Soundproofing / deadening a room
Soundproofing / deadening a room
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Stu R

Original Poster:

21,410 posts

233 months

Wednesday 17th March 2010
quotequote all
I'm looking to reduce the amount of sound that can escape from my office room (insert seedy joke here). It's a cheaply built early 90's detached house and I'm fed up of the paper thin walls and floors bleeding sound out.

I don't want to spend megabucks doing it, but I'd love to deaden the sound a bit, even if it's just a couple of walls and the floor I think it'd make a massive difference. I also do a bit of my AV work in there so it'll help that too.

It's an upstairs room, so the floors are the regular cheapo chipboard nailed to the beams type affair, with the ceiling downstairs nailed to the other side of the beams. There's a few spotlights in the cieling below, the LED jobbies.

As for the walls, the room is a corner room, and is bordered by 2 stud walls which let a lot of sound through. I'm thinking if there was something to fill the wall cavities with, and the floor did a better job of deadening the sound, it'd make things a lot nicer acoustically. I'd rather not use egg boxes, but I don't want to spend a fortune doing it. Lining the walls with matresses isn't an option either hehe

Anyway, I'm redecorating the room at the minute so the flooring is up and the walls will need some painting etc, so whilst I'm not planning on putting massive holes in it to insulate it, I don't mind damaging them a little bit. Is it safe to insulate the gap between the floorboards and the downstairs ceiling, I was thinking just fill between the beams with insulation or something, would this be safe with LED's in the ceiling? Also, the ceiling /loft space above the room just has regular loft insulation. Would it be worth changing this or sticking something below it like dynomat type stuff?

Any ideas as to what I could do to sound deaden the room a bit? Any products I should be looking at, and more importantly are they any good? I realise it's never going to be amazing for acoustics in this house, but if I can make a slight improvement it'll be worth it.

Or am I just totally wasting my time trying to improve the room acoustics in a crappy 90's house? (I fear so hehe )

garycat

4,949 posts

228 months

Wednesday 17th March 2010
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I did this by putting a second layer of plasterboard on each side of the wall, and filling in between the original plasterboard with insulation. Also using a heavier 'fire' door would help.

gareth h

4,047 posts

248 months

Wednesday 17th March 2010
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I researched this a while back after taking down a lathe and plaster ceiling and replacing it with plasterboard which had very poor accoustic performance. there appear to be 2 types of sound, percussion (stamping on the floor) and airborne (talking, tv etc).
The percussion can be improved with a type of rubber underlay, the airborne needs insulation / extra plasterboard.
I think I found a lot of info on the gypsum website, might be worth a look

RedLeicester

6,869 posts

263 months

Wednesday 17th March 2010
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There's another thread running on this, but www.noisestopsolutions.co.uk do a lot of that sort of material, plus googling will reveal a handful more too.

52classic

2,633 posts

228 months

Wednesday 17th March 2010
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Sheffield Insulations have some good solutions.

Based on what we are doing with flats at the mo my suggestion would be to line the walls with accoustic plasterboard on metal resilient bar. If you want to go to the trouble of taking off the existing plasterboard you can fill the stud with e-cousti which is a sort of rubber and mineral wool composite.

Surprisingly effective is laying plasterboard over the whole floor and then the floor finish on that. The proper solution is shown in their spec sheets but this is a halfway house solution. Even the 12.5mm stuff does seem to work.

Think about upgrading the door to a FR30 rated one too.

condor

8,837 posts

266 months

Wednesday 17th March 2010
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Cork tiles could be an inexpensive way to reduce noise.