5 Steps to Sound Insulating Your Basement

Basement remodeling is a popular alternative to selling the home and upgrading in a tough housing market. Making the space more user friendly for the family should include steps designed to sound isolate the room from the rest of the house. Discover here five simple steps you can take to protect the rest of your house from your basement noise.

Step 1: Sound Insulate the Ceiling

This does not mean batting insulation. When noise bleeeds through a common floor/ceiling assembly, the energy transfer that takes place is through the joists, much like vibrations that carry through a string pulled tight between two coffee cans. It is not the dead air space between the joists that should receive the soundproofing treatment, it is the joists themselves. Start by stapling a layer of mass loaded vinyl to your ceiling. This will add the density you need to keep it from renoating (much like grabbing a tuning fork with your hand to kill the vibration). Then install a set of furring strips perpendicular to the direction of your floor joists, and then a 5/8" drywall layer to your furring strips. Note that you do not need pre-engineered drywall, as this layering technique embeds the density of mass loaded vinyl, separated from your finished surface by the dead air gap created by your furring strip. Your strip system can be simple strips of metal or wood, your goal is separation to force the collapse of the vibration.

Do not put cannister lights in your ceiling if you can help it. Use track lighting or floor mounted lamps. Minimize the cutouts to isolate the bleed of noise through the openings.

Step 2: Inner Walls in the Basement

If your walls are already finished or framed, follow the same technique as in Step 1. Staple mass loaded vinyl to your frame or finished wall, run furring strips horizontally up the wall, and drywall over. You create the same collapse in sound bleed thanks to the density of the vinyl and the disconnection from the strips. If your starting point is a new build, then consider a double wall frame for complete disconnection, or a staggered stud frame which would place a 2x6 floor plate down, with 2x4 studs alternating so that studs 1,3,5,6 and 9 are flush with room A, while studs 2,4,6,8 and 10 are staggered to run flush with the opposite side of the 2x6, supporting the wall for room B. In any case, your goal is the same. Force the wave to collapse, do not connect the rooms together.

Step 3: Outer Walls in the Basement

A common mistake is to think that because these are outer foundation walls, that there is no need to treat them for sound transmission to the outdoors. A reminder that the outer foundation walls are vibration paths carrying unwanted sound to the rest of your home. They are vibration points that will grab the sound waves in your basement and pull them upstairs, circumventing the ceiling treatment you put in. The right answer for the outer walls is to build a frame free floating from your block our poured concrete wall, line it with mass loaded vinyl, and drywall over. What you will trigger is a disconnection on the outer walls that will prevent the foundation from being able to accept vibration.

Step 4: The Floor

As with Step 3, a common misperception is to leave the floor alone, there is nobody behind the flooring that we need to protect. But again, any surface you leave untreated for sound bleed will become the path of least resistance for the sound wave energy trying to fight its way out of the room. Lay a simple floor underlay made form retread rubber tires beneath your finished surface in the basement. This material is waterproof, don't use cork or some other medium that will warp when taking on moisture.

Step 5: Sound Panels

Once you have all six surfaces in your basement properly isolated, with minimal cutouts and leakage, you could experience up to a 90% drop in sound bleeding out of the room. One result of a successful treatment is a loud echo drum produced inside your basement. To reduce the level of exposure within the room, mount a series of archtiectural sound panels around your room in a nice design, placing them as an example as a wainscoting around the perimeter of your room. These panels will serve to capture the echoes trapped within your basement and convert them out of the room. Also note, that by lowering the level of echo trapped in the room, you lower the level of leakage out through windows, stairwells, vents, plumbing fixtures and more.

Remember, when sound isolating your basement, all six surfaces should receive materials designed to add weight and disconnect the structure. This is a layering approach, combining the density of mass loaded vinyl with the spacing of properly framed walls, ceilngs and flooring surfaces. Good luck with your project! To your sound success!

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