As my room shares the same concrete floor as a few other studios and a couple of very loud bands i'm getting a lot of noise travelling through the floor. I'm going to attempt a floating floor to rectify this.
Are you SURE you want to do that? You might want to read this before you embark on such a huge, complicated, expensive endevour... :
http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... f=2&t=8173
Also, it looks like your room is already built as a proper "room within a room", so you don't need to build any more in there! If you did, you'd actually make the low frequency isolation WORSE, not better, as you'd be creating 3-leaf systems. If you want to get two rooms out of that place, then the logical thing to do is to split it in two right where the beam is: build a single-leaf wall on each side of the beam, then take out the beam and cut the ceilings and walls at that point. Bingo! Two rooms, properly isolated.
You should also break the connection between your room and the brick wall, now that you built a new wall there. If you built the wall correctly then it is already supporting the ceiling, so you should be able to just cut the mechanical ties where the existing walls and the ceiling were attached to the brick wall.
The landlord has previously achieved this in another room using old pallets on rubber pucks and stuffed with insulation so i'm going to give this a go.
Well, he mioght THINK he did something useful like that, but I can assure you that he actually did not. Read though that tread I linked to above, to understand why. There's nowhere near enough mass in that to make it float. all he really achieved was to build a drum: in effect, the floor became resonant system that absolutely and without any doubt messed up both the acoustics and the isolation of that room.
so i'm going to give this a go.
That would be a bad idea! There are much better ways of dealing with isolation issues. Once that are based on the science of acoustics, not what the guesses of a landlord...
(i've read up on calculating the estimated weight etc so going to give this a go and get as close as possible).
Did you also read up on how to calculate the resilience, deflection and MSM resonant frequency? What frequency will you tune your system too? What is the resilience of the rubber pucks you mentioned? How much deflection would you need on those in order to get the correct resilience? How thick would they have to be to get the correct frequency? Did you also consider the coupling of the air resonance, which is also an MSM system? With a floated floor you have to consider both springs: the pucks and the air. They are both resilient, yet have very, very different characteristics. Did you figure out both? What are the two resonant frequencies that you calculated, and how do they compare to the lowest frequency that you need to isolate? Is the higher of the two at least 1.414 times lower? How did you calculate the locations of the pucks? Did you allow for the fact that a floor is an uneven planar load, with concentrated loads in some places (point loads) and widely spread loads in other places? Did you place extra pucks at the highest load areas, and fewer at the lowest load areas, by carefully calculating the area, mass, loads and deflections on each puck? Did you allow for the fact that the loads will change as people and equipment enter and leave the room, and move around the room? Don't forget that if you got the math for even one single puck wrong, and it bottoms out or tops out, then the entire floor stops floating and it becomes a coupled system, with no isolation.... Floating a floor in real life is a lot harder than it looks on a YouTube video.
1/2" neoprene sheets aren't the cheapest so i'm hoping since the floor wont be supporting any walls etc i'll be able to space the pucks quite sparingly.
How do you know that you need 1/2" neoprene? Are you sure that is the correct thickness to get the resonant frequency that you need? Will just 1/2" give you enough deflection for the loading at each point? What type of neoprene? What resilience? Are you sure it really is Neoprene, which is a brand name, or is it just some other type of cholorprene or chlorobutadiene rubber? What type of neoprene is it (G, W or T)? What Shore hardness (durometer), and on which scale? You can't calculate how to space the pucks unless you know the characteristics of the exact type of rubber you are using. What is the shape factor of the pucks you are using?
You might want to read this, to get a better handle on the math:
http://www.earsc.com/HOME/engineering/T ... asp?SID=61
Floating a wall, floor or anything else is nowhere near as simple as it sounds. Getting it wrong is very, very easy, and getting it right by sheer luck and guessing is extremely unlikely.
If you really do need to isolate your floor in some way, I'd suggest a "drum riser" type floor is a lit easier and cheaper to do, and can be quite effective. It might even be worth your while to build a few drum riser platforms and give them away for free to those noisy bands around you: much cheaper than trying to float your own floor, and it would do wonders for improving your social standing among your new neighbors!
- Stuart -
