[atum47]

I'm actually, right now, spending about 6k trying to sound proof my work area. If I ware a billionaire, I'd give these people millions of dollars as investment. Or to another team that could figure it out how to turn your hearing on/off on command.

[jacquesm]

Before you drop all that money try this: run low volume ambient noise such as rain or distant thunder. That serves as a masking sound and will have a strong effect on getting rid of other non-periodical sounds. Your brain just tunes it out after a while and it tunes quite a bit of the background noise out with it.

[atum47]

yes, that's what I've been doing until this week. but since I'm looked inside the house since Feb this year I'm not spending money on anything. so I decided to give myself this cool room.

I'll do a 360 picture of it after it's done. like I did with the victorribeiro.com/3Dsphere but with picture instead of a render

[randycupertino]

I don't know if you're doing ceilings or floors as well, but a cork underlay can go under your current flooring and works WONDERS for footsteps, running and other transition sounds between floors. We did ours through Home Depot- you can order it in the carpet section. You can hire them to install or do it yourself. Went from hearing a herd of buffalo walking to glorious silence.

[atum47]

I did all the walls and ceiling. Dry wall + glass wool, on top of bricks.

[jacquesm]

That looks gorgeous. What did you use to make the rendering?

Please let me know when you have it all built I'm very curious to see what it will look like in real life. And don't forget to take 'before' and 'after' readings with a sound level meter!

[atum47]

back then I was a 3Ds max user. now I'm doing all my 3d in blender. Software libre all the way

[jacquesm]

Neat. Best of luck with the remodeling.

[atum47]

thanks

[molszanski]

Maybe in the long run we could decentralize our habitat and eliminate the lions share of the problem

[LockAndLol]

Hopefully remote working will become much more normal and help with that.

[atum47]

tell me about it, I'm working and saving some money so the future me can get a cabin in the woods somewhere. or on the ice, if I'm doing really well.

[pbhjpbhj]

What's a "cabin on the ice"?

[atum47]

https://66.media.tumblr.com/936b0420940334694d53bad30151b76c...

[sjg007]

Fish house basically.

[atum47]

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5x5YEVp_B2/?igshid=dn2n66w70sj1

[atum47]

yeah, this was probably on my copy/paste from a previous conversation. sorry, this is not a cabin on the ice

[tootie]

This guy says you can build high-performance acoustic panels with old towels.

https://youtu.be/pABvTWSxOes

[nickjj]

> This guy says you can build high-performance acoustic panels with old towels.

Towels, acoustic panels and other materials are good at reducing echos but it doesn't really do much at all for reducing the amount of sound that can enter or escape a room.

If you had an open room with a hardwood floor, you'd likely get a lot of echos when talking normally. That's where things like acoustic panels help out.

If you want to dampen the noise of your neighbor's kids screaming like maniacs you'd have to do a pretty serious amount of sound proofing with other strategies. It's a lot more complicated.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Sound treatment uses acoustic panels to make a room with a flat frequency response and minimal reverb. They damp the room's natural resonant peaks and reflections.

Sound isolation keeps sound from getting into and out of the room. It's a separate problem, and you can only solve it with mass and physical separation - e.g. building a room inside a room with massive walls and rubber isolation for the floor.

If you do it properly you have to pay a consultant to design a solution for you, because it's so easy to get it wrong.

[atum47]

yeah, I follow him on youtube. But, what I think he suggest on this video is a solution to the reverb problem that he faces recording his videos.

I want to stop noise from coming in to my entire room, both acoustic and structural.

[jbellis]

How do you soundproof a room without tearing out the walls and replacing them with thicker ones?

[Hamuko]

Can't you install panels on top of the walls?

[hwillis]

No, not really. Soundproofing means preventing sound from entering or exiting a volume. Because of the way sound works, a quite small leak will result in quite a lot of sound entering or exiting a volume.

20 dB is a ~4x increase in perceived sound volume, but a 10x increase in the actual pressure of the sound wave. So, oversimplifying, if you block off 90% of the sound waves entering a volume, the remaining pressure spreads out to 10x weaker waves... which are still 25% as loud. Keep in mind that this is covering 90% of the floor, walls, ceiling, doors and windows in perfectly sound-blocking material, which does not exist.

To reduce volume levels by 90%, you need to perfectly isolate 97% of the sound leaking in. You literally need to build a new room inside the old one. That's before you even account for the fact that your ears will adjust and sounds need to be much quieter to keep from picking up on them.

Preventing sound from exiting a volume is even worse. Sound has quite low absorption coefficients even in things like open cell foam; anechoic chambers rely heavily on shapes that trap sound and cause it to echo through foam dozens of times so that it's sufficiently attenuated before it bounces back out. Most reasonably airtight rooms are painfully loud because sounds you normally consider quiet (eg footsteps) are not attenuated as normal.

Keep in mind that even if you think a room is reasonably airtight -eg when you have an open window, your door closes far more easily than when the window is closed- it's really not at all. You've probably got vents etc that allow lots of air to move in and out of the room.

In a well-sealed room, sound will echo ~100 times (a second or two) before attenuation makes it much quieter. That pressure is just bottled up and it will escape through even tiny cracks, and if you were to listen at one of those cracks you'd hear much more clearly than if the room wasn't soundproofed at all. In that case, the soundproofing is just acting like a funnel or a crack in a pressure vessel. Unless you've got comprehensive soundproofing and a way to increase attenuation, all you're doing is causing the sound to escape from smaller spots.

When you see people recording and they have just a few acoustic panels up, the point is not to make the room any quieter. In fact they usually want the opposite- you want sound to exit the room as easily as possible, to prevent echoes. If you hang up too many panels, you prevent that from happening and you don't really decrease the volume of sound from the outside.

Acoustic panels are best used sparingly to dissipate or break up echoes from a very specific place, like directly in front of the recording, or behind electronics/noise sources.

[atum47]

that was a very good explanation. I'm awaiting for my remodeling to be done so I can see if I spent all that money for nothing. Got a new wooden door and new windows. If everything works, I'll share my project here on HN.

[deckar01]

Unless you need to record sound, noise cancelling headphones are much more cost effective. If you do need to record sound, directional microphones and noise shields for them are a little more practical.