Hi Karen, As others have said, this is a bit more complicated and there's a lot of confusion and misinformation, some of it somewhat cynically and deliberately stirred by people with products to sell. Here's a slightly longer answer: There are two different issues: stopping sound escaping, and treating the sound qualities within the room. The latter is to do with controlling reverb and resonances to get an accurate representation of the sound coming out of the speaker. Without this you'll get peaks and troughs in the frequency spectrum along with ringing and booming at certain frequencies related to the dimensions of your room. It's a complex subject with many "silver bullet" solutions sold but this is what most things like foam tiles, bass traps and the like are for. The second issue, stopping sound escaping, is much harder. There is nothing that will "absorb" sound to stop it escaping, you simply have to have an air-tight room with very heavy duty walls, ceilings and floors. Depending on how loud you want the music to be inside, and how loud you want that sound to be on the other side (noting that bass is harder to contain), it's pretty much about how thick abd heavy your walls, ceilings and floors are. Without undertaking major construction work all you can really do is bring the weak links up to that standard. Usually that means putting on a heavier door, and trying to seal up air gaps. With floors you can make some gains by putting "barrier mat" or "mass loaded vinyl" down, completely covering the floor and sealing gaps (then put carpet on top of it). Ceilings are best treated from above, i.e. "soundproof" the upstairs floor, not your ceiling. Windows are also big leaks and depending on how serious you are, blocking them up to some extent or another is in order. Sound will, however, continue to leak through vibration along joists and pipes, and if your walls are thing stud partitions you'd be lucky to get much containment without e.g. building another, heavier set of walls inside them. If you want to contain the sound of an acoustic drumkit so that someone next door can sleep while you play, you're probably out of luck. If you're trying to reduce, but not necessarily eliminate) how audible you are next door when you're monitoring at medium volumes, or making it so that someone talking next door doesn't show up loudly on your microphone inputs, you might be in with a better chance. Sorry if this all sounds a bit negative and daunting! The point is that there are things that can be done but without doing some research it's easy to spend a lot of money on treatement that doesn't actually meet your needs. I can recommend picking up a second hand copy of Basic Home Studio Design by Paul White (editor of Sound on Sound). It's not necessarily the greatest book on the subject ever, but what it is small, clear, pragmatic and cheap, and it gives you a quick overview of all of this stuff. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Basic-Home-Studio-Design-White/dp/1860742726 I'd offer to send my old copy but I've just moved house (coincidentally to build a bigger studio) and all my books are still in boxes. Best wishes, Ben _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
