Sound proofing vrs Acoustic treatment….

Many of you out there who watch my YouTube videos have been contacting me asking about how I soundproofed my studio rooms when the truth is, I haven’t! Soundproofed or acoustically treated? It’s a common area of confusion that has loads of articles written about it so I thought I would add my bit and go over how I approached Maplewood Studios live and control rooms.

So, whats the difference between soundproofing and acoustic treatment?

A soundproof room - a room that contains all sound/noise within it and prevents external noise from entering it.

An acoustically treated room – a room that has been treated with acoustic panels to create a ‘neutral sounding’ room controlling the frequencies within, the room is also subject to external noises.

The easiest way to think of acoustic treatment is to stand in a room and clap your hands, more than likely you will hear a slap back kind of reverb, the sound waves generated by you clapping hitting the walls and ceiling and bouncing back to your ears. Now, close the curtains and do it again, it will sound slightly different, less lively. if you can hang a duvet on a wall and try it this way it will sound different again, it should sound even less lively or reflective and so on. Acoustically treating a space for recording is all about getting the room to sound natural with not to much reverb or room reflection as this lets you add a reverb of choice in the mix but you also don't want it to sound 'dead' or no reflections as this can sound just as bad as a room that is to lively. The difficulty with acoustic treatment is that all frequencies react differently, the foam or panelling you see on walls and ceilings controls the mid to high end of the frequency range while low frequencies are a lot harder to control, here you use bass traps in corners to trap these long sound waves. Bass frequencies travel the furthest and can go through a lot of materials, whenever you hear a house party you never hear the top end, all you hear is the low frequencies of bass drums etc etc.

To sound proof a room is a very hard task indeed. The easiest way to think about it is to imagine the sound inside the room as water, water will leak from any gap big or small, there is no getting away from it and this is exactly what sound waves inside the room will do. The most efficient way to build a sound proof room is to build a room within a room including a floating floor, the way in and out of the room will be your weak point and of course you will need ventilation in your ‘air tight’ room, this again creates another weak point. There are plenty of designs and advice on how to build a soundproof room online, just get googling. Of course, once you have built your sound proof room you will still need to ‘acoustically’ treat it!

So, I hope this helps define the difference between the two.

At Maplewood Studio I have converted two rooms within my home to pro recording environments, both are just acoustically treated. My live room used a combination of foam acoustic tiles on the ceiling and a band running round the middle of the walls to control the mid to high end of the room while the bottom end is looked after with 6' foam bass traps in all four corners and then Ghost Acoustic gobo stands in front of these. The floor is oak laminate which give me further flexibility by adding rugs if required. This room is slightly more dead sounding than the control room, thisl room uses the Ghost Acoustic panels throughout and is a more neutral sounding room. The idea behind this is that for mixing and mastering you should try and have as neutral sounding room as possible so your mix's are accurate, ie if the room exaggerated the low end your mix's may be lacking low end in a average environment, etc.

I hope you find this useful and if you have any questions please feel free to contact me.

Take it easy!

Stick