Waking up your neighbours with your latest heavy metal project is a major concern for many home/project studio owners. Mixing with your headphones or shifting your residence is not the solution. It is quite common that other family members and neighbours are less enthusiastic, so you sometimes need to consider some sort of soundproofing.

Soundproofing: What is it?

Sound proofing (or Isolation) is the method by which you contain the sound that you play or create in your studio. After a proper sound proofing is executed, the track that you play loud while mixing or mastering is not leaking out of the room and irritate your next door neighbour anymore. The reverse is also true that you won’t be recording that neighbour’s car whizzing past your house while you are recording a vocal track. So basically, soundproofing is a 2-way solution for good sound to stay in and bad sound to stay out.

Sound proofing is achieved by a combination of methods such as redesigning & building secondary walls & ceiling in an existing room, isolating the floor by blocks of neoprene or rubber, re-designing & installing double doors & windows etc. It involves civil work based on science and is generally considered as a costly affair.

Sound Treatment: What is it?

Sound treatment (or Acoustic correction) is done inside your studio to change the dynamics of how the sound waves are moved and absorbed within the room. Most acoustic treatments absorb sound waves which improves the sound within that space, giving the engineer / listener a true and better listening experience. This process enhances the quality of the recordings and leads to very accurate mixes and masters.

Acoustic treatments focus to reduce the natural reverberations that occur inside the studio room, remove low-frequency build-up in corners, standing waves, flutter echoes, comb filtering, room modes, and other issues. These treatments are useful for creating the best critical listening & recording spaces in the studio.

Will Egg-trays Help?

Some people think that sticking egg-trays on walls will work as soundproofing, but this is simply not true. It might make a minor improvement to some characteristic of the acoustics of a room, but will have no effect at all on sound leakage. However, there are practical steps that will have an effect in a typical home studio, although in most cases the word ‘soundproofing’ is rather deceptive – the best you can pray & hope for is to improve the condition. Eliminating all sound leakage & acoustic correction is practically impossible without a custom-designed room.