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Looper's Delight
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Haven't had time to read this whole thread but wanted to lay a salient
nugget of wisdom I learned years ago from one of the chief sound design engineers
with Crown (a producer who helped to design the pressure zone microphone for Crown).
THE CHEAPEST WAY TO SOUND PROOF A ROOM WITHOUT FUNDS:
If you go into your room in the middle of the day and can see a pin prick of light when the
lights are turned off, you are losing a whopping 40% of all the sound to the outside.
As he explained it, a room full of air is like a vessel full of water. One pinprick
in that vessel and the water will come out a high pressure.
If you can make the room light tight, you immediately reduce the output of volume (especially
bass waves which travel furthest) of the room by 40%.
Foam does virtually nothing, according to this guy, except to reduce the high frequency content of the
audio WITHIN the room.
It is bass waves that are the greatest offenders because of their large size.
>From what I have heard (and I"m not expert) a 30 cycle bass wave is something like 16 feet long.
That's for one stinking sine wave (the fundamental) and twice that for the first subsonic below
it.
Foam will make a dry sounding room as Stefan pointed out and since every room is , in essence ,
a shitty reverb unless you've spent some major bucks to make it a really good acoustical space,
it's better to have a deader environment (internal foaming = good) and then use expensive
reverbs or, better yet (for the champagne living on a beer budget recordist) inexpensive or free
convolution , software reverbs with really good acoustically modelled impulse files of real
reverberant spaces (read the freeware SIR convolution reverb...........see the archives of
my Audio Plugin Junkies Annonymous tribe at tribe.net for those URLS)
The easiest way to fill all the holes in a darkened room is to go out and buy a caulking gun full
of silicone caulk. You literally turn out the lights and walk around caulking holes in the room
(pinprick sources of light) until the entire room is perfectly light tight.
Voila, you have now made your room as soundproof as possible short of spending $3,000 USD
or equivalent to build an entire box within a box (yeppers, that means raising the floor, lowering
the roof and building four walls around you that are insulated by a layers of wood and foam, then
a layer of air (the greatest insulator, ironically) and then another layer of wood and foam.
that's what I know about it. Hope it helps.