Soundproofing NYC Apartment
yo yo,
Is it possible to 100% soundproof a NYC apartment? The walls aren’t very thick, and if i turn the music up on my stereo system someone will be knocking on my down. They don’t seem to be a fan of dubstep as much as i am. 
. I live on the upper west side in a building that is fairly old. The walls are plaster. I need to start taking music seriously and need somewhere to really produce.
THANKS.
Jed
I’m no expert but probably not within any reasonable budget. If you want sound isolation that’s thicker walls, extra layers of sheetrock, and better insulation and is more of a construction thing.
When I was moving I was sure to move into a new building with concrete walls between apartments. Never had a complaint and I blast stuff all the time and have subwoofers. Can’t really fix building problems.
It kinds of amazes me and I often wonder if my neighbors actually hear it and are too passive to say anything and are just secretly getting resentful.
Jester’s Solution: Move To New Zealand 
Used to live in NYC. It’d be hard to do it for cheap. ur gonna need some money!
Because just about every building in NYC was built 100 years ago, my answer would be no. I would try to find a building filled with youngsters who also like to play music at high levels. It’s what a friend of mine did . Seems to be working out famously.
Not if you renting? What you have to is build a room with in a room and sandbag the floor, lift it off the original floor.
yo yo,
it is possible.
soundproofing = building a room inside the room, walls on top of walls + insulation material in between (rock wool combined with several layers of aluminium works wonders), bass traps & sound treatment. As you may have figured it’s not cheap and not an option if you’re renting. The cost is a few grand, depending on room size.
The cheaper option is to get a decent pair of headphones.
Ive been doing some research into and yeah… you have to build a room inside a room and its a rather large project.
Basically the rockwool vibrating because of the sound will convert the kinetic energy of the soundwaves into friction energy (heat). This is useful for both sound proofing and accoustics.
Everything thats connects to the outer walls / floors / ceilings of the room cannot be connected directly as the energy from the vibrations will pass easily though. To create a barrier theres all sorts of different products for different purposes, theres spring loaded clips (genie clips) that you can fit galvonised metal runers onto that you can fit the soundproofing drywall onto.
Its really important to stagger those sheets of drywall, so if your going this route make sure you do that. You could use this same system for the ceiling too i believe. Between a nice layer of sound deadening quality insulation (rock wool does a very good job) and the sound deadening gyprock your going to lose a lot of audio.
You need to approach sound deadening in a few ways:
Most importantly you want to keep the air inside the room with no way to escape. Air-con vents, light/power switches will all create ways for the air to get though and will be a major contributor to noise getting though to areas you dont want it in.
second most important is to create layers between the walls (without letting air from your studio to get into this space, or from this space into the space you dont want your sound getting into. a door inside of a door really helps here too ! Use big heavy solid wood doors that have air seals around them to keep the air in.
Pure mass is really important, the more mass you can get in between your room and the next room will drastically decrease the amount of noise thats going to get though. This is where those sandbags previously mentioned come into play, also the sand vibrating in the bags will create friction energy which helps to deaden the sound.
converting the kinetic energy from the sound waves into friction energy (insulation) - using bass traps will also help somewhat reduce the amount of sound that gets outside the room. Also lining the inside of the walls with insulation will also facilitate this process while keeping your studio much cooler. This approach is also very important when you are creating anchors for your room inside a room, anywhere where you room contacts the outside structure should use this approach of energy conversion otherwise the sound will just pass easily though the structure.
http://www.acoustiguard.com/ has plenty of products for stopping sound, never used their products but having a look though what they have for sale will give you a very good idea of the sorts of approaches you have to take with soundproofing a room. If your good with your hands you can soundproof your own room for a reasonable cost, getting someone else in to do it will put the price up quite a lot !
Hope this helps
Get some of the studio “egg crate” stuff…put it on all of your walls.
This will not help at all with low frequencies, which are also the ones that penetrate structures easily. You need mass, and lots of it. I was dumbfounded to read that there are actual buildings with plaster walls between apartments, that sounds horrid.
No.
There is a LOT that can be done to help keep the highs inside the room. There are few practical solutions for keeping the bass contained.
Headphones are the cheapest (and best) solution.
just get some deep bass headphones. some times i find my self jamming out in my basement and my wife comes downstairs but all she sees is me and dead silence (maybe the humming sound from the control vinyls)… unless you’re having people over your better off just playing with good headphones.
my co-worker mixes dubstep in his apartment. no one ever complains b/c he doesn’t play it too loud… playing it at max volume is just asking for trouble if you live in a apartment complex
I’ve played around with getting stands for my monitors and positioning them at ear level to the left and right of my body, facing me at opposing angles. Offset them so that you’re not standing in a dead zone.
This allowed me to hear everything well and loud while keeping the overall output volume low enough to keep the neighbors from getting me kicked out. Instead of filling the room with sound, you’re just filling your ears. In principle it’s like wearing headphones.
After a while I did get very conscious of the damage to my hearing I might have been doing though. There’s probably a happy medium you can reach there.
This actually just reminded me of something.
A long time ago, a friend of mine had a parabolic satellite dish hanging upside-down from his celing in his thin-walled apartment. WTF indeed, I thought.
He then demonstrated his monster home theater setup positioned carefully under the dish.
He played some music, which I heard very faintly. Then he told me to sit down on the couch positioned directly under the center of the dish.
That shit was really, really, really loud. And awesome. Stepped out from under it. Very faint.
The parabolic shape of the dish directs all waves bouncing off of it, no matter what originating angle, to a single point at the center of the dish. I was amaze.
he was an engineering student and he had it dialed in perfectly, but I figure this is one way if you are so inclined.