Sound Deadening Board

So, the stinky "sound board" that you can purchase from your local Home Depot - is it any more effective than drywall at reducing sound transmission? I cut my main room down and built a drum room. At the advice of a person with some studio construction experience, I built my single wall partition of 1/2" drywall, 1/2" sound deadening board, 2 x 4's and thick pink insulation (single partition design for space reasons), 1/2" sound deadening board, then 1/2" drywall. The isolation is pretty decent, but I fear I may have made the wrong choice by using sound deadening board rather than 5/8" drywall in the layers. The damage is already done, so any suggestions for next time would be great. Should I have done the double drywall instead? Thanks, Matt

The "sound board" of which you speak is a waste of money. You can achieve better results spending less money on more of the "regular drywall" stuff. Also, what you've described is a single-frame two-leaf coupled assembly. While the two layers on each side (leaf) is better than a single layer on each side, you would have spent a lot less money and had better results mounting 2 or 3 layers of the "regular drywall" stuff on each side of a decoupled frame (either a 2x6 frame with 2x4 staggered studs on 12" centers, or a 2x4 frame on 16" centers using resilient channel on one side) with insulation in the cavity. Even better is true double frame.

Thank you for the reply. Yes, being that space was more of a concern than total isolation, I elected to stay single partition. Lesson learned the hard way, I suppose.