Hi,
has anyone on here had recent experience of domestic soundproofing solutions?
In the process of moving into a new (to us, it was built in '58) house and heard Abba a little to clearly through the party wall last night.
Think it was just the TV but we don't want to move in a start being disturbed by/disturbing the neighbours - I don't want to have to retire
my hi fi!
thanks!
i had a simular problem in my new house (not nuew but new to us)
its a 1960's build with a rubbish party wall.
next doors tv is next to the wall and you could hear it.
I looked at many options but came up with this one.
http://www.soundservice.co.uk/part_e_wall_system_M-20_AD.html
firstly you will lose about 75mm of your room.
firstly we put a soundblock plasterboard on the wall while next door was playing music.
these are 15mm thick. put this up using dot and dab technique.
then we glued the m20ad rubber to the wall. this is a pain in arse but then we couldnt hear the tv at normal volumes.
then we put 2 more sound block boards up on a 1"x1" stud wall (you can just glue to the rubber but we didnt)
then painted.
now next door cant hear us and we aint heard next door.
only room i didnt finish is our bedroom.
we did the wall between us and the daughter which is really good as we cant hear her watching tv and she cant hear us .... talking...
anyway took a while to find best solution but its worth the money.
other thing we tried is stud wall with soundblock and kingspan. works well but not as well as rubber.
They say it reduces upto 48DB but adding the other sound block board and stud walling makes it around 60.
we did this behind our tv wall to her tv wall and now we can have our sound system on and she hasnt heard it apart from when we leave the kitchen door
open.
Worth the money although not cheap but makes our lives better.
I hate to be the voice of doom but effective soundproofing is a pretty big (and usually expensive) job. I recently had a recording studio built and due to planning restrictions was forced to go with a flat roof. The roof itself needed to be de-coupled from the ceiling with two sets of independent rafters and 2 tons of sand was laid in between. You really need mass, especially for the bass (hf stuff is a bit easier to deal with). your best bet, although this will only be an improvement rather than an outright solution would be to build a second stud partition with some specific sound proofing plasterboard (much denser). The deeper you can make the cavity the better. If you can stand to lose 10" from the room do it twice, 1st with standard grade plasterboard and then with the heavy stuff. Fill the two cavities with different density materials, acoustic energy loses momentum every time it changes speed, the different densities should help achieve this (in theory). Good luck
Thanks for the replies.
i'd seen the website for soundservice and they are relatively local to me too.
soundproofing is really too extreme a term for what we want - it's really noise reduction.
Recording studio levels of proofing aren't really required (I don't think I've ever cranked my current system to neighbour-baiting
levels) but to reduce the level of intrusion would be great!
It can be done cheaply, thick cavity wall blocks followed by 2 layers of plaster board and one layer of styrene backed plaster board.
A friend used this method to insulate a home cinema from the rest of the house.
Put in a 50mm stud wall, leave a 25mm air gap and put in 25mm rockwool flexi or similar and then board.
Always leave a gap or it will make no difference.
The other altenative is if the dividing wall has a cavity, get rockwool blown in as it is more dense than other cavity insulation.
I know this subject very well as I used to own a domestic soundproofing company.
It's all about isolation, think of sound waves as a vibration. If you don't isolate your wall from next door to sound will simply vibrate
through into anything new you put up.
We used to use metal studs with special rubber mounts fixed to the old wall (rubber isolates studs from old wall), lined with 2 sheets of plasterboard
and filled with a cellulose fibre. You can used thick / dense Rockwall instead. The plasterboard also had a foam strip around to isolate it from the
existing floor, walls, ceiling.
Expensive and had to be perfect or it didn't work properly.
Your also find that noise travels through the joined ceiling/Walls/floor around whatever you 'treat'. Open windows too.
It's a nightmare most times
Thanks to all.
I get the feeling this could turn into a mission.
The lounge and dining room have parquet floor and the lounge also has a chimney and I imagine these could be factors in determining the success of any
measures taken.
We'll have to look at the main bedroom too and next door also have a loft conversion.
Having said that, we've been in and out of the house the last few weeks and didn't notice anything until last night!
Lots of food for thought.
Thanks again,
Mike
Hard floors are the worst for transferring noise especially if they have them too. Chimneys a bit of a pain too.
Generally you won't really hear them till your quiet and then once you've heard them you'll be listening for it, which makes it worse
again.
quote:
Originally posted by Ben_Copeland
Hard floors are the worst for transferring noise especially if they have them too. Chimneys a bit of a pain too.
Generally you won't really hear them till your quiet and then once you've heard them you'll be listening for it, which makes it worse again.
You can and likely ..will.. only undertake Simple inexpensive mods... I would.
Best result for your $ is to apply resilient metal strips to the existing offending wall(s?) then cover with 5/8" drywall.
The idea is to decouple direct sound transmissions. Surprisingly it works fairly well... within reasonable expectations.
Forget adding insulation (tested as mostly worthless) forget adding Mass (you can't practically/$$ add enough, in quantity and locations to
make significant differences... to anything but your wallet :-).
You will still have coupling through your floor structure and probably ceiling as well. Carpets help .. some. As does a 1 1/2" concrete slab
pour over your existing floors .. pricey and messy though..
Beyond that.... It becomes, as stated above, a financial nightmare. Easier to relocate.