soundproofing for urban people

A decoupled ceiling might eliminate most of the noise between floors, but not all of it.   If you're thinking of decoupling a ceiling in your home or apartment, you might not eliminate all the noise between two floors. This doesn't mean that it's not worth doing. It means that resolving noise issues in your home might be an iterative process. Because after you address one noise source, you might discover another one. Noise paths A noise path is how a noise enters another space. For example, this could be through the air or through a thin wall, through the joists and studs in a building frame, through a wall outlet, or through a vent. You might soundproof one noise source only to realize afterwards that there were other points of entry for that noise. So if you're thinking about removing your existing ceiling and decoupling it with soundproofing materials, keep in mind that some types of noise might be coming from different sources via different paths. You might reduce o

This is an old post from 2010, which I've left here in the blog, but updated it a little. I had run across some videos from the Geek Group , and they were hard at work building a sound studio earlier in 2010. In this video, Chris describes how they affixed drywall to the original cinderblock walls of their space. I don't necessarily agree with some of their processes (didn't they read my multiple blog posts about Green Glue?), but they've been attaching wood strips to the cinderblock with glue, then adding resilient channel strips from Auralex, and then attaching drywall to the strips. However, he confessed that they're not adding insulation behind the wall because of their budget. But they were going to caulk between the pieces of drywall and add a second layer of gypsum (drywall) on top of the the first wall, placing the second layer in the opposite direction so that the seams don't line up. To see the older Geek Group videos, check out the National