Acoustic plasterboard v regular plasterboard

Robin1

Just got planning for timber frame house build, with stud partitions. Just a bit worried about sound. We are going to double slab on the walls without doors only - long story but basically for technical reasons we won't be able to double-slab on walls with doors so I suggested acoustic plasterboard for those walls, but our builder/carpenter said he didn't rate them at all so I'm undecided what to do. Does the acoustic plasterboard perform better than the regular plasterboard?

gman2k

What you are doing there is increasing the mass of the walls, and basically, the more mass in an object, the less the sound waves can travel through.
However, there are other considerations...
Sound is transmitted from one room to another by two means;
1. Sound waves traversing through solid materials,
2. Sound waves transmitted through air.

The reason a block wall is better than a stud wall is
1. Much heavier mass
2. Very little air transmission through block walls.

So you need to be very particular with your detailing to prevent sound transmission through the stud wall.
What I did was the following (soundproofing walls from living room - it will get very loud in there!)
Stud wall, (void filled with 100mm glass fibre insulation)
50mm acoustic foam roll on studs
18mm WBP Ply screw fixed to studs/ foam roll
Seal all joints between ply sheets and floor etc with non hardening mastic & tapes
15mm fireline plasterboard (pink sheets) screw fixed to plasterboard and also bedded down on mastic.
Skim plaster finish to plasterboarding. (get your plasterer to use the paper plastering tapes as opposed to scrim tapes for jointing between sheets)

soldsold

A staggered stud wall is possibly the easiest and cheapest way to get very very good soundproofing. If you google it there are loads of descriptions, all saying basically the same thing. Look for STC ratings, anything above 50 is good. Dont even try to come up with your own solutions for soundproof walls, if you just throw materials at it you can get worse results rather than better, for example a twin stud wall with a structure of:

plasterboard
100mm stud filled with rockwool or glass wool
2 inch air gap
100mm stud filled with rockwool or glass wool
plasterboard

is BETTER than:

plasterboard
100mm stud filled with rockwool or glass wool
plasterboard
2 inch air gap
plasterboard
100mm stud filled with rockwool or glass wool
plasterboard

The second one creates a drum effect, even though it does "seem" to be a better soundproof wall its worse.

A staggered stud wall has a 6x2 bottom and top with 3x2 vertical studs in a staggered formation. Ive a pic of this on the live selfbuilds thread, I think its around page 52, or as I said google will show you the construction.

Steve

triplem

Acoustic plasterboard is slightly denser than normal so will give you a slightly better performance.

If they are for internal walls to the house (non party walls), then standard plasterboard will be fine. The difference subjectively will be minimal.

macgabhs

Bear in mind that overall sound insulation of Walls with doors will be determined by the performance of both the door and plasterboard partition. The door will have a much lower performance than a standard stud wall, even with acoustic plasterboard, and will drag the overall performance down. Because of this I wouldn't bother with the acoustic plasterboard in this case.

Robin1

macgabhs wrote: »

Bear in mind that overall sound insulation of Walls with doors will be determined by the performance of both the door and plasterboard partition. The door will have a much lower performance than a standard stud wall, even with acoustic plasterboard, and will drag the overall performance down. Because of this I wouldn't bother with the acoustic plasterboard in this case.

That's exactly what builder said to me, not to bother too much with sound proofing as sound will travel through the doors anyway; I'm talking about two rooms upstairs in a converted attic, one to the left of the landing, one to the right - they are not actually side by side. Is there anything that can be done about the door thing? And is he right that it's not worth our while?

tiocimarla

normal stud wall filled with rockwool and cover on both sides with polythene roll stapled on. The main problem with sound traveling through stud walls are its hollow so u should fill it. sound also travels through the screws and nails that hold the plasterboard so its louder as aposed to blobbing the board to brickwork where the board is not penetrated.