It was quite shocking to find out how little designers and building/remodeling companies know about sound proofing. We asked this question of all the contractors that came to bid on the project. In general the answers were extremely poor. Makes me want to email them a link to http://www.avsform.com/ to show them how little they know about soundproofing.
I think everyone wants a quiet house, but the average person doesn't realize that they can't trust their builder to deliver this as just part of the package. If you want it, you have to know to ask for it, and you have to watch how they do it because small mistakes can eliminate the benefits of your efforts in other areas.
But I'm not going to dwell on this. The finished basement company was willing to work with us and were open to hearing our ideas. But, we selected them for other reasons and not at all because of their knowledge or expertise with sound proofing.
We focused on the basics and did not attempt to implement drastic solutions like building a room within a room (which can actually be accomplished by losing only a few inches and isn't as difficult or absurd as it sounds).....
To start, we have 15" ceiling joists. We packed them with insulation. After they were done, I bought some insulation and supplemented where I felt they had not done a good job.
Second, we insisted on using resilient sound channel on the ceiling. Ideally it would have been on the walls too. Resilient sound channel helps keep sound from transferring into the ceiling joist and in turn the room above by minimizing the surface area of the sheetrock against the joists, and by placing rubber washers that act as vibration dampeners between the rock and the joists.
Next, we learned that it is not standard practice to insulate interior walls, so that had to be identified and written into the plan. Not hard to do, but we didn't realize that it was something additional we had to ask for.
Last but not least, the design called for very large sofits which increased the space between floors and added more room for insulation. This was unintended from a design aspect, but played well into our desire to sound proof the basement as much as possible.
I was, however, infuriated and wanted to call the whole project off, when the HVAC guy came to do his part. He apparently made NO EFFORTS to sound proof. There is so much that can be done from an HVAC perspective. If I had been around to micro-manage the project, I would have insisted that the last 5 feet of the HVAC run be flexible hose vent instead of tin which will carry the sound throughout the house. I am very dissappointed in this aspect of the project. I am now looking into a sound absorbing adhesive spray that you can spray into the HVAC vents to dampen the sound and not allow the HVAC system to become an intercom system for distributing audio all throughout the house.
This is unnecessary additional costs that I'm assuming because they weren't with the program. If I were to do this again, I would expend more efforts getting them to realize that sound proofing is an entire program that has to apply to every aspect of the project. They just saw it as 2 or 3 additional tasks and did not share our end goal.
Enough ranting....
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