Soundproofing for Home theatre

I got Rod blessing for posting here so here it is. The Plan : My father wants to built his own home theatre in his basement, just under the master bedroom. He wants to be able to listen to music and films (loud ) late at night without disturbing my mother sleeping upstairs. Here's the deal : He thinks he will achieve that by placing batts of mineral wool, the itchy pink stuff in the basement ceiling then installing an acoustical suspended ceiling, made of tiles. Like we see in most offices. He'd put batts in the walls then put a layer of sheetrock or whatever you guys call it. Carpet on the floor. To the rescue : Now i,ve been reading here from time to time for a year or so and, although i am not even close to be a construction or acoustic experts to say the least :wink: , i'm pretty sure what he wants to do won't work... right ? :? The facts : The space available for this is 3.66M X 6.1M with a 2.5M high ceiling. Floor is concrete. Three of the four walls have sheetrock on them, these are the walls wich are against the basement concrete. The last wall is a divison wich split the basement in two. We can still see the wood structure of that wall from the future home theatre point of view. There are some pipes in between the ceiling structure here an there. Here's a very rough sketch, my appologies to anyone who thinks it's ugly. :) At this point, where should we start ?, what should we do ?. My understandable lack of confidence in this aera makes me shy about posting what i think we should do. I hope this is clear enough though, but feel free to flame me if you think it isn't so. :roll:

Aloha and welcome to the forum, Jenny :D First of all, kudos to you for posting before building! For your benefit, please be sure to check out the "sticky's" at the top of each forum (Design, Construction, Acoustics, etc) as there is a wealth of information to be had there, as well as here: http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5670 http://www.saecollege.de/reference_material/index.html http://ethanwiner.com/acoustics.html#rfz Chances are, many of your questions now and those about to come up in the future have already been asked and answered. It's just a matter of looking for them, as they will eventually turn up. Using the "Search" function will also be an invaluable tool. As a side note, when you do find answers to your questions, be sure to collect, arrange and file them in one place that you'll be able to locate again, as at some point you will have alot of information to sift through. And finally, any chance you could: Edit your profile to include your location, please? This is very important, because this is a worldwide resource, and as such, material costs and availability vary widely. For example, masonry is cheaper than gypsum in some parts of the globe, whereas it's the exact opposite in other regions. This will really come in handy two or three posts down the road. (It's also part of the forum guidelines.) Thanks! :wink: More later, Aloha 8)