Sound from a basement.

unclebill98

Hi all,

Finally getting to the basement of the house!!

I plan on using the basement as a Recording Studio. I am getting the dropped ceiling put on at the moment. There is a drop of about 3 inch between the slabs and the ceiling. I was thinking about putting some insulation in this area to dampen the sound to the rest of the house.

Now, I've got 11 inch concrete slabs as the basement roof and about another 6 inchs of concrete floor poured on top of that. There is 50mm insulation in that poured floor too. There is also then going to be tiles/carpet etc on top of that and then the basement will have a plastered board finish.

I've been told by the chap doing the ceiling and by the builder that I'd be wasting money adding any kind of more insulating. The slab and floor is by far enough to dampen the sound down.

Of course there are windows in the house and doors to upstairs. The doors are air locked by having 2 doors into the main live rooms etc. I've been told there will be more noise bleed from the windows to upstairs than from through the floor.

What you guys think? Waste of money or not?

No6

Your floor should be ok by the sound of that for impact sound on the floor, you might be right to put in some fibregalss or mineral wool in the void between the concrete and the dropped ceiling as the void could act like an amplifier to some frequencies when recording, if you weren't doing a studio i'd say you were fine without it but you'd be safer with it for recording, fibre glass isn't very expensive either. If its not a huge ceiling you could consider using an insulated slab (more expensive) and smaller battens. You could also consider triple glazed windows in the live room to reduce the sound to upstairs.

unclebill98

Thanks for that. I was told it be only a few hundred euro to put something there, so I was thinking better safe than sorry, cause I cant do it afterwards. As for the windows, I've asked for something better than double glazing, just waiting on a price for them.