Sound Proof Darkroom

[bob carnie]

Hi Folks

I am about to redesign my darkroom , we are moving it to a larger space and I hope it will be one of the last times that I have to move the gear.
This sucker will be humidity and temp controlled to make life easier for alternative printing, as well a huge ventilation device running overtop the sink.

Currently my neighbors dislike my music and how loud I play it , but it relaxes me and helps me move the large trays along.

I need sources for sound proofing material for walls and ceiling.
The walls are pretty easy as I am sure I can find the right stuff at home depot

but

The darkroom is around 700 sqft, a problem area is the ceiling as there is a skylight above which makes it problematic to hang a proper drop ceiling as there is only air to the roof which is around 16ft then the large skylight.
I do not plan to take the walls to the roof as we want to take advantage of the skylight and as well be able to make the roof or ceiling of the darkroom look pleasing as it will be smack dab in the middle of the Lab.
Anything used for soundproofing will need to be lightweight as I have used a light weight black vinal before to light tight dark halls but the soundproof material needs to be lightweight and able to be attached somehow to the ceiling.
I think I have figured a way to secure the ceiling but now I need the lightweight materials.

Any ideas on light blocking material and sound proofing materials would be greatly appreciated.

[Deane Johnson]

These questions come up often on home theater type forums.

It takes heavy mass to stop sound. Double wall board is often used. Bass is almost impossible to stop. Soft and light materials have almost no effect on sound transmission.

Have you considered ear phones and an iPod?

[Gem Singer]

Bob,

Purchase a set of Bose headphones. Listen to your music at a volume that pleases
you and avoid an expensive solution to a simple problem.

Or, listen to your music on an iPod.

Making a darkroom light proof can be a huge undertaking. Why complicate it by trying to make it sound proof too?

[Gem Singer]

Deane types faster than me. In fact, everybody types faster.

[bob carnie]

Not a bad solution, but I also print by direction and most of my clients will endure my music, some even approve.
Hard to share the headphones.
Just heard about a product called Sonoflex , at the home depot may look into that.


Bob,

Purchase a set of Bose headphones. Listen to your music at a volume that pleases
you and avoid an expensive solution to a simple problem.

Or, listen to your music on an iPod.

Making a darkroom light proof can be a huge undertaking. Why complicate it by trying to make it sound proof too?

[aduncanson]

Some of the most effective soundproofing materials use a thin lead foil, perhaps suspended in a urathane foam on both sides. I would not expect it to be either terribly affordable or lightweight. Here is a highly effective lead foil at 2 lbs and $8.21 per square foot.

http://www.soundaway.com/Lead_Barrier_Plus_p/11202.htm

If you were to surround your darkroom with a material like that then the doors and ventilation would likely become the most significant source of noise escaping and require special treatment for truly effective noise control.

[bob carnie]

Expensive but quite nice product , there is a 1lb but no price. This stuff looks like it can handle Guns&Roses with no problem, the 2lb looks rated for Mettalica.
thanks for the link.


Some of the most effective soundproofing materials use a thin lead foil, perhaps suspended in a urathane foam on both sides. I would not expect it to be either terribly affordable or lightweight. Here is a highly effective lead foil at 2 lbs and $8.21 per square foot.

http://www.soundaway.com/Lead_Barrier_Plus_p/11202.htm

If you were to surround your darkroom with a material like that then the doors and ventilation would likely become the most significant source of noise escaping and require special treatment for truly effective noise control.

[William McEwen]

OK, Bob, like so many others here, I'm going to make a few statements and not answer your questions! :)

1. Music: Do you enlarge or contact print? Seems to me music played at a rip-roarin' high volume would make the enlarger vibrate and adversely affect print sharpness.

2. Sound-Proof. Do you really want a sound proof darkroom? Personally, I want don't want any barriers to prevent me from hearing what might be going on in the house -- If the house is on fire, I want to be able to hear Sheryl yelling "get out!" and if a pipe bursts and I slip and fall on water, I want Sheryl to be able to hear my cries for help!

[bob carnie]

Hi William

I have concrete Floors, most of my work is done on a 11x14 deverre or 8x10 durst(these suckers are heavy , just like the music, All the 4x5's are stabalized to the 3/4 ply on studs. I can hang off my 4x5's .

This Darkroom will be smack dab in the middle of our Lab which is pretty secure. With smoke and sprinkler systems.
All the plumbing is within the darkroom itself.

Not to mention if I slip and fall and kill myself my wife and Kevin my business partners stand to make a few bucks.



OK, Bob, like so many others here, I'm going to make a few statements and not answer your questions! :)

1. Music: Do you enlarge or contact print? Seems to me music played at a rip-roarin' high volume would make the enlarger vibrate and adversely affect print sharpness.

2. Sound-Proof. Do you really want a sound proof darkroom? Personally, I want don't want any barriers to prevent me from hearing what might be going on in the house -- If the house is on fire, I want to be able to hear Sheryl yelling "get out!" and if a pipe bursts and I slip and fall on water, I want Sheryl to be able to hear my cries for help!

[Drew Wiley]

I have frequently worked with acoustic engineers. Forget places like Home Depot.
Cheap soundboard like Homasote can easily control sound, but it also is quite hydroscopic and would probably rot to shreds unless your darkroom was very well
ventilated and all the wall coated with enamel paint or waterproof panels, in which
case the soundboard wouldnt't work! And any interception in the system like the
mandatory ventilation ports will allow the sound outside. Acoustic drywall works much
better, but you're talking a formal system of installation, and the kind of adolescent
baboons who work at Cheapo Depot wouldn't have a clue what you're talking about.
I personally used R-23 insulation with 2x6 studs, clad with fiber-cement siding outside,
and a big exterior-mounted squirrel-cage fan to pull (not push) the air. Quite inside
the room, always comfortable temp, and relatively quiet to the neighbors too. But if
you want loud muic too, you take your chances! I've been involved in the design of
quite a few professional sound rooms, and all it takes is one significant breach in the
system and it's like sticking a pin in a baloon. And if you put enough bends and
corrugations etc into your air ducts in order to reduce sound transmission, you're only
going to cripple the ability to efficiently extract fumes and draw in replacement air.

[Drew Wiley]

I should postcript this by saying that soundboard now no longer requires a metal liner
in the middle as a carrier to the acoustic polymer, and is just as simple as working
with regular drywall, except more expensive, AND you need the proper acoutic caulk
and installation technique. The brand you want to research is Quiet Rock. Around
80 to a hundred bucks a sheet, depending. The same technology also exists for
laminated plywoods, which can be used for the floor or whatever.

[Ken Lee]

Noise-canceling headphones suppress highly repetitive ambient sound, such as the vibrations produced by machines. They are great if you're riding in an airplane or helicopter - or in a car, or sitting next to an air conditioner.

They detect a repeating wave form (like from a lawn mower engine), and apply another identical wave, 180 degrees out of phase. The resulting sum, is silence. They literally "cancel-out" the offending signal.

This approach doesn't work as well for music or speech, which is (compared to machine noise) irregular by nature.

[jeroldharter]

I think that sound proofing a large darkroom like that would be difficult to achieve and extremely expensive. For that kind of money you must be able to find wireless headphones on a network to share sound with others. You could hook the headphones up with a wireless headset microphone and talk back and forth while toggling the music for the thousands of dollars you will save.

[Rob Vinnedge]

I did a lot of research on the soundproofing problem when I built my studio next to my wife's studio. We both play music, but not always the same music, and found it necessary to isolate. There is a website online that is the exact format as large format photography forum, which deals with all the issues surrounding this subject (I'll try to remember the site name).

In one word, the answer is air. You can talk about lead foil, double sheet rock, urethane, etc, till the cows come home, but air is what you need. Build two walls with an airspace in between. Or you can build one thick 2X6 wall and split the 2X6 header and foot right down the middle and separate them enough so they don't touch and then stagger the 2X4's to accommodate the two outer sheet rocked walls. That will take care of sound escaping from an enclosure. The urethanes, soft surfaces, and ceiling "clouds" will temper the actual space that contains the music source, but the air space is what you need for containment. There is one other idea that is slightly useful, and that is to double sheet rock on both sides of the wall, but use regularly spaced globs of silicone to "float" the second layer of rock. Use fewer screws so as not to allow too much transmission of sound from one layer to the other - in other words, create yet another micro space of air between the two layers.

Here is the website:

http://homerecording.com/bbs/forumdisplay.php?f=20

[bob carnie]

Room within a room, I recieved a PM that basically said the same thing from someone I respect on this site.
It sounds like I am asking for a lot of woopass if I proceed with this size of project. I can only dream of the day where I can move the Lab up North and just surround the darkroom with acres of land.

Thanks for all the replies .

I did a lot of research on the soundproofing problem when I built my studio next to my wife's studio. We both play music, but not always the same music, and found it necessary to isolate. There is a website online that is the exact format as large format photography forum, which deals with all the issues surrounding this subject (I'll try to remember the site name).

In one word, the answer is air. You can talk about lead foil, double sheet rock, urethane, etc, till the cows come home, but air is what you need. Build two walls with an airspace in between. Or you can build one thick 2X6 wall and split the 2X6 header and foot right down the middle and separate them enough so they don't touch and then stagger the 2X4's to accommodate the two outer sheet rocked walls. That will take care of sound escaping from an enclosure. The urethanes, soft surfaces, and ceiling "clouds" will temper the actual space that contains the music source, but the air space is what you need for containment. There is one other idea that is slightly useful, and that is to double sheet rock on both sides of the wall, but use regularly spaced globs of silicone to "float" the second layer of rock. Use fewer screws so as not to allow too much transmission of sound from one layer to the other - in other words, create yet another micro space of air between the two layers.

Here is the website:

http://homerecording.com/bbs/forumdisplay.php?f=20

[Drew Wiley]

There's an entire profession called acoustic engineering. You can make life hard for
yourself if you want double walls and so forth and it will probably work, but you
will waste and bunch of money, time, and lose square footage when they are actually
much more efficient ways of doing this, even if the materials cost a little more up
front. There is all kinds of hard data on this including cost anyalysis and sone ratings.
It's very routine and even required in building codes for high-end spaces around
this part of the world. Just depends whether or not you can sacrifice the square
footage to build a double wall, or if you need a more modern answer.

[CG]

One item I didn't see mentioned is that double walls by themselves are not optimized until the the two walls are tuned to different resonant frequencies.

Any material will vibrate at a preferred frequency when activated by impact or sound energy. Think of a bell or a tripod. If one wall responds to one frequency, and it's neighbor responds to a different (and not a multiple) frequency, the two walls will tend to "ignore" each other and transmit a disproportionately lower amount of energy throught the whole assembly. It has to do with properties like stiffness and mass.

Getting all this right, or finding useful alternate schemes takes the expertise suggested by Drew Wiley. It gets pretty technical rather fast.

[Rob Vinnedge]

CG,

You may well be right about optimization of double walls. However, I built my two 2"X4" walls 2" apart and sheet rocked three of the four sides with 5/8" sheet rock and cannot hear a thing from the other side. Could I have just been lucky, or is it possible that the second layer of sheet rock on one of the walls could have broken the transmission?

[sanking]

Bob,

Get an iPod and spare your neighbors. You can play it as loud as you like and the only thing to suffer will be your hearing and brain.

Sandy King

[pocketfulladoubles]

Hi, I actually am an acoustical engineer and I work on these design situations daily on everything from multi-family residential buildings, to industrial power plants, to concert halls. It is hard to give you any accurate advice as I haven't seen your room or your construction, but what I can tell you is that reducing the sound transmission to a level so as not to disturb your neighbors is an extremely challenging problem and will likely require a huge effort.

Sound absorption materials on the walls is generally effective at mid to high frequencies unless you have significant thickness or provide an airspace to back the material, and even then it will just reduce the reverb level increase which is not that significant.

A better solution is to provide a double-stud wall (two independent rows of studs) with an uneven number of drywall layers on opposite sides, and batt insulation in the cavities. Do not place drywall layers at the inner side of the studs as all you do is reduce the airspace and low-frequency sound insulation performance. If you cannot fit a second stud track, you can make a compromise with something like Kinetics Noise IsoMax, or RCSD resilient channels, but these are difficult to install and require technical expertise. A mistake with these like driving screws into the studs renders them mostly useless.

These walls need to either be full-height and sealed to the deck above and floor, or you need a multiple layer drop ceiling to close the acoustical envelope. Your skylight and any lightweight drop ceiling are going to be a problem. You will also get sound propagation down exhaust and supply ducts if you do not treat that as well with sound boots or plenums. Don't waste money on QuietRock. If you look at their acoustical lab tests, you will see that the performance does not apply to this situation. You will need to properly seal gaps, cracks, etc. and pay attention to intersections at floor-wall-ceiling. Do you need to maintain a fire-rating on your walls? Probably yes if you have adjacent neighbors. This will send you to an architect and building permit.

I see this time and time and time again, and I rarely see this pan out to anything less than thousands and thousands of dollars by the time it's done. Without an architect and acoustical consultant, you're likely to overlook things too like penetrations at conduits, piping, junction boxes. You will be able to buy your whole staff a pair of cordless headphones for less money, and they are guaranteed to work, whereas a home-brew sound insulation project is not.

[Rob Vinnedge]

pocketfulladoubles,

I wish I had spoken to you before attaching the sheet rock to the inside surface of my first wall. I could have saved even more money and time, although maybe this extra layer serves as the uneven number you are referring to. In any case, I did achieve satisfactory results.

[bob carnie]

Both are going, I think Ipod is probably the way to go.

Bob,

Get an iPod and spare your neighbors. You can play it as loud as you like and the only thing to suffer will be your hearing and brain.

Sandy King

[pocketfulladoubles]

pocketfulladoubles,

I wish I had spoken to you before attaching the sheet rock to the inside surface of my first wall. I could have saved even more money and time, although maybe this extra layer serves as the uneven number you are referring to. In any case, I did achieve satisfactory results.

It's not so bad that you did only one inside stud track. Doing both can be a real degradation. For your case, you've just broken up the airspace a little so more low frequency (bass) can get through, but only maybe 3 to 5 dB more or so which is "slightly" noticeable.