CHEAPEST Budget way For SOUNDPROOFING a Room

Links to ALL products I recommend in the description of this video!

when i was in high school i bought a truck load of carpet foam padding to sound proof an old shop i used to practice in with an old band and we layered the whole room at least 3 times with carpet foam and hung moving blankets over all of that as well and you wouldnt believe how well it worked. we paid like a 100 bucks between 5 kids for all that and we jammed like clams while bothering anyone around us

Having worked with a very well-respected professional in this area, this guy’s recommendations are dead on! The only major thing we did differently was to add drop closers and thresholds to the doors. Note that as you sound deaden a room, you generally also insulate that room. We had to also add dedicated hvac for those rooms.

This is the first video I've seen on this subject acknowledge that $50 isn't exactly cheap for some foam and I subscribed right away. The space needs more budget conscious creators and it's a breath of fresh air to finally see recommendations people can afford. Thank you.

Have a new neighbor in my apartment building that loves to slam their front door, and the sound travels up the stairwell and into my apartment. After watching this video I put a flashlight in the hall pointed at my door and turned off all the lights in my apartment and saw light bleeding through from the bottom. Previously I thought there was 0 gap in my front door. Thanks for the tip!

The difference between deadening the sounds coming from inside a room, (echoes and such) and preventing sounds from outside coming into the room (traffic, TV, etc.) is an important distinction, that I had not considered before. Thanks for that!

I really like how practical and honest you are about the “soundproofing”. I’m a carpenter and I’ve had many clients expect pure silence on a busy street. I will be sharing this as they can hear from an expert there is no perfect sound proofing (in most scenarios)!

We converted a very large bedroom into two rooms.... one for a TV room and the other for a bedroom. We were able to completely eliminate all noise from being transferred through the common wall by making the wall 8" thick and then alternating the 2x4 studs so that the drywall on each side of the wall was never secured to the same stud as the other rooms drywall. The void formed by this approach was then filled with rubber 1" squares from cut up left over flooring material. If you scream in one room, you might here it from sound waves travelling out the door and down the hall (assuming the doors were open)... but you hear NOTHING through the walls. Now the TV room can be used at 2AM without waking the person sleeping in the bedroom.

This guy is singlehandedly keeping them red devil calking in business and helping indie musicians in the process truly a blessing

If you want to hang curtains to reduce outside noise (typically traffic), use the heaviest fabric you can find and have the curtain hang at one-quater of the the noise wavelength from the window. Assuming the centerband traffic frequency is 500 Hz, the 1/4-wavelength is just under 7 inches. Ideally, you want some extra material so the curtain is not tretched taut, but is a bit ruffled. This effectively varies the distance to the window and mitigates a wider frequency band of noise.

Caution on the moving blankets for window covering: the top fabrics are not UV stable and over time the sunlight will convert the tops to dust. They work and I use them but you will want to put some other stable fabric, like your light blocking curtain, between the moving blanket and the outside light. If you don't want the stylish moving blanket wall covering look, get some other fabric print and attach that to the moving blanket to convert it to a tapestry like in merry old medieval times.

Years ago I binge watched a bunch of seasons of 30 Rock. I happened to have my laptop connected to an old 8 channel PA system with a pair of very large house speakers and several stage monitors. The house speakers had massive 36" woofers and a folded horn passive port, and extremely large horn tweeters. It reproduced a very large range of frequencies. Somewhere along the line, one of the seasons, there must have been construction outside of the building where they filmed the series, because for the rest of that season and for at least the next one or two seasons, almost every scene involving dialog had the sound of dump trucks pulling away and shifting gears. At first it was barely noticeable, but once I noticed it, it became hard to ignore. I was able to drop a few bands on the parametric eq to help silence it, but it was always audible to some extent. I studied sound reinforcement at a community college years ago. We covered the issue of external noise and sound deadening materials, soundproifing, etc, as part of a "constructing a studio" course module. I'm surprised NBC hired sound guys who didn't account for that nose interference.

Best advice I seen on YouTube. I had a shared wall in my downtown condo between my living room and a neighbor's bedroom. Eight grand later, no noise from my sound system was heard in my neighbor's bedroom. Everything he suggests has to be done and done correctly, but the end result is blissful silence.

I am so glad this video actually uses “soundproofing” correctly. So many videos refer to acoustic treatment as soundproofing, and they’re totally different things, as you said. Thank you!

When our house was being built, I had the builder add insulation to the interior walls. I had this done for noise reduction. Noise originating in one room would then be less noticeable in adjacent rooms.

One thing to keep in mind when doing something like this, especially in houses with older A/C systems (or none) is that many houses leak the A/C return air, on purpose, via the gaps below the doors. Windows will also sometimes have small filter vents to allow for outside air to come in. If you block all this off you are effectively creating a sealed space in which to suffocate in, since no fresh oxygen can enter and displace the carbon dioxide you are expelling. Now for houses with A/Cs that have built-in outside air re-circulation this is not a concern in that the vent will provide fresh air, but the air still needs to find its way back to the A/C intake vent or you end up with overpressure in the room and no real airflow through your vent.

He’s really out here helping people reduce their heating and cooling bills

Finally a video that is realistic and honest about soundproofing. I used weather stripping along with those bottom door draft stoppers and it works very well. I have to pull the door a little harder to make sure it closes properly which also tells me the seal is tight. The biggest problem which you mentioned and no one else has is the air flow... The room can get a bit stuffy and humid since the air flow has been reduced so much.

I discovered using flat moving boxes cut to fit snug inside the window frame, fold the moving blanket around it then stuff it into your window frame.. super soundproof and will cost about 15 dollars for a standard window. Harbor Freight has cheap moving blankets and Home depot has cheap moving boxes👍

Before you seal around the door, and instead of buying moving blankets, invest in an acoustic solid core door, designed to cut down on vibration. If you're using a regular door not much will happen. The bottom line that I was taught in my acoustics class is that mass-air-mass is the best acoustic insulator. You need a thick solid outer wall lined with acoustic insulation, then an air space, then another thick wall, using resiliant channel and acoustic decoupled mounts to attach your 3/4" plywood, then 5'8' drywall, using acoustic caulking to seal ALL gaps. This is what I have done in my present and last studio (as well as 3 layer varying thickness windows) and it works very well.