Sound Proofing

Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 10:33 am

Can sound proofing help the quality of sound? In a home studio/bed room environment, is sound proofing a necessary addition?

Thanks

Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 10:45 am

Hmmm... as vague as your question is.... Depends....

First, it's important to understand that there's a real difference between sound proofing and acoustical treatment.

Quote:

In a home studio/bed room environment, is sound proofing a necessary addition?

Again... it depends.

How loud you are, how much low frequency stuff is in the room, how tolerant are people in the adjoining rooms, buildings, etc.

Quote:

Can sound proofing help the quality of sound?

Again... depends... If it's 120db in the room, then soundproofing would def help the quality of sound for those outside the room... especially if they don't care to hear what's going on inside the room.

Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 11:05 am

I assume by "soundproofing" you mean "sound isolation "- making sure that sound doesn't go into or out of the room. I think it is best to think of this as a separate problem from "room treatment" - mainly making sure the room has as even a frequency response as possible. As Max indicates it can be more complicated than this, but for the most part the things you do to prevent sound from escaping or entering the room don't improve the quality of sound inside the room and the things you do to improve the quality don't do much (if anything) to prevent sound from escaping or entering.

In general, isolation is the harder and more expensive of the two tasks. It usually requires you to do some demolition and rebuilding. Treatment can be as simple as putting up some corner bass traps. This can improve the sound quality in the room with relatively little effort.

Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 1:01 pm

stratplyr01 wrote:

Can sound proofing help the quality of sound? In a home studio/bed room environment, is sound proofing a necessary addition?

Thanks

Isolation, the new sound proofing, can do a lot of things. Some places in a home/bed room environment are leaky as it applies to isolation. Windows and doors are the two most common sources. Plugging up windows and sealing doors can often get you isolation from external noise that you can live with.

Quality? It can make some noise go away but can bring attention to other sounds. I did a bedroom with several layers of rock, plugged the window to match the walls capacity and sealed the door with stripping and threshold.

Blocked out a bunch of noise! Side effect was the neighbors AC unit was located at the end of thier house which also faced the roof vent of the house with the modified bedroom. It may have already been there, but for sure there is now a *standing wave in the corner farthest away from the AC whenever the AC runs.

*What is a standing wave?

Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2008 6:03 am

I'll add to what Bob said regarding acoustical treatment.

There are a lot of products out there that have misleading verbage in their literature.

Soundproofing/Isolation requires mass. Thick, dense, heavy materials are required to absorb sound. Also, you can achieve isolation by detaching, or un-coupling structures. You might say that the best isolation is a combination of decoupling and adding mass.

In most rooms, especially a small room such as a bedroom, acoustic treatment is needed to control the build up of frequencies, deal with early reflections, and overall change the sonic characteristics to that of as flat of a frequency response as possible.

Commonly found "acoustic foam" products are not capable of a meaningful amount of sound proofing. They are more suited for acoustic treatment.

Almost ALL small rooms will benefit from bass trapping. This is an acoustic treatment and not necessarily a sound proofing solution.

If you can be a bit more specific, we can give you more specific answers.

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