John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hello,

I have been a long time lurker here but as my acquisition of my own house approaches, I find myself with questions. Planning and building my project studio is becoming a reality and i will need some input.

Nonetheless, I plan to build the studio in well-thought out stages and the first stage is just setting up some reheasal space that won't annoy the neighbours.

I have been reading a bit about floating floors, etc. and one magazine (EQ maybe) talked about how even a platform for the drums can reduce transmission of sound through the foundation of the building. Can a simple platform with some rubber or neoprene feet reduce the volume of a kit or is this a myth?

If it can, is the same principle applicable to a bass amp?

I have done a little research through the various faqs and links on this and other pages, but have turned up very little.

thanks,
bryan

Bryan,

Here are some Auralex offerings:

Platfoam for "DIY" risers.
GRAMMA for amps and such.
HoverDeck for portable, easy-to-assemble, drum decoupling.

Finally, if you'd like to hear the effect these devices can have, go here. (Note that the "Full Band" demo includes a PlatFoam riser under the drums.)

so objectively, what do these do for isolation? How much of a difference will it make?

Bryan, Jeff may be a while getting back; basically, what you're doing with a riser is to physically decouple the floor your drums are sitting on from the rest of your structure; so a main source of flanking noise is treated by breaking the hard contact between drums/vibrations and your floor.

Once noise gets into the floor, it can travel through solid building materials at various speeds and into the rest of your structure, re-radiating into other rooms or outside through panels attached to frames attached to your floor.

There is no way of calculating just how much this effect changes things because there are too many variables; whether the floor is a timber floor that's kind of wimpy and can vibrate really easily, or a solid concrete floor on earth, whether the walls attached to the main floor are wood or concrete, well damped or no insulation at all, the list goes on and on.

Generally, in order to get the most isolation possible, it takes decoupled surfaces (decoupled from the REST of the building) EVERYWHERE in a room with enough mass and air gap to lower their resonant frequency to below the audio range, but everything you do to get closer to that ideal will make SOME difference.

The "platfoam" approach should work well on either a wood or concrete floor, because it will damp both leaves of the mass-air-mass construction - your original floor and the riser. Just make the riser as heavy as you can afford, and you'll get the best results for your money... Steve

Bryan,

First, "what Steve said."

Second, we have tested PlatFoam/GRAMMA in a sort of modified IIC-test configuration. The results are in our Master Table, near the bottom.

Thanks for the help guys. The creation of my studio space is gonna take a while and i just want an interim solution to reduce some volume...

The next question is... I'm dealing with a concrete floor. when i build my room within a room, what kind of difference would it have to have a floor floated for the whole room over just having the drums, etc on platforms?