John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hi all,

I have a friend who is an owner of a local health club. They have recently added dance lessons to their services. The dance lessons take place in an upstairs room directly above a workout gym floor space. My friend says that the tap noise from the tap dancing shoes is causing noise interuption issues to the classes going on below and vis versa.

I don't have a detailed drawing (please forgive me) but I will try and describe the construction detail.

The room is really large, don't have a spec measurement but if I have to guess probably 45ft X 75ft.

From top (upstairs room) to bottom is as follows:
3/4 oakwood floor (gym type)
2X4 supports (the floor is screed sp?? or floating on the 2/4's)
3/4" plywood subfloor
2X4s running the width of the subfloor
metal industrial looking braces screwed/centered to the 2X4s that are 24"oc

The braces come down 2 feet from the top and have a flat bottom side that "acoustic tiles" could fit in or I guess sheetrock could be installed to them. Presently the ceiling is "open" and blacked out so you can see the bracing and subfloor above.

My first thought was to glue rigid fiberglass to the subfloor on the ceiling and see if that would take some of the footfall out. We're dealing with tap shoes and I don't know the freq. involved but wouldn't they be higher freq to deal with?

I know you guys are the experts so I told my friend I would get your feedback.

thanks!

Tapp (no pun intended ha ha)

This is an impact noise problem. So anything soft may be good for the noise, but I don't know about dancer's ankles. My first guess would be something like acoustikmat and then another oakwood floor upstairs, but I'm worried about resonance. Less effective but easier to find things would include Owens Corning's QuietZone Acoustic Floor Mat, which used to be available at HD.

I doubt that fiberglass on the bottom will help perceptibly. It may reduce the noise making it upstairs by 1db (because the whole room will be a little quieter), but probably nothing from upstairs down.

If you can't raise the bridge, lower the river. Can you increase the noise floor downstairs by playing dance club tunes at 70db(c)? A boom box is cheap.

BTW, are you in Mississauga or Mississippi?

(humor) As a radical solution, you could buy those running shoes with the LED lights in the heels, connect them to radio headphones to make a 'tap' sound they could hear.

Thanks for the reply.

I think my friend would rather attack this from the "bottom" or ceiling of the 1st floor room since it's open right now rather than rip up the existing floor upstairs. Although, if it will solve it and be less money to go at it from the 2nd floor room, then........

I'm from Mississippi so quite far from Canada.

Another solution I was thinking would be to put install a sheetrock ceiling (2 layers of 5/8ths) to the bottom of the braces and somehow either blow or batt insulation between the big 2 foot gap of the brace. I wouldn't think RC would be needed since the braces would take the vibration.

Sound feasable or overkill??

Tapp

Tapp:

Re the sheetrock/gypsum ceiling under the tap floor:

Personally I'm not fond of RC. I believe it was great in its time (30 years ago) but there are better things today that isolate at the low frequencies we use today.

A bit more expensive, but more likely of success from both an impact noise and a air noise point of view are Kinetics ICW spring hangers. They are about $25 CDN per hanger. The PDFs, especially this one show how to install it and the IIC (Impact). Here's another link showing an animation of them being installed.

If you want it done effectively it requires either time devoted to research or an acoustics consultant.

If you/he decide to redearch then start with, sorry I don't have the urls,
NRC documents

CTU 22e
CTU 32e
CTU 35e
IR 766
IR 811


here is link to their search engine. Go to new search and have fun!

http://index.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/cgi-bin/sea ... +loss+data

Andre