soundproofing for urban people

It's not too late to insulate.  A few years ago, most American homes had no insulation in them. When a homeowner did insulate, it was usually with fiberglass batts. Then along came some better products. One of them is blow-in cellulose insulation. Does it work? I can attest to this: YES. I've used it in walls and ceilings, and it works quite well for airborne noise. If you live in an uninsulated home and you hear your neighbors voices coming through your walls or ceilings, cellulose will dampen that noise or mute it entirely. It doesn't work for all types of noise. But it doesn't eradicate impact noise. You might still hear the sounds of someone walking across a bare hardwood floor with their shoes on, for example, or hear wall-mounted cabinets opening and closing. There are other solutions for that, and by combining different solutions you can control most structural noise and create more privacy. Low cost Blow-in insulation is inexpensive. You can hire a

You can add mass to your existing walls. As I mentioned in a previous entry, I successfully muted some neighbor noise in my apartment building when I added a second layer of drywall on top of the original 1/2" drywall, with a coating of Green Glue in-between. This produced better results than simply replacing the original wall with QuietRock 525. I made the double-drywall solution even more successful by using QuietRock 510 as the second layer of drywall, with Green Glue in-between the two. Here's a diagram from Trademark Soundproofing  that demonstrates the STC results between different wall assemblies, including those with Green Glue.  Why do I think the Green Glue + layer of QuietRock was better than just replacing the original wall with QuietRock, right on the studs? My theory is that when you add QuietRock directly onto the wood framing, you're still not decoupling it from the structure. And therefore, impact noise and lower frequencies might still come throu

Two great products work great together. As I've mentioned before, I'm experimenting around with ways to reduce some of the noise problems in my apartment on a tight budget. I think I've found the best combination to date: adding a layer of QuietRock 510 over an existing layer of gypsum drywall with a layer of Green Glue inbetween. This was sort of the best of both worlds: taking a pre-made, sound-dampened drywall and then adding it over a powerful, viscous layer of glue....onto drywall that was already on the wall studs. No demo needed. In this project, I basically added two sound-dampening layers to the original 1950s drywall (one layer in the QuietRock and the other layer created by the Green Glue) to address " flanking noise ": feet, furniture, and shoes pounding on the bare floor of my downstairs neighbors' apartment. The amount of banging, bashing, and foot-stomping sounds coming from their very "wooden" apartment has been severe, and I&

The Knock Test REPOSTED FROM MY PREVIOUS BLOG: By knocking on a wall,  you get some idea of how well dampened it might be for certain types of noise...or not. I made a very short video demonstration in my own home to compare the audible differences between making an impact noise on normal, uninsulated gypsum drywall and two alternatives. The first example shows how it sounds to knock on a hollow piece of 1/2" gypsum board. This type of drywall is typical for mid-century American homes.  Then compare it to: 1) a second layer of sheetrock glued on top of the original drywall with Green Glue in between the two layers -- no demolition required. 2) a layer of QuietRock 525 that replaced the existing layer of gypsum -- demolition required. Original 1/2" drywall was removed and fiberglass insulation was added before screwing the new QuietRock into the wall studs. One layer only.  (NOTE from 2023: Now I know better, and I would have decoupled the drywall from the wall studs instead o