Isolation Wall Construction
“We find that many of our clients don’t understand what may be involved in acoustic isolation for their room when we first begin a screening room or studio design with them” says Carl Tatz, principal of the Carl Tatz Design firm based in Nashville, TN. “The questions we ask are ‘Do you care if sound goes out into the rest of the home and do you care if sound comes into the room from the rest of the home?’ If the answer is no, then they have just saved themselves, depending on the level of difficulty and performance that would be needed to be addressed if they did, either a modest percentage of their overall budget or a fortune. One point to observe in these circumstances is that they may not care now, but the new owners of the home might really care when it comes time to sell and at that point it would become much more expensive to achieve and would require a total rebuild”. http://www.carltatzdesign.com
Tatz continues, that a good way to discuss sound isolation issues to a client is in degrees. “It is far less expensive to attenuate sound than it is to try and eliminate it and often that’s good enough. However, in critical situations where a bedroom is above a home theater or recording studio, then more aggressive measures have to be taken to address this. There are several techniques that can be used, such as room within a room construction, dampened layers of mass using various damping compounds such as Green Glue, Quiet Rock sheet rock, metal impregnated vinyl, isolation spring mounts for ceilings, and fiberglass or rock wool insulation to name a few. I also advise my clients to never expect perfect unless they want to have five foot walls and crawl into the room on their knees because the ceiling has been built down so low. It’s all about the low frequency information that can penetrate almost anything at a high enough volume”. In high performance theaters and studios sound levels can easily reach 105dB – 110dB.
One other sound isolation issue is called foot- fall and is the sound of people walking above your room, typically on a hard surfaced floor. This can be a real problem in a studio where live acoustic instruments are being recorded on open mics. High heels can be the worst and is most simply and economically dealt with by adding a rug or carpet on the existing floor. If this is not possible or desirable, then again there are products and techniques to deal with this but can become expensive in materials, time and labor.
