egg crates

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SpotlightKid83 said:
Now this is for real...
How about that foam that they put below the carpet, but against the wall?? (but like an inch thick)
or sheets of styrofoam like the ones sold at arts & crafts stores??
Both varying degrees of useless..... an inch of "carpet foam" isn't really dense enough to do much and styrofoam is much more reflective than it is absorptive.....
 
People just need to realize that you can't treat a control room for $100. Not gonna fuckin happen. So start saving for some OC703 and do it right.


Egg crates! Gimme a break. :rolleyes:
 
Styrofoam is utterly useless!
But go ahead, make the same mistakes I already have :D :rolleyes:

There should be a sticky of useless, though often used materials, people will try to improve the acoustics of their rooms with.

  1. carpetted walls
  2. egg crates
  3. stryrofoam
  4. auralex alone

I can vouch for the relative uselessness of 2/4 of these...
Anyone?
 
cellardweller said:
There should be a sticky of useless, though often used materials, people will try to improve the acoustics of their rooms with.
I'll add another one to the list which seems pretty popular among the rookies: cork panels.

G.
 
question444 said:
They are the thicker paper-type. 1 square foot pieces. I just have heard of this used before and the guy I got them from was apparently using them for soundproof. Wanted to ask some know-it-alls whether they really even do anything before I go to the trouble of putting them up. I do have A LOT of thick grey foam pieces too that he gave me. I am not building a studio or anything, just trying to make our practice place a little better. Thanks.
Soundproofing and room treatment are two different things. You CAN use egg crates to help soundproof a rehearsal space, but it's only effective if the crates are then covered with cloth. For room treatment, they're pretty much useless.
 
MadAudio said:
Soundproofing and room treatment are two different things.


True


MadAudio said:
You CAN use egg crates to help soundproof a rehearsal space, but it's only effective if the crates are then covered with cloth.

Absolutely not true.

MadAudio said:
For room treatment, they're pretty much useless.


Again, true
 
HangDawg said:
Absolutely not true.
Hate to dispute you, but I've done it. Also I said help soundproof, not soundproof entirely. Also I'm not talking for recording purposes.
 
MadAudio said:
Hate to dispute you, but I've done it. Also I said help soundproof, not soundproof entirely. Also I'm not talking for recording purposes.


I can't see a piece of cardboard covered in cloth doing anything to stop the transmission of sound. Not anything worth the risk of the fire hazard you'd create by doing so.
 
I apologize if I'm thread-jacking...

So what IS the most inexpensive way to "soundproof" a small area? Well, not necessarily soundproof but diminsh the sound being heard from outside the room? I have a large closet that is perfect for a vocal booth (literally, it's a box...and it's seperated from everything, it's awesome). But I want to absorb some sound as to not disrupt the upstairs neighbor (even though the closest is completley isolated from the neighbor). Anything?

Also, what's a good way to diminsh outdoor noise? I have a nice-sized window in my "control room" that I would like to cover to supress the sound of nearby traffic.

I'm not looking for the best possible solution, just one that is good, and CHEAP. :)
 
Nutdotnet said:
So what IS the most inexpensive way to "soundproof" a small area? I'm not looking for the best possible solution, just one that is good, and CHEAP.
There's no such thing............ there simply is no "cheap" method for soundproofing... the laws of physics don't give a damn about your budget.... mass and specialized isolation construction techniques are what's required to soundproof an area.

Sound is very much like water, if a room (or a small area) is not water-tight, it's not soundproof... and you can't make a room "sorta water-proof." So think about an area you want to soundproof, then consider what it would cost to make it waterproof.... you'll see very quickly that it's not a cheap process.
 
Nut,

Bruce is absolutely right, but just so you don't feel totally left out in the cold, I'll opine the three basic principles behind decent sound proofing and leave it to you to see if you can come up with creative, cheap ways of implementing them:

Mass: No I don't mean going to chuch and praying for soundproofing :). I mean mass as in heft. In general, the more mass (the heavier the wall) you put between the sound source and the ears, the more sound will be blocked.

Air gapping: Get some air between a couple of non-connected or damp-connected blocking masses and your isolation will go up. This is very analogous to thermal insulation where double-pane glass insulates much better than single-pane, even if the single pane glass is much thicker. But just like thermal insulation - even more so, in fact - in sound insulation any connections between the two surfaces will act to carry the sound across the gap, greatly negating the effectiveness of the air gap barrier.

Rigitidy: Nothing to do with Levitra. This rigitidy deals with making sure that all hard connections in the barrier wall are solid and will tend to not vibrate when hit with sound. For an extremely simple example a rattling window will be louder on the outside than one that is pretty solid. The same principle applies to all structues in the sound barrier, though.

Any scheme you can come up with that helps acomplish those three basic principles can help you. And there are ways to do it "on the cheap" with existing rooms and common building materials from Home Depot. These ways will be far from professional grade effectiveness and will still cost a few bucks and a few man hours, but there are semi-pro effective levels in between silly egg crates and professional studio design.

One caution, though. The more you insulate your room sonically, the more you insulate it in every other way too. Make sure you have a decent air circulation/ventalation/HVAC system; otherwise a sonically well-insulated room can get real stale and muggy real quick, especially when adding all the electronic recording and amplification gear - no to mention bodies - that are part of a project studio environment.

In my very first studio space (shared with a buddy), we did a pretty good job of making the room much quieter on its outside, except for all the sound leakage out the vents of the home's forced-air heating and cooling system, which we had no control over at the time. But that success in sound isolation also managed to make that room get several degrees warmer than the rest of the house once we put a couple of bodies and a couple of guitar amps in there and fired up all the tape decks and amps. As we had no seperate zone control of the HVAC for that room, it made it not the most comfortable place in the world in which to compose and record music.

G.
 
Hey thanks for the information and advice. I'm fully well aware that making a room soundproof is NOT cheap; I was just curious as to if it was possible to make a room "quieter". All I'm going to be using it for is vocals.

So mass? What if I added mass on the outside of the closet? The cloest has area above it that could be used as storage...I could add mass on top through the use of???
 
jamaaljay said:
Brittany Spears Actually Said that?
I found it on a website ... I think so. :)

EDIT - I assume it will have been from when she was 16 and had the geographical knowledge of, say, George W. Bush. :D
 
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