Floating floor Ireland

Hi Guys, Im in the early stages of planning my studio. I have a large barn that I am going to convert. The walls are 6 inch concrete block plastered on both sides. There is a powerfloated concrete floor and the roof is corrugated steel. I am planning to record everything from singer songwriter to soft rock, but nothing harder than that. I am situated in the country with the nosiest thing near by a dog kennel, but its also insulated so the dogs are not that loud. Nearest neighbour is around 100meters away. My question in regards to the floating floor was, after I insulate around the existing walls can I use 4 inch thick hard insulation to float my floor instead of using springs and ply? http://www.insulation.kingspan.com/ireland/tf73.htm . This is what we use when installing infloor heat, we just pour a coat of floor screed over the top of it. This leads me to my second question, is in floor heat recommended for a studio or not? Also do I have to run any ducting for cabling in my sub floor? Thanks in advance for your help.. Fra

welcome! could you update your profile to include your location. why do you want to float the floor? it sounds like a room-within-a-room approach would suffice. you could add in-floor radiant heating but you should also consider cooling and fresh air exchange.

Hi Glenn thanks for your quick reply. I was going to float the floor in order to reduce any chance of comb filtering happening if the sound passed through from the floor of the live room to the control room. My idea was to insulate the existing floor then add a layer of floor screed then build the stud walls on top of that again. Im not sure if that is the right way to go about it. Another reason is thermal reasons the original floor is very cold! In building a room in a room it all sharing the same floor? Also what do you recommend for a beginning ceiling height? And in terms of design I quite like Johns "corner control room" design, http://johnlsayers.com/Recmanual/Titles/Plans.htm do you know if the ratios for this design? Thanks again for your help.

the room-within-a-room would share the same floor. based on the manufacturer details it might not be suitable for supporting the walls and inner ceiling but you could decouple the walls and ceiling assemblies separately and use that floating floor product plus some additional mass like 2x 25mm MDF layers and a finished floor to top. in most cases though the shared concrete floor wouldn't be the main issue if its earth-damped until your isolation levels are very high and the sounds levels are high. on the corner CR, the room size would be relative to the overall space available and sized to be a proper room volume with some consideration for approximate ratio. depending on the room heights within the space, you could run the wiring overhead along with HVAC etc. or you could run wiring in the floor as needed.

Great Glenn thanks for your help with that! Will give me enough to plan on for now. Im sure I'll be back with some more questions soon.