How To Sound Proof A Room Cheaply?
Friday, September 18th, 2009 at
8:51 pm
I was thinking of using double sided tape and sticking up some egg crate mattress foam that you can buy cheap at walmart and shove some thick pillows up on the window sill along with curtains. i have solid wood floors with padding and carpet so i think im good there what do you guys think i can do that is relatively cheap.
Make Sure to Return! - Egg Crate Mattress Pad
Tagged with: Cheaply • Proof • Room • Sound
Filed under: Mattress Pad Questions
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Soundproofing and cheap do not go together.
Firstly, egg crate does absolutely nothing.
At best it can be regarded as acoustic treatment, but it doesn’t even do a very good job at that. It only copes with absorbing high frequencies and so can be used to sort out flutter echos and such, but you can’t expect any kind of soundproofing out of it! Most people don’t even regard it as proper acoustic treatment.
But acoustic treatment and soundproofing are completely different. Soundproofing is isolation of sound. Acoustic treatment is the control of reflections, standing waves, etc.
Soundproofing is very difficult to install retrospectively. It takes a lot of planning and care even if you are building from scratch. Most of the soundproofing comes at the planning and building stage, and there’s not much else effective that you can do to retrofit it.
So, a soundproof wall?
At the very minimum you want two stud walls filled with dense fibreglass which are separated by a good air gap (the bigger the better). Thick drywall (probably two sheets layered over each other) should be used over this stud wall. Basically you want two masses separated by an air gap (which ‘decouples’ them). Buildings are often designed such that corridors or storage cupboards act as large air gaps between walls, which is very effective.
But then you get on to the problem of floors and ceilings. There’s no point constructing a sound-proof wall if the sound can easily travel straight through your floor joists or ceiling.
This is why soundproof rooms are often built as a ‘room within a room’. They have ‘floating’ floors and ceilings which are decoupled from the outer room. Can you see why this is very difficult to fit retrospectively, and cheaply!?
Then you have to consider doors… soundproofed rooms usually have two doors with an air gap between them – an airlock if you like!
Windows are also troublesome.
And once you have a good soundproofed room, this usually also means its relatively sealed and airtight. This means you need a good (and quiet) ventilation system.
I would forget the whole idea of a soundproofed room, unless you can build from scratch. Why do you even need a soundproofed room anyway?
Most of the time you’ll get more benefits from acoustically treating a room anyway. Maybe look at this instead (but no egg crate!)?
Start with dynamat under that foam and you’ll be all set.