Home Theater

I blog here on information technology related topics. I figured I am long overdue on blogging on other interests I have...



I have crossed the halfway point in my basement remodeling project that includes redoing my office and home theater. One of the things that I strived for in the reconstruction was to reduce sound. Here are several principles of achieving a quiet home:

• Mass: I ended up hanging two sheets of drywall on both ceilings and walls based on the principle of mass. mass impedes the transmission of sound in a simple way - it's harder for the sound to shake a very heavy thing than a very light thing, no different than saying it's harder to push a shopping cart full of lead bricks than an empty cart.


• Absortion: I went well beyond "code" and increased the amount of insulation in all my walls. I wish I could have afforded using RSIC Clips but the price more than turned me away. The basic principle here is by preventing vibration from moving through the mechanical parts of the wall to the other side of the wall, where it can/will produce sound. instead it has to pass through the air, where some of it will be lost, and through the insulation/absorbing material, where (at some frequencies) much of it will be lost.


• Constrained Layer Damping: I used Green Glue between the layers of drywall. The principle is that a "sandwich" is formed by laminating the base layer to the damping layer and adding a third constraining layer. When the system flexes during vibration, shear strains develop in the damping layer. Energy is lost through shear deformation rather than extension of the material.

I hope to post photos one we finish painting in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned...