How to Soundproof your home.
- Seclude the wall (Insulation) – This is not an expensive procedure at all and can get you great performance gain as well. The walls have now turned into sound-absorbers in the bass and also do not transmit mid/high frequencies in either direction of the room. The walls also do not sound like a big drum.
- Replace the Door – It is extremely easy to do that! Replace the door with a sturdy wood door and add seals to the door. One of the greatest sound leak in any room is your door. Hollow interior door are ghastly blocker of bass energies.
- Baseboards – remove the baseboard and use a 50 year Latex caulk or acoustic caulk to caulk the gaps under the drywall (between the drywall and floor) and also caulk the wall to the floor to prevent air penetration.
- Discard the prevailing outlets and switches to build an MDP “backer box” behind each of them. Make a hole in the top of the box big enough for the Romex to enter and block that. Change with old work boxes and if you can’t take down the drywall to build boxes, make use of putty pads on the rear and sides of the plastic box to add some mass and seal it up tightly. Redo this for any canister lights in the room. Use IC rated cans if you are going to box around them.
- If it is accessible, replace any tin duct-work with flex tubing and soundproof it in an MDF box with 90 degrees bends in it. This does not only just makes the room quieter but also refrains the sound from going out. Generally, HVAC is ignored while soundproofing, but it is extremely important!
- With all that you have done in the room with level 1 &2, add another layer to the wall and use Green Glue between the layers. This provides tremendous gains in soundproofing across the spectrum down into the deep base range, the additional mass of the dry wall stops a good amount of sound by itself. Green Glue also provides ‘visco-elastic damping layer’ between the sheets.
- Build a plug for any windows in the room. Make the front something that has mass like MDF, fill the rear end with insulation. If the windows are recessed in the wall, make the plug small enough to fit in while using ¾” foam weather stripping for a seal. If you can’t do that, make a 2x2 frame around the window that allows you to trim and slide the plug around the outside.
- Now you need to focus on the floor – You can either suspend a floor using Dri-Cor or you can use a precisely made rubber dampening layer and add new layer of subfloor. You can also add a third layer of Gypcrete between the prevailing floor and the rubber matting. The floor joist beneath you is probably shared with the remaining structure, you must remember that. Bass frequencies will move through to the structure and building despite of concrete flooring.
- You can add another HVAC system for the room, Mini-Splits are also cost effective in that case.