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Heres the history:
Moved into a house with an unfinished basement. I was only 18 and dumb so I dumpster dived some decent carpet and did the walls and ceiling. Obvioiusly: dampened some volume (mostly highs) and created a dead ass room for me to start my studio and use lots of cheesy digital reverb on the snare drum and vocals.

Then I got a little smarter: Put up insulation on the walls and ceiling and covered that with dry wall. Room sounds much better for recording (a little loud for band practice, but I got make shift curtains on one wall and carpet left on only one wall). But the catch is there is a stair way parallel to one wall of my studio/practice space. Tons of sound shoots right throuh it and makes it loud upstairs. There's insulations and acoustic tiles (white stuff) under the stairs but the wall above the staircase is just dry wall and paint on the other side.

Here's the plan: I'm going to screw two by two (or something similar) lengths of wood into the wall as spacers, place acoustic tiles on that. Then put in another few spacers over the acoustic tile, on which I will hang dry wall or plywood (obviously my budget is in the one to two hundred dollar range).

Is this the best way? Obvioiusly I can't expect silence upstairs with my budget, but I want to tone it down. I heard dead air between layers is helpful in sound proofing. What would you do?
ps thanks for reading all that.

Do a search. Soundproofing has been covered a lot here. There's more information here as well.

I'm having a little trouble visualising your specific problem. However, building up space between the wall and the stairwell would be good, as well as adding extra insulation/acoustic tiling.

However, for me, the most obvious solution after that would be soundproofing the door and aperture at the top of the stairwell (if that's an option.)

Is this the stairwell that leads to the studio? Any pictures/diagrams?

Someone once posted a link here to a forum which was all about designing studio spaces and soundproofing issues. Do a search and you'll find the link. It was filled with incredibly good information.

Not sure if this is the link you're talking about, but this forum has helped me out a lot...

http://www.johnlsayers.com/

You can usually get answers just from searching and reading other posts.

jjcarterco wrote:Not sure if this is the link you're talking about, but this forum has helped me out a lot...

http://www.johnlsayers.com/

You can usually get answers just from searching and reading other posts.

That's the one. Thanks.

All your soundproofing questions are answered somewhere in those forums.

Yeah that site has alot in it. Um as far as the stairs question maybe this makes sense:
lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll
ll..........control room ................................ll
ll..............................................................ll
ll_______xxxxxxxxxxx door.....................ll
ll.................................lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll
ll.......studio room........ll.....storage room...ll
ll.................................ll............................ll
ll.................................ll............................ll
lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll
*not to scale*

x represents the stairwell. The door to the stairs is in another room (the right half of the control room which is actually living space). The _____ line is the entrance to the studio room. The sound that hits the wall where the stair case is, goes through to the other side of the staircase, thereby putting sound upstairs. All the doors are p.o.s. model hollow jobs. Real doors are pricey! I am trying to find a banged up but solid door somewhere.
But to review, I am trying to decide what to layer up on that xxx wall that lines the stairs so not so much sound goes through.

Ok. I think I understand a little better. Insulating the stairwell (both inside and out - walls, carpet on the stairs, etc) will help, but I really think the critical part will be the door at the top of the stairs and however much of the inside of the stairwell wall interacts with the walls of the upstairs portion of your house.

Soundproof that and the stairwell walls that are adjacent to your studios, and you'll probably take care of most of the problem.

If you can't find a good door, and you're handy with tools, you might want to consider converting one of your hollow doors into a soundproof door. Depending on what your door looks like, there are a number of ways you could go about this.

A friend of mine once had a hollow door with recessed panels. We removed the recessed panel side, attached a layer of rubber to the inside of the exterior panel of the door, then a layer of particle board, then a layer of foam, then cut a flat panel for the interior side (which would be facing his room). Then on the outside of the interior panel we attached acoustic dampers and then did the door jamb as well. This was all done with salvaged foam, rubber, wood, etc. It took a little bit of adjusting to get the door in right and make sure we had sealed the crevices, but once we had finished, it was fairly soundproof.

[quote="losthighway"]

>> SNIP<<

Is this the best way? Obvioiusly I can't expect silence upstairs with my budget, but I want to tone it down. I heard dead air between layers is helpful in sound proofing. What would you do?
ps thanks for reading all that.[/quote]


I knew a company that had some hanging baffles that you can hang from a ceiling that you may be able to use. I know of a church that used them to tone down / isolate a drummer that worked pretty well.

I did some research on this issue a while back, if you run into a dead end
and don't want to construct a solid wall Email me and I'll dig out what I found on portable sound isolation.


Regards,

Gary

info@guitarsalon.biz

losthighway wrote:Here's the plan: I'm going to screw two by two (or something similar) lengths of wood into the wall as spacers, place acoustic tiles on that. Then put in another few spacers over the acoustic tile, on which I will hang dry wall or plywood (obviously my budget is in the one to two hundred dollar range).

Seal every layer as airtight as you can without killing yourselves. Use old tires or other rubber to decouple your 'walls' from other layers (former walls, the concrete). Maybe use them in strips instead of the 2x2's. That'll cost you some silicone and a trip to the junkyard.

The information regarding sound absorption coefficients you can find online is very useful. Remember, soundproofing materials don't simply add up cumulatively...there is a simple equation that will tell you what to expect from any combination of materials.