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The Brief
Great soundproofing starts with a solid foundation. Our live rooms and control rooms are all built using a 'room within a room' design, with no element directly coupled to the external frame of the building. This is the most effective method of isolation and is essential to stop impact-type vibrations.
In the world of soundproofing, there are two different types of sound to address. First is airborne sound, or direct sound. This is the sound that comes from your mouth as you sing; it travels through the air and is heard by your ears. Airborne sound is the easiest to absorb as it loses energy when it passes through more mass. The second type is vibration or impact noise. The best example of this is footfalls; the noise from someone walking upstairs is transmitted downstairs (in most structures) via these vibrations, which travel through the very frame of the building. This is also a major contributor to low frequencies getting through many soundproof enclosures.
As bass frequencies from a direct sound source (like a bass amp) hit the walls, a large portion is converted into mechanical energy as the walls vibrate. These vibrations are harder to absorb, but you can take steps to substantially reduce this impact noise.
The best way to achieve this is to isolate the soundproof enclosure from the external building frame and from any other room. Our ceilings have special iso-mount brackets that isolate them from the building frame while still supporting the hanging weight. Our walls have another version of these iso-clips between the plasterboard layers and the frame. Our floors also have an extremely effective isolation method, which is explained below.
Floors
Let's talk about floors. For this example, we'll take a close look at the design of the floating floors in Studio A, which have some awesome tech hidden under your feet.
Between the downstairs studios (Studio B) and upstairs (Studio A), there are several thousands of dollars in materials and a literal ton of weight. This is because before we built Studio A, the space was a beautiful apartment, and the floor was already soundproofed. In 2018, we demolished the apartment and began construction.
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The original floors to the entire upstairs remain and are constructed as follows: Above the soundproof ceilings from Studio B (which are suspended from the steel beams), there is a sealed cavity filled with 100kg/m³ Rockwool and air. After that cavity, there are two layers of Structaflor with Green Glue in between.
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This is a typical soundproof floor construction, and it was effective in reducing a large portion of the sound. However, we wanted to achieve even more isolation when we turned the living spaces into what would become our primary studio space. So we added two more massive floating floors. These floors are over the live room/iso booth and the control room of our Studio A facility and are explained below.
Framing
The first step in creating a floating floor is building the frame. This frame allows us to create a cavity under the floor that will be filled with Rockwool. In our studio, we used 110mm of Rockwool in the floating floor cavity. You can build much smaller floors by using 50mm Rockwool, but we wanted to control the sound as much as possible, so we decided to go big.
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Our frame sits on special U-shaped rubber pucks to isolate it from the subfloor. As mentioned earlier, this significantly reduces—and almost completely eliminates—any impact-based noise. You can see the frame and the rubber pucks in this image.
Cavity Soundproofing, Structaflor and Green Glue
After the frame is made we filled the gaps with soundproof insulation. The colours are different in the 2 photos seen here due to the differences in product. In the control room we used 110mm Brandford Soundscreen vs the Live Room in which we used 75mm 120kg/m3 Rockwool. The reason for this is below the Live Room is a further decoupled floor layer or higher step up between so there is actually 3 separate floors on top of each other between the live room of Studio A and the downstairs ceilings. Because of this construction difference, the Live Room used a special custom order product. The specs of these 2 products was almost identical. The less dense but thicker Brandford Soundscreen performs to the same levels across all frequencies as the less thick but more dense Rockwool.
After all gaps are filled with the insulation, the first layer of Structaflor goes down. Sometimes called yellow tongue flooring. The floor is glued and nailed to the frame. After this first layer goes down, Green Glue is used between the layers. Green Glue is an amazing product that is more effective at reducing sound transfer than mass loaded vinyl. Green Glue works by absorbing the vibration between the sandwiched sheets and allowing the 2 separate sheets to vibrate at their own rates. When coupled with insulation in the cavity its extremely effective. But it's also wildly expensive, especially if you use the maximum amount for the best STC levels (as we did!)
Live Room Floor
Here you can clearly see the 2 floating floors that exist Below the entire Studio A live room and the anti-vibration pads. You can also see the 2 layers of Structafloor.
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