John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

How deep or thick do walls need to be for proper Isolation? Like 1 foot? More, less?

Thanks

Mongoo

From http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2665

Read the material here:

http://www.saecollege.de/reference_material/index.html

to avoid asking mostly redundant questions

Mongoo,

“proper isolation” is in the ear of the beholder, so to speak; this depends on several factors you’ve not specified; things like how loud (and what instruments) you play, how close your neighbors are, what the average, minimimum and maximum outdoor noise level is, what your local noise ordinances are, what time of day you intend to use the rooms, etc -

With under a foot of total thickness, you can get around STC 70 with careful construction using double 2x4 stud frames and 5 total layers of drywall - beyond that, your doors and windows and ceiling will all have to work really hard to keep up… Steve

I'm not concerend with my neighbors at all. I'm more concerned with recording in two rooms at once. Is that done often or is it either all tracked in one room or all tracked one at a time?

Yeah, that's the OTHER reason for good isolation; it's really nice to be able to track drums and other instruments simultaneously, without having crosstalk between tracks - this also lets you listen to what the drums will sound like on tape through the speakers, instead of having to make multiple test recordings and play them back to see what they sound like without the drums bleeding through the walls -

In any case, the physics are the same - between any two areas, you want mass, air, mass - the air should have insulation in it, but NEVER more than 2 leaves of mass. Do a search here on m-a-m for some reading on this... Steve