Floating Floors/Walls for Garage conversion

[loman]

Hello, this is my first post. I have be reading the forums for a while. It's nice to be part of this community.

I am in the process of designing the conversion of the third car bay in my garage to a studio. My garage floor is concrete. The room will measure 10 X 12 and I will be building a room within a room per the SAE website (great site!) directions. Given the small size of the room, I am contemplating making the whole thing a control room. My productions are computer/sampler based and only bass, guitar, and vocals are recorded live. I would love to put an isolation both in for recording the live instruments but the room is a little small. My questions for the group are:

Given the size of my room should I worry about floating the floor? I know this is the optimal practice.

If I float the floor, how do I attach the walls, given that constuction dictates minimal use of screws and nails, because they are conduits for sound escaping?

Opinions on neoprene vs auralex's u-boats for floating floors, given the necessary 15-20% compression of the material for optimal isolation.

If I have any misinformation here please let me know, this is my first attempt at this. Thank you for helping me do this the right way the first time.

[Jai]

welcome,

Float the floors if you want to stop sound from going through the slab to the house. Float the floors if your neighbors are closer than 25 feet and you do not want to bother them.

Building the walls on your floated floor is not special. The fasteners and screws go right through your bottom plate into the floated floor. You do not need to put neoprene (Rubber) under your walls but do float your floar on it.

The auralex U-Boats are cool. They are way expensive for what you can order from a rubber supplier. Check out the Construction Matierials page their is a great link to a company in the midwest. Shipping is not that bad and the guy, I think Tom, is really really cool. He can help get you the product you want. But beware, Just like nightfly here, he will want a total weight to be floated before telling you what you need. To figure this out do a search and find Knightfly's weight chart for sheetrock, etc. then find his calculation thing. (Real Technical Hun ) It works great and he went into detail how to determin what duro on neoprene you need.

As far as actually giving you step by step on floating the floor maybe Kase or knightfly would be better to handle this. I am in the process of floating mine and still not totally getting the big pix. I think it is right now and with help from these kats around here I have the solution. Go back to the construction page home and check out the link Floating Floors Revisited.....revisited again. This is my link to floating with diagrams. Do not pay attention to the OSB Board or matierial use, look how to put it together but then scroll down to some of the replys for what matierial.

Hope all this helps any. Good luck and post any questions,

jai
www.themixstudio.com

[loman]

Thank you Jai. I'll check out the link and the midwest rubber supplier. Thanks again.

[Aaronw]

Loman,

Here's one of the links that Steve (Knightfly) talks about the weight, and spacing of the rubber...

http://johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic ... 39&start=3

Aaron

[knightfly]

Not much time right now, but also consider this - if you're planning on your construction being there in 10 years or more, look for EPDM rubber instead of neoprene. Jeff from Auralex told me their U-boats are EPDM because it lasts more than twice as long as neoprene. It's also more expensive, which is a lot of why the U-boats seem expensive... Steve