Doors etc.

I'm about a couple weeks away from being done with my small personal studio build. It's time I stop procrastinating on the door situation. Here's the deal: It's a one-room studio with one entry/exit that leads to the outside world. this entry way will have 2 doors that are separated by a pretty big (4x5ft) airlock hallway of sorts. so you enter the first door and you're in this tiny little room you can barely move around in, and then you go through the next door and you're in the studio. sound isolation is key here. the rest of the studio is completely solid in that department, my only concern is the doors, and getting them sealed up nice and tight. i play LOUD. my drumset is the first thing you will see when you enter the studio. so...how crazy do i need to get with these doors? i dont want to build super doors if i dont have to. will putting this product on 1 or both of my doors be sufficient? http://www.acousticalsolutions.com/door-seal-kits i really hope so, it looks simple and relatively easy to install. i've been doing a lot of reading on these forums about the doors. i gotta say, after all the hustle and headaches that it's been already to build this studio i don't feel like spending days tracking down some obscure 1950's GM trunk rubber to put around the door, i dont feel like building a super door, i dont feel like doing much of anything really i'm very tired and just want something i can hand to my contractor and say "here you go, make it work". i've heard people mention this product on this site but i want to know if anyone here has actually used it and can vouch for it? are there any other products that will do the same job and be just as easy as placing an order online? thanks so much. carl bantam

Hi Carl. Welcome! And Merry Christmas, too! Please read the forum rules for posting (click here). You seem to be missing a couple of things! :) In answer to your question, it's impossible to say. Seals are critical to door isolation, yes, and without good seals you won't get isolation: that's guaranteed. However, even the best seals in the world won't help if you don't already have the rest of the isolation story in place. Insufficient mass, for example, will leave you just as poorly isolated as having no seals. The typical doors found in most homes, for example, often just consist of a layer of very thin plywood (pr other similar wood) on each side of an empty air space, with a light frame around the edge. That's practically worthless as a studio door, especially where drums are involved, and even a pair of those would be useless. On the other hand, a pair of massive, thick, heavy solid-core doors, mounted on suitable heavy-duty hinges, and with good quality automatic closers and good seals, will go a very long way to keeping drum sounds out of the rest of the house. However, even then that's only part of the solution. Even with a pair of fantastically massive doors, if you don't also have the proper two-leaf isolation structure around the rest of the room, then you'd be wasting your time and money. For example, if you only have typical 2x4 framed walls with 1/2" drywall on each side, then there's no point at all in going for massive doors and expensive seals. Ditto if your HVAC silencers are not up to much, or your electrical system was not installed and sealed correctly for high isolation, or any number of other possibilities. Since you didn't tell us anything at all about that, we can't tell you what you need to complete the doors correctly. But to summarize: Doors are just an extension of the walls they are part of, so your inner door has to be consistent with your inner-leaf, and your outer-leaf door has to be consistent with your outer leaf. As a typical example: If your inner-leaf is 2 layers of 5/8" fire-rated drywall with Green Glue in between, then your inner-leaf door needs to have a surface density of at least 30kg/m2 if you want it to be effective. If the leaf has 3 layers of drywall (instead of just 2), then the door needs to be more like 45kg/m2 surface density. Likewise, If the MSM cavity in your wall is 8" deep, then the air gap between the two doors needs to be at least 12" deep. Etc. The goal is to maintain the same consistency as for the rest of the wall, and even to improve on it, since doors are always the weak point in any studio. So if you can provide more information about how your studio was built, details of the walls, floor, and ceiling construction, how you did your HVAC system, how you did your electrical system, your isolation goals (dBC, preferably), and also photos of everything, then we can give you a better answer. - Stuart -