Basement studio isolation: dealing with pipes and ducts

[Tadpui]

I'm getting to the more tangible part of my studio design. I'm having a contractor come over on Monday to go over my requirements, so I'm trying to gather up what I really want on paper (and in my head!).

It's a basement room with concrete floor and 3 concrete walls, approx 16' x 17' x 8'H. It's totally unfinished right now except for some old wall frames that will be demolished before this project begins. The ceiling is standard joists, spaced 16" on-center.

My main worry is that every "bay" between the joists is occupied by some form of house infrastructure. Supply/return registers for the HVAC, drainage for the 2 bathrooms, water supply for the bathrooms and back yard faucet. This worries me for 2 reasons:

- a drop ceiling is pretty much out of the question for isolation, so a drywall ceiling seems to be necessary. I'd always be 1 broken pipe away from a total disaster in my studio.

- all of these pipes will serve as conduits for transmission of sound in/out of this space, and the many breaches of the floor will be a pain to shore up. Getting insulation, drywall, acoustic caulk, etc. in-between these pipes and between the pipes and the floor/ceiling above would also be a total pain in the ass.

So what would you all do in this situation? I've got my heart set on this one corner of my basement being my "loud room". If there aren't any reasonable ways to work around all of this ducting (much less get a fresh air supply into this room), I'm going to have to rethink my location. The good news is, it's totally free to change my mind at this point!

 

[David Cooke]

Why do you want a ceiling so bad? Why not do clouds.. I mean A ceiling wood be nice but...tearing up drywall at 3 am to fix a pipe really sucks..I've been there. Can i ask what you have in mind for the floor? I'm working on my garage studio myself and am considering acid staining the floor but am a little nervous about the safety hazard.

 

[mjbphotos]

You mentioned isolation - how MUCH isolation are you looking for? (assume it is sound getting out, not incoming sound you are worried about). Wiht 8 ft of space, a floating floor and similar ceiling are going to make a low ceiling. I'd forget the isolation aspect, there are a few threads here telling folks to stuff the between-joists spaces with pink stuff - sound transmits thorugh the wood joists, too. You can wrap pink stuff around airducts and heating pipes.

 

[Tadpui]

Why do you want a ceiling so bad? Why not do clouds.. I mean A ceiling wood be nice but...tearing up drywall at 3 am to fix a pipe really sucks..I've been there. Can i ask what you have in mind for the floor? I'm working on my garage studio myself and am considering acid staining the floor but am a little nervous about the safety hazard.

For any sort of isolation from the master bedroom immediately overhead, I'll need mass, damping, and decoupling for the ceiling. Clouds will be nice to tame the finished room but they won't buy me anything towards isolation. But yeah, I'm just really hesitant to put drywall up there knowing that a single blown supply or drain pipe would cost major bucks to repair. I don't see much of a way around it though.

For the floor, I think I'm going to go with something similar to what RecordingMaster did in his build thread and use either vinyl or wood plank flooring. I just think it looks nice, and it'll be a nice lively surface to help keep the room alive amid the corner traps, wall treatments, and ceiling cloud.

 

[Tadpui]

You mentioned isolation - how MUCH isolation are you looking for? (assume it is sound getting out, not incoming sound you are worried about). Wiht 8 ft of space, a floating floor and similar ceiling are going to make a low ceiling. I'd forget the isolation aspect, there are a few threads here telling folks to stuff the between-joists spaces with pink stuff - sound transmits thorugh the wood joists, too. You can wrap pink stuff around airducts and heating pipes.

I've been going back and forth on how much isolation. Primarily I'm looking to be able to sing without anybody being able to hear me. Next priority is to be able to blast loud guitar amps and have it be substantially attenuated outside of the room. I don't have any delusions about it being silent outside the studio door with my 30W tube combo on full tilt, but I don't like to entertain the neighbors while I play.

Next priority would be environmental low-frequency noise from outside the house. One neighbor is a chronic lawn mower, the other has a Harley. I live near the airport, and also the neighborhood kids like to frolic in the streets. Put it all together and it's not as noisy as it seems like it should be. But still, I like the idea of not having to record around my neighbor's mowing schedules or dodge the 7:00 flight to Timbuktu.

I should probably get an SPL meter and collect some worst-case scenarios and see if it's reasonable to expect those to be isolated from my studio. Honestly, even having simple normal walls will isolate me from a good deal of that outdoor noise just due to the location of my potential studio space in my house. It faces the back yard, away from the street, it's fully underground. The current weak link is a single-pane basement window that will be outside of the studio space when I get a wall up. That damn window might as well be made of paper.

 

[miroslav]

.... or dodge the 7:00 flight to Timbuktu.

As long is it's not a Malaysia flight....you'll be OK.

A couple of suggestions.
Record more at night...no lawn mowing, no kids outside, less traffic noise.
Put the mics closer to the sources, and have nice, hot signals from the source....that will increase your S/N ratio with all the ambient noise.
Don't be a wanker....just sing, who cares if they hear you.
Since you're building out an empty space....and you have a bit of room, maybe toss an decent size iso-box/closet type setup at one end, and really soundproof the crap out of that, for your guitar amps when playing loud, and for your singing when you feel bashfull... ....and that way the rest of the space won't eat up as much $$$ trying to soundproof it, and you can focus more on making it acoustically balanced for mixing and the not-so-loud tracking.

I've got three 6' windows on my studio walls, and while I'm in a quiet neighborhood with a good amount of yard between me and them....bright now I've got one neighbor building a house about 100 yards away, so the 'dozers are out there digging away during the day, and then of course, on the weekends when I like to do a lot of tracking, everyone else is cutting grass....so I tend to wait until the evening before tracking, and I may do other studio things before that if there's too much noise/outside distractins....either way, the amount of outside noise, even though audible to my ears, never makes it into my tracks, so I've not ever had to avoid recording during the day, I just try to plan it for the quieter times.....oh, and no one has every complained about my playing, and I even track loud guitars at 3AM sometimes.

 

[Tadpui]

As long is it's not a Malaysia flight....you'll be OK.

A couple of suggestions.
Record more at night...no lawn mowing, no kids outside, less traffic noise.
Put the mics closer to the sources, and have nice, hot signals from the source....that will increase your S/N ratio with all the ambient noise.
Don't be a wanker....just sing, who cares if they hear you.
Since you're building out an empty space....and you have a bit of room, maybe toss an decent size iso-box/closet type setup at one end, and really soundproof the crap out of that, for your guitar amps when playing loud, and for your singing when you feel bashfull... ....and that way the rest of the space won't eat up as much $$$ trying to soundproof it, and you can focus more on making it acoustically balanced for mixing and the not-so-loud tracking.

I've got three 6' windows on my studio walls, and while I'm in a quiet neighborhood with a good amount of yard between me and them....bright now I've got one neighbor building a house about 100 yards away, so the 'dozers are out there digging away during the day, and then of course, on the weekends when I like to do a lot of tracking, everyone else is cutting grass....so I tend to wait until the evening before tracking, and I may do other studio things before that if there's too much noise/outside distractins....either way, the amount of outside noise, even though audible to my ears, never makes it into my tracks, so I've not ever had to avoid recording during the day, I just try to plan it for the quieter times.....oh, and no one has every complained about my playing, and I even track loud guitars at 3AM sometimes.

I appreciate the input, thanks Miro.

Even with my current setup where the single-pane basement windows are the weak link, my neighbors say that they can only hear me playing guitar if they're outside. Usually it's their dogs that hear it first. So I take it that simply finishing this space with normal walls/ceilings will pretty much eliminate any leakage of even the loudest things out into the neighborhood.

I have some restrictive times when I can record now because my wife and I work totally opposite schedules (I'm a weekday 9-5, she's a weekend night shift). Not a lot of time alone at home to make it unbearably loud inside the house. Those weekend afternoons while she's sleeping are some prime mixing time, so I'd like to be able to at least mix at normal volumes and not rock the bedroom directly overhead. She says that she doesn't mind, but it's just a weird thing of mine. It's akin to the "dance like nobody's watching" thing. I just want more isolation from the rest of the house, and I don't think that a standard basement finish is going to do the trick.

I've studied up enough to know pretty much what I want, but this duct work just scares me. I don't want to throw money at a special build focused on isolation and have the pipes and ducts totally defeat the purpose.

 

[JimmyS1969]

By the way, those single-pane basement windows are easily replaced with vinyl double paned ones for under $100. If you desire to have fresh air in the room, then just upgrade to those. Otherwise just close them in and forget about it.

How old is this house? If you do not have galvanized water lines and old drainage pipes you are not likely to have any repair issues anytime soon. It is quite easy to see possible issues with poor sweating of copper pipe joints or leaking of PVC or ABS drain pipes. If all looks good then close that stuff off and don't worry about it until you have to. In your current placement you have to deal with what it is you have in the structure you have.

I have the same in my room. Well, rooms. My drum room has an open ceiling filled with insulation and ductwork covered in cloth. It also has the furnace in it. I make sure to shut that thing off before recording. The control room has all that but covered in drywall. I also make sure no water is used in the house while tracking.

I however do not personally have an issue with isolation. Most external noises are so minimal in my neighborhood that it doesn't matter. Once my daughter had a temper tantrum upstairs during a vocal tracking and it actually made it on the recording. lol

 

[pegger]

Without going into a total re-do/re-route of all your hvac and plumbing, there's not much you can do with the basement. I just finished mine, and although I would have liked to get rid of all those things, I realized it is not feasible and I will have to live with it.

I boxed out my hvac ducts with wood framing, then stuffed safe'n'sound around it to fill the voids. Then drywall around them.
The rest of the basement ceiling is the of the drop ceiling tiles type, with safe'n'sound filled in between every joist cavity. I put 6" of the stuff in the cavity, and left an air gap for circulation between the subfloor and the top of the safe'n'sound.

I then installed doors (solid wood, not hollow core) for the room. floors are still bare concrete, but will be finished with click-lock vinyl planks. 6" bass traps in all corners, and moderate reflection treatment on the walls, and I gotta admit, the sound is pretty decent in my room.

As far as sound transmission into/out of the room...anyone in the basement hears what I am doing in there just fine. The kids and dog running up and down the stairs is audible in my room, so that's always going to be a problem for the foreseeable future. However on the main floor, with my full band playing at live volume, the sound is about equal to a loud radio playing in the next room. not unbearable at all. My wife often naps on the couch upstairs while the boys are over making noise.

I guess it's all in perspective right? For your situation, perhaps the suggestion of iso boxes is a good one. I prefer the close mic method with higher s/n ratio myself. It is going to be almost impossible to completely block sound transmission in a home basement studio without massive construction costs and without chewing up your valuable space with isolation construction techniques.

Look forward to hearing about the solutions you come up with.

 

[pegger]

I have the same in my room. Well, rooms. My drum room has an open ceiling filled with insulation and ductwork covered in cloth. It also has the furnace in it. I make sure to shut that thing off before recording.

And this was a problem for me too. Obviously you want air circulation, so vents are required. But they are highly audible in recording, so make sure you flick the thermostat to off before working....and don't forget to flick it back to on when you are done!!

And keep in mind that most building codes require you to make all electrical junctions accessible (ie: no buried junctions behind drywall), so plan your electrical carefully.

The more I think about it the more I realize that I had a lot of other things to consider too....
In my location, the summer/winter temperature variations are huge. So in summer, I want more AC cold air forced upstairs and less in the basement. But in winter, I want to equalize the warm air circulation in both upstairs and downstairs. I have manual adjusted baffles in each HVAC supply duct coming off the trunk, which allows me to partially open or close the air flow to the line. I had to make sure that these were accessible all year round, so that's why I went with the drop ceiling tiles...

Hope this info is proving somewhat useful to your planning.

Cheers

 

[JimmyS1969]

and don't forget to flick it back to on when you are done!!

I did that once in winter. Brr...

 

[Tadpui]

Hey thanks for the input guys.

I talked to a contractor today and we went over the room and the requirements. We're going to try the ol' room-within-a-room thing. Putting in decoupled ceiling joists for the internal room's ceiling, and going with a double wall on the only non-concrete-backed wall, and moving that wall to where the drainage pipes will be inside it instead of in the ceiling. Separate split heat pump for climate control and isolation from the rest of the house's HVAC. It's not the perfect setup that I had in mind, but it'll be so much better than what I've got. Actual walls that can be treated! Corners to be trapped! A ceiling to be..uh...clouded!

Any last words or suggestions, or "oh no don't do that!!!" kinds of advice?

 

[mjbphotos]

Guess you've got a good budget!
Just make the room as large as you can, and not square.

 

[Tadpui]

Guess you've got a good budget!
Just make the room as large as you can, and not square.

Yeah, I have the good fortune of having this be a part of finishing the rest of the basement. So I'm plunking down the coin for the project in the first place, and the added expense of the studio space is kind of a drop in the bucket in the bigger picture of the entire basement. My house has increased in value by a fair margin since I bought it 12 years ago, so I feel like that offsets the cost of improving the house. Plus adding 2 new bedrooms will further increase the value of the house.

Good advice on the squareness of the room. That's been a worry, for sure. As it stands now, it's close: about 17' x 16' x 8'. I'll be losing about a foot or 18" on one wall to accomodate the drainage pipes. Guess I'd better go measure again, I can't remember if that's coming out of the 17' dimension or the 16' one. It'd suck to end up with a 16x16x8 room! Ouch!