Isolating desk with monitors from the floor - to reduce SL

Hi all I've posted recently about my new house and the chipboard flooring it has in the first floor bedroom where I'm setting up my music gear. I have now had a decent carpet underlay and carpet put down to help with footfall, and the last thing to do is try to isolate the unit holding my monitors from the floor as much as possible. The aim will be to reduce the amount of sound that will be heard in the living room below. I'm also hoping it will help reduce the sound reaching our neighbour. The party wall with the neighbours is actually a couple of rooms away. But it would seem that the way the houses were built, flanking is a bit of an issue. When the neighbours move their chairs in their tiled kitchen, the sound is really loud in any part of our house - including the music room...... Here's a basic diagram of the desk: The unit is made of 18mm MDF. I'd estimate there'll be around 300 - 400 records. The monitors are Event ASP8s and are reasonably heavy. They will be mounted on MoPads....most probably in a position where they will be slanted pointing downward. I intend to follow advice from another thread and add more weight to the top of the monitors to make the MoPads compress more and be more effective, although I'm not certain if this is so important if I'm slanting them - seeing as there will be less foam to compress. I've marked in red the areas where the unit meets the floor and where it meets the long horizontal piece of MDF which holds the equipment. My ideas: I have 8 strips of Auralex foam - the type they use on the bottom of their gramma isolation risers (See: http://www.dolphinmusic.co.uk/product/3 ... e-.html/?u tm_source=google&utm_medium=shopping&utm_campaign=base ) I thought about making a some kind of platform at the floor.....either a length of MDF sat on top of some of the foam, which the unit could then stand on. Or a similar design, but rather than using a whole length of MDF, using strips of MDF the same width and length as the foam strips to make kind of feet to put under the three sections of the unit which meet the floor. I then thought about maybe doing the same at the top end. Where the unit meets the large horizontal piece of MDF, I could put another horizontal piece of MDF (to the same width of the main unit - so that there are now two horizontal pieces of MDF - and the sandwich some of the foam between them. So my main question is whether it is worth doing both these things, or only one of them (because doing both is overkill)? Or am I wasting my time completely with both ideas?!?!? I also wondered if anyone could think of a better solution either utilizing the materials I have - or bringing other things into the equation such as neoprene, isolation coils/springs, etc. etc. One last thing, as you can see in the diagram, the monitors themselves are actually at the end of the unit. The diagram is not to scale, and in reality the main unit is a little longer.....but at least half on the monitors are still overhanging with nothing beneath them - like they are in the picture. From a sound isolation POV - is this a bad thing? Would I do well to put in some kind of support? Or is it the case that the less things making contact with the floor the better? Sorry for the long thread and a huge thanks to anyone who can help. Cheers Max

Bump?

Um, I don't believe isolating your monitors is going to help much. It may help with the vibrations due to the desks mechanical coupling, but the flanking issue won't change. Read Rod's book again about isolation. Or spend several weeks reading about it on this forum. There is a ton of great information here. Steve

I guess the biggest question here is: how loud are you? At what level are you playing those monitors, normally? The next question would be details on the construction of the house itself. I'm suspecting that the issue probably isn't related much to your desk, or the way it sits on the floor (although it might be), but rather to the way the house is built, and to all the flanking that is already going on. It doesn't matter how well you isolate your monitors from the desk, and desk from the floor, if it turns out that the real issue is simply airborne sound making the room walls/floor/ceiling vibrate, and the structure of the building is transmitting that to the rest of the house. To get a rough idea, how about if you stack up several thick folded bath towels under each monitor, getting you several inches of isolation, and see if that makes any difference at all in the level that you hear in the rest of the house. If your towels are soft and fluffy enough then they should do a reasonable job of decoupling the speakers from the desk. If that makes a noticeable difference, then it is worth exploring the decoupling idea more, but if you can't really hear any difference "downstairs" with and without the towels (playing the same song at the same level, of course), they decoupling isn't your problem. - Stuart -

"The party wall with the neighbours is actually a couple of rooms away. But it would seem that the way the houses were built, flanking is a bit of an issue. When the neighbours move their chairs in their tiled kitchen, the sound is really loud in any part of our house - including the music room......" Wooden floors and wooden joists? This party wall you refer to, have you climbed into the attic to verify that it is in fact a fire rated party wall that goes at least to the roof if not in fact a full barrier that has the roof butted into it? Good chance if sound is traveling that far, your issue may well be the overhead ceiling area, but that flanking you are dealing with is going to be difficult, if not impossible to overcome with simple methods.