Soundproofing - Acoustic Tile

I need some recommendations on a good brand and style of acoustic sound absorbing foam to deaden my practice room at home. I mearly want to keep the rest of the house quieter and the wife happier. :wink:

Thanks,

Acoustic tile isn't really for soundproofing. More for balancing out the frequencies and reflections. For lowering the volume you need mass. Insulation, etc. The cheapest bet is matresses. They really cut down the sound. Find some decent used ones.

You can get creative to save money too. Professional Aurlex foam treatments & bass traps are inexorbitantly expensive.

Try soft foam gained from anything you receive in boxes like TVs etc. Goto a crafts store or shipping store to find that foam with the protruding fingers. Hell, staple eggcrates to cardboard. Hang a drape or heavy blanket.

I found that eggcrate-like foam 9"x12" square from hard drive shipping boxes. I'm going to mount to something decent for cheap bass traps. I can also just glue to shower-stall sheets & hang on the wall for additional deadening.

The possiblities are endless.

hi

what do you really want?

- to calm down reflections inside the rehearsal room
or
- to isolate the room that no sound goes outside

which is both quite different from each other.

Neighbour friendly is to build a room-in-a-room construction.
you need an isolated floor and walls/ceiling that have no stable connection to the rest of the building. a sound absorbing door of course.

to "deaden" the inroom reflections take egg-boxes or carpets on the wall etc.

only mass will reduce volume.

foam, only smooths off highs and bass traps keep reflections down, and helps in dialing in mix areas.

if you want 'soundproof', you gotta go for mass.

The possibilities are endless but most of them don't really work. There's all sorts of things you can do to clean up the sound of your studio space, and guys mistake that for soundproofing because it sounds quieter/better inside the room, but trying to quiet things down within the house/building is a losing battle. (Keeping the neighbours happy is a lot easier.)

Mattresses and other "mass" stuff will only help a little unless you can also do the floor and ceiling

At a minimum, you'd have to move your stuff to a room in the basement (to save yourself having to deal with the floor), hang a fixed ceiling, double the drywall on the walls and ceiling, then weatherstrip the crap out of the (hopefully not hollow) door. I helped a buddy do this in his house for his home theatre. We built a staggered-stud wall on the interior walls of the room, and doubled the ceiling. It worked okay for the home theatre-- basically went from "you can tell exactly what movie it is from anywhere in the house" to "you can tell immediately that there's a movie playing downstairs." But if you're playing guitar loud enough to need earplugs, for example, I don't think it would help a lot. I was originally thinking of doing the same thing and after doing his space, decided not to bother.

If you're serious about doing the work there's lots of howtos from home theatre guys on the web; google "home theatre soundproofing."

But basically, if you don't have a basement and/or you're in an older house where you don't want to start knocking stuff out for fear of what else might go, you're mostly screwed and are better off building a shed or garage outside.

Sorry to sound negative, but this is one of those things where you can waste a whole ton of effort and/or money and not really get anything out of it.

Seriously, dude, the best thing to do is make some kind of weekly arrangement with your wife on when you can crank it.

Actually I have a solution for you, acustiblok and sheetblok. They are basically as effective as lead at stopping sound.

Check them out:

http://www.acoustiblok.com/

http://www.auralex.com/sound_isolation_sheetblok/sound_isolation_sheetblok.asp

I think limp mass vinyl is the way to go, as well as trying to decouple as much as possible.