Reducing echoing with wooden flooring

[MrCheese]

All the rooms in our house are carpeted and need redoing. I love the look of wooden flooring but cannot stand the echoing that results as each of the 6 room surfaces are then shiny. For example, it is very difficult to setup home cinema speakers with so much reflected sound. If someone drops something on carpet there is generally no noise but do that with a wooden floor and it makes a right racket.

The obvious answer is to put down rugs, but then that sort of defeats the point of having a wooden floor. Does anyone have any experience or pointers? Maybe some sort of ceiling coating?

[bogie]

I have the same, all real wood floors on ground floor of a barn with vaulted ceiling ...setting up the AV was a nightmare

we do have a rug in the middle of the room, but otherwise, hanging pictures on the wall helps, soft furnishings like sofas/cushions (thick curtains on side windows etc)

if you are really going for perfection you can get someone round with a spectrum analyser and box of acoustic tiles/foam and they will put them around in strategic places ....depends how far you want to go...usually if you are that concerned with the acoustic performance you have a seperate AV room

[dxg]

You could have a look at ecophon's products. Not exactly ideal for a domestic setting, however.

[hairyben]

Hang rugs or throws on the wall? Longer curtains? If you have a bookcase, cupboard or whatever, either a soft upholstered finish or a curtain to pull across?

I think a good soundproof layer under the floor will help but check on this, not a bad idea anyway especially for upper floors.

[Sam_68]

Certainly, there are plenty of acoustic ceiling tiles that would have a major benefit; other than that, realistically you're looking at lots of soft furnishings, wall hangings etc., to stop the sound bouncing around.

As an aside, I once did come work on a recording studio where all the walls and floor were extremely absorbent of sound (using really thick fibre batts, IIRC), and it was a very strange environment: no echo at all so even voices sounded strange when people spoke.

Are you talking about just polishing the existing floorboards, though, or laying some sort of laminate/block flooring over the top? If the latter, there are plenty of resiliant underlay products that will help damp out a lot of the noise (though you're still faced with the problem that the hard surface of the floor will reflect noise sources within the room itself back up).