Hi chaps, looking at possibilities in regards to building a facility with shared Live Room and multiple control rooms. Need near perfect isolation between live room and separate control rooms obviously. We are considering mudbrick or double brick construction for live room walls and then independent studwalls of strawboard ala ortech for the control rooms. Control rooms will be on opposite sides of the live room and share no walls with each other.
I've attached a very rough outline to give an idea of what I mean.
Mudbick is 300x250x100 and are 13kg each
What kind of isolation should I expect for this building material?
multi room facility question
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mylesgm
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Soundman2020
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Re: multi room facility question
It's actually not so easy to get a simple answer to that question, mainly because there are so many unknowns. For example: How big is the separation between the leaves? What type and how thick will the cavity insulation be? Will the bricks be sealed and rendered on both sides or not? What types of doors and windows will you be using? Will there be separate foundations and slabs for each room, or will they all be built on the same slab? What about the roof and outer shell of the building? How do you plan to build your HVAC system? Etc. There are so many variables that it isn't possible to just plug in "100 mm thick 13kg mud brick", and get an answer of 46.187 dB isolation.
Assuming absolute best-case for everything, and very, very deep pockets to build it, you could probably expect around 70 dB of isolation, with lots of luck and assuming Murphy is in vacation when you build it. In the real world, probably more like 60 dB, assuming things go well with the build and it is designed with great care. If Murphy is having a field day with you, then more like 50's.
When you get to extreme levels of isolation (which seems to be what you are looking for), tiny things assume huge roles, and small errors can have major effects. For example, let's say a wall is designed for 70 dB isolation, but a careless bricklayer left a gap in the mortar between two bricks, and nobody noticed. That tiny little gap can cost you 10 dB of isolation, so your really expensive 70 dB wall is now no better than 60. Ditto if a carpenter forgot to install a seal under one of your doors: knock another 5 dB off. It's the tiny little mistakes like those that can add up and trash your isolation. As can "insignificant" errors in the design itself, such as specifying an air gap between the glass panes in a window as 8 cm instead of 8", or neglecting to include insulation in a wall cavity. Either of those could cost you several dB of isolation.
So the theoretical isolation you could get on paper, and the real.world actual isolation you get from the final build, could be very, very different things, depending mainly on the designers attention to detail, and the construction team's skill and dedication to following the best practices all day, every day.
So the best one can say is that you could expect somewhere between maybe 50 dB and maybe 70 dB, depending on a whole truckload of factors, with a big one being budget. As isolation needs go up, budget grows exponentially.
If you really want very high levels of isolation, then you should probably consider hiring a studio designer to at least make certain that the design itself is as good as it possibly can be and theoretically meets your design goals for isolation, then maybe also consider getting the same designer to supervise the build, on-site, to ensure that it really is built the way it was designed. You might want to send a PM to John himself, and see if he is able to take on your design right now.
That said, I'm not clear on what you mean by "double brick" construction: are you talking about building single-leaf walls that are the thickness of two bricks? Or are you talking about building two independent walls with a gap between them, as a decoupled two-leaf wall, where each leaf is one thickness of brick? If the former, then your maximum possible isolation would be around 40-something dB. If the latter, then you could hope for that "50 to 70" range.
By the way, is this going to be a complete "greenfield" build? Starting out from an empty patch of land with nothing there at all except dirt, grass and flowers? Or is this something that you want to fit into an existing building? Those are two rather different scenarios.
- Stuart -
Assuming absolute best-case for everything, and very, very deep pockets to build it, you could probably expect around 70 dB of isolation, with lots of luck and assuming Murphy is in vacation when you build it. In the real world, probably more like 60 dB, assuming things go well with the build and it is designed with great care. If Murphy is having a field day with you, then more like 50's.
When you get to extreme levels of isolation (which seems to be what you are looking for), tiny things assume huge roles, and small errors can have major effects. For example, let's say a wall is designed for 70 dB isolation, but a careless bricklayer left a gap in the mortar between two bricks, and nobody noticed. That tiny little gap can cost you 10 dB of isolation, so your really expensive 70 dB wall is now no better than 60. Ditto if a carpenter forgot to install a seal under one of your doors: knock another 5 dB off. It's the tiny little mistakes like those that can add up and trash your isolation. As can "insignificant" errors in the design itself, such as specifying an air gap between the glass panes in a window as 8 cm instead of 8", or neglecting to include insulation in a wall cavity. Either of those could cost you several dB of isolation.
So the theoretical isolation you could get on paper, and the real.world actual isolation you get from the final build, could be very, very different things, depending mainly on the designers attention to detail, and the construction team's skill and dedication to following the best practices all day, every day.
So the best one can say is that you could expect somewhere between maybe 50 dB and maybe 70 dB, depending on a whole truckload of factors, with a big one being budget. As isolation needs go up, budget grows exponentially.
If you really want very high levels of isolation, then you should probably consider hiring a studio designer to at least make certain that the design itself is as good as it possibly can be and theoretically meets your design goals for isolation, then maybe also consider getting the same designer to supervise the build, on-site, to ensure that it really is built the way it was designed. You might want to send a PM to John himself, and see if he is able to take on your design right now.
That said, I'm not clear on what you mean by "double brick" construction: are you talking about building single-leaf walls that are the thickness of two bricks? Or are you talking about building two independent walls with a gap between them, as a decoupled two-leaf wall, where each leaf is one thickness of brick? If the former, then your maximum possible isolation would be around 40-something dB. If the latter, then you could hope for that "50 to 70" range.
By the way, is this going to be a complete "greenfield" build? Starting out from an empty patch of land with nothing there at all except dirt, grass and flowers? Or is this something that you want to fit into an existing building? Those are two rather different scenarios.
- Stuart -
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mylesgm
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Re: multi room facility question
There are a lot of variables and I'm not looking for an answer for all of them. What I'm looking for is an understanding of the pros/cons of mudbrick or double brick as a wall mechanism. I'm aware windows, doors, hvac etc etc will affect the build and I'm aware that they will all work as a system and most of the time it is incredibly difficult to say what the overall reduction of spl is from one room to the next given all the variables. But!
A two leaf design.
Inner wall of the studio to be mudbrick as described above built onto a concrete slab, second wall to be a studwall of a high density material such as ortech strawboard (durrapanel) http://www.ortech.com.au/durra-panels/durra-panel. This material to be used for ceilings for each room as well. Each room is freestanding and not connected to the others except via the concrete slab upon which they all rest.
Is this an effective place to start? I know that once the layer is pierced with doors and windows, hvac there are going to be other variables but these can be managed if the wall design is effective at the start.
A two leaf design.
Inner wall of the studio to be mudbrick as described above built onto a concrete slab, second wall to be a studwall of a high density material such as ortech strawboard (durrapanel) http://www.ortech.com.au/durra-panels/durra-panel. This material to be used for ceilings for each room as well. Each room is freestanding and not connected to the others except via the concrete slab upon which they all rest.
Is this an effective place to start? I know that once the layer is pierced with doors and windows, hvac there are going to be other variables but these can be managed if the wall design is effective at the start.