Affordable, highly insulated, double glazed, bespoke garden offices, all year use
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Garden offices installation, Church Lane, Colston Bassett, Nottingham NG12 3FE
Sound Proofed music rooms, insulated and wired garden buildings
An indication as to how they are made and how effective they can be.
Click on the photos to see the detail
What needs to be done and why, to properly Soundproof a recording studio or music room
Sound travels through the air in waves, and those waves cause the objects they come into contact with to vibrate. When a sound is loud enough, those vibrations travel through walls, floors and ceilings, transferring sound everywhere The key to effectively stopping unwanted noise is to stop the vibration.
In most buildings, walls and floors have an interior support structure of wood or steel studs or joists and are covered with some form of rigid sheeting like plasterboard, or particle board flooring, leaving an air space between the walls, floors and ceilings. That air space allows for the easy transfer of sound waves with very little solid mass for the sound to vibrate through or slow its transfer. One of the most common methods used to reduce the transfer of that sound has been to insulate the wall, floor or ceiling with one of several types of insulation. This may reduce the transfer of sound vibrations through the air space, but does nothing to stop the sound transferred through studs, plasterboards, joists or flooring.
It's also important to understand that all sound frequencies are not the same when it comes to insulation. Lab tests show that low frequency sounds are not stopped by insulation, nor are high frequency sounds reduced significantly.
Insulating the air space is only effective in deadening mid-range frequency sound.
Many people have found this out to their cost by having sound deadening insulation installed only to find that the bass beats of drums or a bass guitar or any bass sound comes through almost unaffected, as if no insulation was present. High pitched sounds also travel through uninterrupted.
So how is sound transferred in an insulated wall? When plasterboard is nailed directly to wall studs, sound waves vibrate the plasterboard, that vibration is transferred to the stud, and is finally transferred to the plasterboard on the other side of the wall. That vibrates the air in the room and the vibrations become sound waves again. The industry calls this coupling.
Unsurprisingly, the solution to this is called de-coupling. De-coupling creates a space between the drywall and studs. This dampens the sound. That is, the vibration and resulting transfer of sound is greatly reduced. This can be achieved during construction by placing a resilient rubber cushion between the plasterboard and studs to absorb the vibrations. Another even more effective method is to install a cushioning sheet over the stud wall and under the drywall, or over floor joists and under sub-flooring, When combined with insulating the air space between walls and floors, there is a significant reduction in the transfer of high, low and mid-range sound frequencies.We go even further than that for even greater effect.
When used together, each of these standard methods goes a long way in controlling the transfer of unwanted sound.When all this is done twice over, as with a “room within a room” and the weakest link, the windows, are also shuttered with sound isolating shutters to both leafs, acoustic triple glazing, noise lock doors, the effectiveness is tremendous.There are also a few additonal applications we utilise, to increase the effect still further, but this is commercially sensitive so we do not go into it here.
To give an example of how effective at sound supression our soundproof rooms can be, this is what occured during a recent test in an Extra Room used as a recording studio and sound mixing room.
A large ghetto blaster was placed a few inches from the front walls of the building and the music volume was pumped up to the max. The reading was over 120 decibels. This is the threshold of pain, and hearing loss can occur after less than 8 minutes at this level. To understand a little about how the decibel scale works, click here.
The ghetto blaster was left on and the doors closed and the decibel meter was taken outside the building to the other side of the walls from where the ghetto blaster was inside. (We say “walls” rather than “wall” as this was a “room within a room” design of soundproof studio, for max effect.)
The decibel meter scale starts at just over 50 decibels and the needle did not even move, no reading was achieved but soft speech, whispering in fact, to comment on the needle not moving, made the needle bounce strongly to the right, so it was still working okay.
Music could be heard by the human ear, but only if one stopped breathing and strained to hear. If we moved away a few yards then nothing could be heard at all. We stood and listened for a few minutes, at one stage we thought we could hear something again, untill the customer realised and pointed out that this was music from down the street as he did not have that track!
This is what is attainable, it is pretty close to perfection but to achieve this level, a lot of work has to be done so it does cost a lot more than just softening sounds somewhat, but it can be attainedif required.
You may not need this level of effectiveness, but at the same time, you do not want to find your studio is not as effective as you need it to be. Talk to Extra Rooms, tell us what level you require and we will supply it in an attracive building at the lowest price possible, bespoke, turnkey and guaranteed..
So whilst sound isolation can be complicated and labour intensive, involving many layers of different materials, once completed, noise levels become no longer an issue if sound isolation is done properly.
Standard sound-proofed music practice studios
Case study of a sound proof extra room done to specification #1, the highest specification for max effectiveness. You may not need this level but it shows what lengths have to be gone to in order to achieve the maximum effect.
Large sound-proofed garden rooms
A comprehensively soundproofed music practice room, with cedar cladding applied to the eaves and with a cedar soffit with integral lighting.
Price for this case study: £35,000 + VAT
Decibel meter survey
A surver showing how the human ear can detect a wide range of sound pressure levels. Sounds can be very soft, such as the ticking of a wristwatch, or very loud, such as a top fuel dragster doing a burnout. The intensity of sound pressure can be measured, and is expressed as decibels, or dB.
