2. home-theater
  3. 191511-185661

Sound insulation advice for home theater room in middle of the house?

I'm an interior designer working on a house where the client wants to create a movie room. I need some recommendations for the materials to soundproof the walls.

Part of the complication is that they want 2 doors into the room (1 on each side - see image below), as well as a movable partition that separates the movie room from the family room. According to my limited knowledge, this makes MLV (my first choice) basically useless? Due to the number of openings?

What would you recommend, for a midrange budget, to outfit the walls (and possibly the doors) with sound reduction materials?

They're not planning to blast movies at full volume, but they do want to invest into soundproofing so they don't need to always worry about disturbing the kids or guests.

Also, the middle of the house is a vast open space, and it's very "echo-ey". We had 5 people trying to have a conversation, and it was almost unbearable. Any recommendations for making it more tolerable from audio quality perspective, while keeping to a clean and minimal look?

If anyone is willing to do a personal consultation (20-30-minute Zoom call to go over the floorplan and make recommendations, more for my own education / curiosity, but also to make a nice final product for the client) - I'm willing to pay a reasonable amount.

Thank you in advance!

nathank9000

Showing 1 response by terry9

terry9
2,354 posts
 

I've done two rooms in my own house. In the home theatre, I built a wall on each side of 2x4 frames and filled the interstices with playground sand. Same for the ceiling. It was highly successful.

For the purpose built music room I used Quietrock 545, which is a 5 layer drywall with a sheet metal core. Far easier to build, but not as effective. Still, good enough for the purpose and my usual listening levels.

You want two things: first, you want the walls to be stiff so that they do not flex and interfere with the music. Second, you want to prevent sound from escaping. The two goals can both be met, but they require considerations like my solutions.

As for a terrible room, you can always change the dimensions. The scientific work has been done by the famous acoustician Cox, who published the results about 20 years ago. The research is on the website of the School of Acoustics at the University of Salford, UK. As for construction, the people at Quietrock are very, very helpful. Also, there was a reasonably good article published about 6 years ago in Stereophile or Absolute Sound, can't remember which.

Good luck - glad your client had the good sense to hire someone like yourself.

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