Soundproofing Your Bedroom

There is nothing more stressing than to be woken up in the middle of the night from sound or to not even get a good night’s sleep. Soundproofing your bedroom from either other rooms in your home, outside sounds, or, if you are in an apartment, your neighbors, can help you get a better nights rest and lower your stress level.

The goal in soundproofing a room correctly is to block the transmission of sound from bleeding through a common wall. Ultimately you want to impair the wall's ability to conduct vibration. This is accomplished by adding two components to your wall assembly. The first is density, the second is disconnection. The combination of these two ingredients will help force the collapse of your sound wave inside your wall, and can trigger up to a 90% drop in sound transmission.

Your treatment will depend on your starting point, but a treatment can reasonably trigger a 10-12 dB drop in noise levels bleeding through a common wall. Much of the success of a sound isolation wall will depend on the quality of the installation, the disconnected framing techniques, and the number of holes in your wall surface that will impair your noise reduction efforts.

Open air holes in a wall are called "flanking" paths and will serve to deteriorate results. Flanking paths include switch plates, electrical outlets, supply vents, return vents, light canisters, pipes, windows, doors, and a host of other possible paths that cannot block noise bleed. For soundproofing common walls, using a product such as dB-Bloc minimizes the flanking paths and can trigger up to a 90% drop in noise bleeding through.

Another way to soundproof is through combating the bleed of noise through the ceiling. This offers greater sound isolation and privacy between rooms that share this common surface. Ceiling tile treatments are designed to capture unwelcome sound reflections in the room.

A good sound barrier ceiling treatment can deliver up to a 90% reduction in plenum noise, foot noise or noise bleeding into or out of your room through the ceiling. A sound absorption ceiling treatment can restore your room to good quality sound by collapsing your reverberations times down to under 2.0 seconds.

Another consideration is your floors. Deadening noise that transmits through a common floor/ceiling assembly system is accomplished by either raising the floor up above or lowering the ceiling down below, lining with a soundproofing substrate, and applying the finished surface. This creates a disconnection that forces transmitting sound waves to collapse structurally and protects the adjoining space from noise.

Floor underlayment treatments target the reduction of foot noise and squeaking floors for stronger floor sound control

Last are windows. Soundproof Windows are acoustical windows designed to affix directly over your existing window treatment to help block noise and produce a soundproof window. These sound insulation windows serve as a sound barrier for soundproofing a window against street traffic noise, loud neighbors, barking dogs, as well as protecting neighbors from garage bands, home theaters, drum rooms and music room noise. These are attractive acoustic windows that will anchor directly in front of your existing windows to combat sound transmission. These are not replacement windows, they are acoustic windows that are applied over your existing windows. Soundproof Windows are available in many color options or can be custom painted for a decorative window soundproofing treatment.

So if you aren’t getting a good night’s sleep or are even a light sleeper, soundproofing your bedroom will certainly be worth the investment.