Domonic A

Wall Treatments

I have the walls framed and electrical just about done. Aside from insulating the walls and ceiling is their anything else I should do to the walls before I drywall. I am going to use 90# roofing paper on the ceiling and mechanical room wall. I know their are endless options but anything that is a must for sound quality, or would that intail adding acoustic panels when all is done?

Thank You,
Domonic

Joe L.

Domonic ,

One suggestion for before you close up the walls...

You want to find any rattles in the walls and silence them before you install the drywall that makes access difficult/impossible.

Put your subwoofer in the room and play various low frequency test tones through it at very high volume. You might want to try the sub in several locations around the room and repeat your tests. You can download wave files and burn a CD or use a tone generator and your PC's sound card to supply the tones.

Pipes, ducts, light fixtures, junction boxes, cables all need to be secured and silenced. No matter what, try the sub in its planned location in your theater.

You may not find anything, but if you do, you will be glad you silenced it prior to putting on the drywall.

Joe L.

Domonic A

Thanks for the suggestion Joe. Any advice where I can find such files to download?

Thanks
Domonic

Joe L.

You can find tone files and tone generators at the following links. One of them should do for you.

This page has a set of tone sweep files in MP3 format. Your subwoofer is unlikely to be able to reproduce the lowest frequency sweep, but start with the 20 Hz file and then try the 30, and perhaps the 60 Hz file. Between them, it should hit every frequency from 10 to 120 Hz.
http://marchandelec.com/sweeps.htm

Here is the program I used. A simple tone generator. I liked it since the steady tone at a single frequency made it easier to "excite" various objects in the room. Now my sub starts to fall off in the low/mid teens, but this program allowed me to learn that the closet door on the far side of my theater rattled at about 17 Hz. (it is 14 feet from the Subwoofer!) A bit of foam weather stripping and it was silenced.
http://marchandelec.com/fg.htm

Here is a set of 12th octave tones:
http://www.markfitzsimmons.com/gomer/1-12octave.zip

And here is a tone generator that has a lot more features (and a bit more complicated to use) It lets you save its output as a wave (.wav) file.
http://www.nch.com.au/tonegen

Good luck. As I said, you may find some rattles, and others may not show till you get the wallboard in place. (it will act as a sound-board to make the walls shake even more) In any case, you will be able to test for rattles before you settle down to watch a movie.

Joe L.

Shawn Keeler

Just added a page to my site on the acoustic panels I just did for my theater. Check it out if you want some ideas.
http://www.keelercables.com/keeler_theatre.htm