Help with Building a Room

[majortracks2]

Hi All
I am building a small facility and would like suggestions for sound proofing.
Doing this on a small budget, I need to do the following. This is for recording and rehersal(No recording and rehersing at the same time required.
What is the best way to keep the sound from bleeding out of the rooms.
1) Sheet rock?
2) Cynder block?
3) Cement?
4) Space, (air)
5) Float the floors?
6) Carpet?
7) two wall design

Any ideas are appreciated
M

[dirosa]

air(distance) is the best isolation next to floating room inside a room. make sure you have fresh air circulation inside and talk with your neighbours ;-) a good contact with them and some testing will show you whats necessary.
Each of the materials you cite has its own frequency specific capabilities. Best check with a professional studio builder, pay him for his expert advice and save money on mistakes made by saving money...
good luck

[Barnabas]

To keep sound from travelling from one room to another you need to use the densest materials you can get. Therefore from your list; cement, sheet rock, and cinder block would be the best. The order of these depends on how dense the meterials are and how thick they are. Dense and thick are the best.

Density is how heavy something is compared to the amount of space it takes up. Rocks are dense, wood is not as dense, and air is not very dense at all.

Sheetrock is an inexpensive way to make a sound proof wall. (We'll it's cheaper and faster than laying brick!) You might need to use two thicknesses depending on how sound proof you want your wall. Sealing the cracks and joints is very important since a small crack can let lots of sound through an otherwise sound-proof wall.

Floating the floor is good for removing low frequency vibrations that follow the floor from the next room. This is usually not a problem in home studios.

Search the DUC and the rest of the internet. A lot has already been posted about this kind of stuff.

Good luck!

[Lee Blaske]

If you're building from scratch, one thing that you must absolutely positively do is plan for a machine room to house your computers and peripherals. Otherwise, you'll be forced to deal with iso boxes, which are unsatisfactory in so many ways.

These days, with the flood of soft synths, samplers, verbs coming out, the studio of tomorrow (and today) will consist of multiple computers. You need a place to put them to shut out the noise, and a well designed machine room makes a lot of sense.

Make sure your machine room has adequate space for a nice floor to ceiling rack or two (you'll be surprised how fast you'll fill them up). Also make sure that it's wired with plenty of power, has ample conduit to your control room, and adequate HVAC ducting to remove all the heat. An additional air filter on incoming air would be a nice touch.

If you get this detail of your construction taken care of correctly, it'll make an enormous difference in your day to day studio use.

Lee Blaske

[Mike Brosco]

Have you checked out Jeff Cooper's book "Building a Recording Studio" yet? I'm pretty sure that it is still highly thought of. Mine is the fifth edition with a date of 1996 but I think I read on the net that a new edition was on the way (anybody know if it has been released yet). The ISBN number on mine is 0-916899-04 and it is published by Synergy Group, Inc. It is written very well and has lots of good illustrations, tables and formulas that address your primary question. It allowed me to show my general contractor what I wanted in terms that he could understand.

Good luck,
Mike

[Mike Brosco]

sorry, that ISBN number is:

0-916899-00-4

I'm glad I reread my post (guess I should have hit preview).

Mike

[majortracks2]

Thanks all for the advice!

M

[jaczaj]

Since no two materials have the same frequency absorption coeffiecients, it's a good idea, and common practice, to involve layers of materials. A common approach is the old sheetrock, soundboard, sheetrock sandwich. Another common soundproofing material is thing called resilient channel or RC. It "floats" the sheetrock off of the studs by about an 1/8th of an inch. It is well worth your while to get a respectable contractor to do this step as you don't save that much by going to Home Depot to buy all this stuff.

Another typical step is to caulk all of the seams with a general purpose silicone bead. The most common mistake is to overbuild the walls and still have tons of leakage coming through the ceiling or floor. I'll try to remember to post the links to some good online absorption calculators for various materials.

Another common mistake is to think that doubling materials doubles your sound absorption. Sadly, it doesn't work like this. This is a wild guess, but it's more like doubling materials only increases the absorption by 1.3 or so - depending on a variety of factors.

John

[MichaelL]

Here are a couple of White Papers you might find useful:
Link 1
Link 2

[ekuehnl]

Sales oriented but very helpful:

http://www.acoustics101.com/

-Eric