walls with a lead curtain suspended between

The product you’re describing is mass loaded vinyl, commonly called MLV. It comes in 0.5, 1 and 2 psf densities. It’s also a complete waste of money as it is handily outperformed by common sheet rock in terms of cost per weight. If you ever see someone with a wall covered in MLV you’ll see someone who spent a great deal of money (the stuff is expensive) to get less isolation than another layer of sheet rock could have provided for significantly less dough.

 

[N. Kentucky Bass]

Hello bass people,

I'm moving to a new apartment. I have two rooms to choose from to put my studio in, one big and one small. An isolation professional came to study the place. Since it's an apartment building, he suggested a floating room solution and the price he worked out for the small room was around 4.5k. I don't have a budget for that now.

I installed an SPL meter on my phone and when I'm playing the level goes up to 95db at times and usually under 90db. Do you think it'd be possible to use some form of insulation other than the floating room method to bring it down to acceptable levels for the neighbors? I know acoustic treatment and isolation are two different things, so I'm not looking at acoustic tiles here. I can consider building a second wall with some sort of noise reduction material and covering the ceiling that way too.

BTW, one of the rooms I can pick shares only the ceiling with a neighbor and the other has a shared wall plus a ceiling. Below my apartment is the parking lot.

Your quest to do it cheap is futile. Isolation = Mass plus airpockets. Especially in an apartment building with shared walls/ceilings/floors. Your quest will start more easily if you begin with a single detached building. Then you'll still need Mass + Air Pockets.

 

[seamonkey]

Cardioid subwoofers, or Kii Audio monitors. They could steer the sound away from walls you don't want sound transmit through. Overall it wouldn't be cheaper the $4k5 but it could be more portable than a custom isolated room but may not work any better.

 

[ofajen]

I have a degree in Acoustical Physics. I live in a townhouse, where we have masonry walls between units. I practice via headphones. Isolating low end is really tough - the room within a room is what it takes. At $4.5 K, my bet is it won't be everything you hope for. We built a studio in our workplace a few years back. It isolates really well, even at low frequencies. A large part of the the isolation "recipe" in that facility is the concrete block (filled with cement) walls and pre-cast concrete ceiling. Mass is your friend, and you ain't gonna get that for cheap.

Yeah, I do most of my musical stuff in a basement level room that was built as a storm shelter, so it has concrete walls and ceiling and double doors, the inner one of which is solid wood. Plus it’s in the lower level of a separate dwelling, so there are no noise issues with neighbors and not too many with family. The downside is it has some really awesome bass buildup which requires all the clever bass trapping I can do.

Otto

 

[silky smoove]

Isolation = Mass plus airpockets.

Not exactly. Isolation equals some combination of mass, decoupling and damping. Air pockets are discouraged in favor of MSM assemblies by all of the current experts on sound isolation. The S part of the acronym (spring) results in improved isolation at lower frequencies than comparable MAM assemblies as long as the spring isn’t dense enough to create an acoustic bridge between the two leaves. Standard pink fluffy fiberglass insulation is the most common spring used in between leaves.