EricPrebys

square sound insulated room

I have built a room that is very sound insulated. It is a small square room, 12' by 12' with 9' ceilings.

Is it possible to use the room for HT in the 5-10 thousand dollar range or am I better off picking a different room?

The room conforms to the following specs:

Quietzone accoustic door.

walls and celing:
fiberglass insulation on all 6 sides (floor ceiling and 4 walls).
resilient channels. spaced 16" on center on the walls starting 8" off
the ground and ending 8" from the ceiling. 16" on center on the
ceiling starting 6" away from the walls.
Soundstop over the resilient channels.
5/8" think firecode drywall over the soundstop.
OSI accoustic sealant all the way around between ceiling and walls and in any crack.

flooring:
9 " fiberglass batting.
3/4" standard subfloor
Quietzone accoustic floor mat.
two layers 1/2" thick exterior grade plywood floating on top of the
floor mat but screwed and glued together.
5/8" thick prefinished bamboo flooring

the weaknesses in terms of sound proofing:
medium quality door solution.
poorly installed double pane windows and 3' x 3' skylight. (less concerned about exterior noise)

rough plan for HT (6000$):
3500$ 42" plasma television
500$ A/V receiver
400$ subwoofer
400$ dvd player
1000$ front/rear/center speakers and stands

what are the the weaknesses in terms of HT and how significant are they?

the room is square which i know is bad because it causes standing waves. what kind of room treatment would be appropriate? how much space would i have to sacrifice?

the room is a small. for my budget, is a projector or a plasma better?

the walls are intentionally resilient to block transmission of sound from other rooms. is this a bad thing for sound quality in the room? as far as i can tell it is according to page 26 of this free journal article from audio perfectionist:
http://www.audioperfectionist.com/P.../journal2rl.pdf

Virg Villarreal

Hey Eric!

Glad to read your vine on sound-proofing a dead-HT. As I am also wanting to make my HT as stealth and great sounding. I am particuarly interested in your floating floor approach and was wondering if you used any framing for your floor and if you did are the truses parallel or perpendicular to the rear of your room. Did you use anything to prevent mositure from coming up through the foundation (Sweat) I also wanted to ask if I wanted to make my room as quiet to the rest of the house as possible do I need to put up a subwall and floor to keep the reverbarations from transferring through the rest of the foundation of the house. Can I just paint the foundation (Newly poured and straight) and hang carpet. Did you mention your ceiling? I was just going to use a drop ceiling and paint it black as Mick Jagger would say.

WAF: a must.

OUT. --Virge in KC

Room size: 7'5" H X 17'5" W X 17' D

EricPrebys

The floor system I did closely follows the spec for this Owens Corning product:
QuietZone Acoustic Floor Mat (http://www.owenscorning.com/around/s...s/floormat.asp)

Before installing the Acoustic Floor Mat system:

1. I filled the cavity between my floor joists with insulation.

2. Then I installed a 3/4" CD grade plywood subfloor with tongue and groove. I used Liquid Nails Subfloor glue to secure the subfloor and prevent squeaking. I used screws instead of nails. I followed these instructions:
http://www.homestore.ca/tabs/homeimp...rOverJoist.asp

I'm sure I could've improved sound isolation considerably by using more advanced secondary framing techniques, but I was limited by budget and I didn't want to sacrifice much off my reasonably high ceilings (9').

I haven't tested with a subwoofer, but preliminarily, it looks like I get pretty good sound insulation for my purposes. Normal walking can't easily heard in the room below mine. Stomping definitely can be easily heard. I suspect the sound isolation follows something of a threshold curve. Low impact sounds are blocked almost entirely, but very high impact noise overdoses the systems and is transmitted pretty much undiminished.