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The Importance of Soundproofing in a Home Cinema
Soundproofing helps keeping the noise of the movie in the room as well as keeping distractions out
A luxury private cinema can be a significant investment, its not unusual for a premium room to be of similar value to a new kitchen of 5-10% of the property value.
With a cinema in your home, its important to maximise the enjoyment of the investment, with freedom to enjoy a movie any time night or day.
Sounds leaving the room or entering the room can both prevent you using the room when you would like to, which is where sound isolation or soundproofing comes into play.
Acoustically Transparent Fabric
Many of our home cinema designs feature upholstery or stretch fabric on the walls. This allows us to introduce a beautiful finish, whilst also hiding acoustic absorbing and isolation systems.
Sound proofing effectiveness
Sound will always enter and exit the cinema through the weakest link, this could be a small gap which isn’t fully airtight, the door, cables/plumbing or an under-isolated wall.
Before undertaking any sound isolation project, we will always test and measure the existing structure if possible. This will provide us with valuable information of how much noise is currently blocked and how much more we need to achieve.
For a simple TV room, adjoining a neighbours property, we may only need to add a small increase in performance to reach an acceptable performance level, where as a high performance dedicated cinema room may require much more isolation to meet the objectives.
Where a small improvement is needed, a super slim system may provide enough help, the addition of extra mass in the form of plasterboard and a damping layer of Tecsound Membrane could prevent the noise of a neighbours TV entering the room, disrupting your own enjoyment.
For high performance, we need to call on other tools, namely air gaps and resilience. With 60-120mm available on each wall, we can create a new internal stud wall disconnected from the original wall, essentially creating a new room within a room. The addition of a resilience system such as MuteClips or Genie Clips with furing strip will add a significant improvement.
When the adjoining room is especially noise sensitive, such as a child’s bedroom, further measures may be needed to such as additional fibreglass insulation and further sheets of Tecsound damping membrane.
The most important thing, is to understand that high performance sound issolation will require both physical space and money for materials, but when designed and installed correctly, the system will allow you to use the cinema uninterrupted day or night – a true luxury.
Sound Isolation is required for two purposes:
1) To prevent noise from compromising the carefully engineered low background levels in the Theatre; and
2) To prevent high sound levels inside the theatre from being audible outside the space.
