Whether to Float a Basement Floor

[Phyl]

I'm in the embryonic stages of planning a basement home studio. The studio will consist of a control room, live room, drum room, vocal booth, and a separate room for amps. The basement has concrete walls, floors and a 8' ceiling which is already sheetrocked.

I don't want to cut any corners when it comes to sound islolation but I don't want to do something if it doesn't make sense either.

My question concerns the concrete floor in the basement. I used the search function and read a number of posts on the topic, but still don't understand why it's important to do anything other than put down some tile or carpet. I've seen posts describing floating a new floor using pucks, underlayment, etc.

What are the reasons behind doing this?

1 - Is is related to room reverberation?

2 - Is it related to isolated the various rooms?

Thanks.

 

[darnold]

Its for isolation purposes. The only reason why you would do this is if you were building every single wall, including the ceiling to be floating to. Meaning there is absolutely no solid contact between one room to the next.

Its the best form of isolation.

Why do double walls and double ceilings when your going to have bass transfer through the floor anyway?

Building a floatin room is literally disconnected the room from the outside. Its very very expensive to do a floating floor. I believe its like 10 grande for a 10x16 or something similiar.

The floor in my studio is floated i think 6 inches. So it might be possible this is adding a little extra bass trapping but probably not much. It is a floating room and it is pretty darn isolated. the only thing that has problems is the windows but it still does a great job.

Plus you dont want to make any mistakes if your really going to go all the way and not cut corners. You probably dont want your floor caving it in a couple of years.

Danny

 

[Phyl]

When you estimate $10K for a 10 x 16, I assume you are talking about doing a floating concrete floor; I'd be more likely to do the other kind of floor where you float wood runners on neoprene pucks, cover it with underlayment, and then put down Pergo or something similar.

I think I understand now why some folks say they are going to forgo the floating floor and just put in a drum riser; they are trying to keep the drums from leaking into the adjoining rooms through the floor.