Sound insulation advice for home theater room in middle of the house?
I'm an interior designer working on a house where the client wants to create a movie room. I need some recommendations for the materials to soundproof the walls.
Part of the complication is that they want 2 doors into the room (1 on each side - see image below), as well as a movable partition that separates the movie room from the family room. According to my limited knowledge, this makes MLV (my first choice) basically useless? Due to the number of openings?
What would you recommend, for a midrange budget, to outfit the walls (and possibly the doors) with sound reduction materials?
They're not planning to blast movies at full volume, but they do want to invest into soundproofing so they don't need to always worry about disturbing the kids or guests.
Also, the middle of the house is a vast open space, and it's very "echo-ey". We had 5 people trying to have a conversation, and it was almost unbearable. Any recommendations for making it more tolerable from audio quality perspective, while keeping to a clean and minimal look?
If anyone is willing to do a personal consultation (20-30-minute Zoom call to go over the floorplan and make recommendations, more for my own education / curiosity, but also to make a nice final product for the client) - I'm willing to pay a reasonable amount.
Thank you in advance!
Wireless headphones for all of the movie watcher's will save a bundle on the soundproofing, electronics, speakers and acoustical room treatment. You could even add bass "vibrators" to the seating if desired. Make the most out of a flawed from the beginning layout which is further limited by budget.
DeKay |
Go onto the Acoustic Sciences Corp. (ASC) website. Owner Art Noxon has designed a complete systems approach and product line for soundproofing a room, named IsoWall Soundproofing. Robert Harley of The Absolute Sound built his room using the ASC products, here's the video he made detailing the build.
https://youtu.be/OtUcfiaN6CY?si=fHzwvqSpAL11VSNd
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I've done two rooms in my own house. In the home theatre, I built a wall on each side of 2x4 frames and filled the interstices with playground sand. Same for the ceiling. It was highly successful. For the purpose built music room I used Quietrock 545, which is a 5 layer drywall with a sheet metal core. Far easier to build, but not as effective. Still, good enough for the purpose and my usual listening levels. You want two things: first, you want the walls to be stiff so that they do not flex and interfere with the music. Second, you want to prevent sound from escaping. The two goals can both be met, but they require considerations like my solutions. As for a terrible room, you can always change the dimensions. The scientific work has been done by the famous acoustician Cox, who published the results about 20 years ago. The research is on the website of the School of Acoustics at the University of Salford, UK. As for construction, the people at Quietrock are very, very helpful. Also, there was a reasonably good article published about 6 years ago in Stereophile or Absolute Sound, can't remember which. Good luck - glad your client had the good sense to hire someone like yourself. |
You will have to do a lot of research on google by looking at people's dedicated listening rooms to pick and choose the methods that would best apply to their layout. You are welcome to start with the construction of my house of stereo under my system details. The double sheetrock with green glue sandwich for walls and ceiling plus offset studs construction would be a good start. Then thick outdoor solid wood doors are also a must. Finish it up with quite a bit of absorbing material to tame the low frequencies that are so prevalent in a home theater. Like 4 corner bass traps and decorative wall mounted absorbers panels. Then add some diffusers at first reflection points to liven the room back up to improve the high frequencies for better dialog deciphering. It won't be an easy overnight design but if those folks are serious about getting satisfactory results they will have to likely spend a lot more money than you all thought.
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That’s a good start, but resilient channels go much further toward not only preventing vibrations/sound from being transferred through studs to the rest of the house, they also greatly improve the sound within the room. Refer to my prior post to learn more about resilient channels. |
