I’m looking into ways to make a home theater sound good, while soundproofing it. It’s in a basement of a new construction, so the most effective way to soundproof the room, would be to build a “concrete block” and contain all sound inside, by decoupling the room from the rest of the building. Given that 2 walls are already concrete, would cost too much, I guess. But the sound inside the room, very likely, would be really poor, unless lot of (expansive) acoustical material was used to prevent sound reflections.
Soundproofing is actually not the highest priority: first of all, I’m trying to build a room that “sounds nice”. Secondary goal is to muffle the sound enough not to be a nuisance (being in a basement, with a kitchen above, we can live with some muffled music)
Browsing the web, I found http://www.asc-soundproof.com/iso-technical.htm, a company that sells kits to address the kind of problems I’m facing. They have a ton of DYI material, and they can sell to my contractor (with a discount) a complete kit. The idea is to dampen the walls and add mass, in order to improve the internal acoustic, and minimize noise outside the room. I’m an engineer, and their sales pitch makes a lot of sense (viscoelastic dampening, paper backed adesive pads, etc), and they seem to offer decent bang for the buck (installation seems easy enough, and the cost of materials is offset by the lower amount of labor needed)
I can’t help thinking, though, that it might be possible to achieve similar results using lower cost materials. Their full kit for a room, for 4 walls and ceiling (the ceiling with resilient channels), is roughly 3,000$ (for a 16x14x8 room), excluding only studs, drywall and screws (including strips, pads, acoustic sealant, felt for the floor, resilient channels for the ceiling). Probably less for a contractor (plus labor, obviously)
Does anybody here have any experience with this company/product? Any suggestion for alternatives? I browsed past posts, but they seemed to focus more on soundproofing, than sound improvement…
Thanks in advance, Rob
Replies
This should keep you busy for a while...no direct experience with any of them. Have fun!
http://www.acousticsfirst.com/index.html
http://www.ethanwiner.com/acoustics.html#top
http://www.acousticalsolutions.com/
http://www.auralex.com/
http://www.owenscorning.com/around/sound/products/index2.asp
http://www.mysoundchek.com/certsck.html
http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/rives/bbs.html