Re: OT: DIY Music Room sound-proofing

["Rick Walker" <looppool@cruzio.com>]

Haven't had time to read this whole thread but wanted to lay a salient
nugget of wisdom I learned years ago from one of the chief sound design 
engineers
with Crown (a producer who helped to design the pressure zone microphone 
for 
Crown).

THE CHEAPEST WAY TO SOUND PROOF A ROOM WITHOUT FUNDS:

If you go into your room in the middle of the day and can see a pin prick 
of 
light when the
lights are turned off,  you are losing a whopping 40% of all the sound to 
the outside.

As he explained it,   a room full of air is like a vessel full of water. 
One pinprick
in that vessel and the water will come out a high pressure.

If you can make the room light tight, you immediately reduce the output of 
volume (especially
bass waves which travel furthest) of the room by 40%.

Foam does virtually nothing,  according to this guy, except to reduce the 
high frequency content of the
audio WITHIN the room.

It is bass waves that are the greatest offenders because of their large 
size.

>From what I have heard (and I"m not expert)  a 30 cycle bass wave is 
something like 16 feet long.
That's for one stinking sine wave (the fundamental)  and twice that for 
the 
first subsonic below
it.

Foam will make a dry sounding room as Stefan pointed out and since every 
room is , in essence ,
a shitty reverb unless you've spent some major bucks to make it a really 
good acoustical space,
it's better to have a deader environment (internal foaming = good) and 
then 
use expensive
reverbs or, better yet (for the champagne living on a beer budget 
recordist) 
inexpensive or free
convolution , software reverbs with really good acoustically modelled 
impulse files of real
reverberant spaces (read  the freeware SIR convolution 
reverb...........see 
the archives of
my Audio Plugin Junkies Annonymous tribe at tribe.net for those URLS)



The easiest way to fill all the holes in a darkened room is to go out and 
buy a caulking gun full
of silicone caulk.   You literally turn out the lights and walk around 
caulking holes in the room
(pinprick sources of light) until the entire room is perfectly light tight.

Voila,  you have now made your room as soundproof as possible short of 
spending $3,000 USD
or equivalent to build an entire box within a box (yeppers,  that means 
raising the floor, lowering
the roof and building four walls around you that are insulated by a layers 
of wood and foam,  then
a layer of air (the greatest insulator, ironically) and then another layer 
of wood and foam.

that's what I know about it.  Hope it helps.