Planning to build the ultimate "Listening Room"

[docmd2010]

Hello!

I'm going through the exact same journey at the moment. I'm custom building a home and right now am designing it from ground up. I am building a 2 channel room. The HT room will be roughed in and I will likely do that later on after I move in.

Room Size: 17 feet wide x 23 feet deep x 10 foot high. Floor will be a concrete slab, and one of the walls will be concrete too (it's in a basement).

The main thing I am going to focus on is soundproofing the room. Not because I care as much about sound coming out of the room, but more or less sound coming into the room.

You will come across many, many solutions for doing this. One thing to keep in mind is the STC. This is the sound transmission coefficient. Measures how well a material traps sound. Basically anything below 40 is terrible, 40-50 is ok, 50-60 is good, and 60+ is excellent.

The quieter your room, the better it will be.

The ideal room construction scenario is a room within a room. Here is it how it is constructed and this has a STC of 73 btw.

Double studded, with 2-3 inches in between the set of studs.

Double drywall 5/8 inch thick with green glue in the middle. This should be done on both sides of the wall.

Insulation should be put in both sets of studs. Quietbatt is one material, amongst many.

If you add Quietbatt to both sides instead of standard fiberglass R13, the STC goes up to about 75 or so.

If you really want to go crazy, you add horizontal bracings between the studs (three levels of bracings, say at 3 foot, 6 foot, and 9 foot), then cover both layers of studs with plywood and nail it in every 6 inches or so. Then add the double dry wall with greenglue in between.

As you can see, you can go nuts with this. It all depends on how crazy you want to get and your budget.