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General help with basement HT design

post #1 of 3
12/8/08 at 7:37am
Thread Starter 
I'm a complete novice with HT design and I'm hoping to get some feedback. I'm going to be finishing my walkout basement and I'm currently in the design phase. In my current plan, I'm going to have a large L-shaped room. The short leg of the L will be the HT area and the long part of the L will be a family/recreation room. I plan to have a ceiling mounted projector, with two rows of seating (the back row elevated). Behind the second row will be a bar that separates the short and long legs of the L. The idea is to have a HT area, but also a large screen tv that can also be viewed from the bar and perhaps a poker table located in part of the rec room.

I know from reading this forum, that the ideal situation is to have the theatre room an isolated room. My general question is:

If I am committed to doing the room as one large room, is it at all worth trying to do anything to try and isolate the noise from reaching the rest of the house? That is, I believe doing staggered stud walls, green glue between drywall layers, etc would be cost-prohibitive to do the entire area. Should I consider doing anything less, or is it a waste of money/time. I can post a diagram of the intended construction if it would be helpful. Thanks in advance!
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post #2 of 3
12/8/08 at 11:34am

Re: General help with basement HT design

Staggered stud construction will help but not as much as double drywall. If you can't do green glue, at least go with the extra drywall.

But it all depends on the size of your system and how loud you listen. If you plan on a massive system and listen at reference levels, then you should either go all out on soundproofing or just skip it. I went with staggered studs and packed insulation in the walls. It keeps the ambient noise out of the room but contains little. My subs can shake the entire foundation of the house so unless I go with a room-in-a-room construction, it would be a waste.

-Robert
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post #3 of 3
12/11/08 at 11:30am

Re: General help with basement HT design


Welcome to the Forum, Jeff!
Quote:
I know from reading this forum, that the ideal situation is to have the theatre room an isolated room. My general question is:

If I am committed to doing the room as one large room, is it at all worth trying to do anything to try and isolate the noise from reaching the rest of the house?
Well, that's something only you can answer, Jeff. If you don't have a compelling reason to acoustically isoloate the room from the rest of the house, there's no reason to pay the expense to do it. In your situation, it's more than just the planned adjacent rec room. That would be easy to enough isolate with staggered stud construction and multiple layers of sheetrock. But that would do nothing for everything that would be bleeding into the room(s) above, through the floor (i.e., the basement ceiling). That would require that the HT room ceiling be physically and fully decoupled from the floor joists. That would pretty much require a "room within a room" scenario like Robert mentioned, where the HT room walls would support is ceiling.

Which gets back to my origninal statement, if you don't have a compelling reason for isloation, there's no reason to go to the expense.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt
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