![]() Let's say you're designing a recording studio and there's a train track outside the studio. You have to figure out how to actually execute a plan that attacks "the weakest link" effectively. Simple, right? Well in principle yes, but the devil is in the details. These work on those principles - there is a high mass wall, an air gap, and then another wall, making sound transmission difficult. You may have heard of sound isolation techniques such as staggered stud walls or resilient channels. ![]() You need mass to contain the airborne sound, but then you also need space (an air gap or similar unobstructed area) so that the structure borne sound can not be transmitted. So what do we do if we want to isolate sound? The answer is quite simple: Only two things stop sound - mass and space. The golf ball experiment shows us that mass does not stop the sound at all, rather it transmits it to other parts of the house-quite efficiently too. Many people think that having a high mass will stop all sound, but actually sound travels faster in dense material than in air. You are not getting any air borne sound transmission, this is all structure borne. Have you ever been in a room on a concrete slab where someone is bouncing a golf ball 2 or 3 rooms away? If you are standing on the same concrete slab with no breaks in it, you will hear that golf ball almost as if you were in the same room. attenuate) and it could become both an air borne wave and a structure borne vibration in the next room. One may ask, "But if the room is sealed, isn't all the air borne sound contained?" To a point the answer is yes, but a ½ inch layer of gypsum is not going to stop 50 Hz, just slow it down (i.e. ![]() A combination of air borne and structure borne approaches need to be considered for sound isolation. Air borne sound is pretty simple - this is what we hear within the room. In residential environments it will either be air borne or structure borne. In order to deal with sound control one should understand how sound travels. You could make changes and increase the STC (Sound Transmission Coefficient) dramatically for that wall, but the result might be marginal because the majority of the sound is getting through elsewhere. The other parts might well be the floor, the ceiling joists and other shared walls. We are often asked questions like: "What can I do to this wall to stop the sound going through to the bedroom on the other side?" It's almost incomprehensible to people that the wall may not be (and probably isn't) the only part that is leaking sound to that bedroom. This is a very appropriate saying with regard to sound isolation. ![]() "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link." ![]()
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