Soundproof Your Studio

SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN · SPYS DESIGNS Two Rooms, Same Size, Very Different Price Tags Almost every conversation about the cost of a sound isolated room starts with the same question: how much per square foot? It is a reasonable place to start, and it is also the reason so many early budgets miss. Square footage tells you how much room you are building. It does not tell you how hard that room has t...

SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN · SPYS DESIGNS The Most Realistic Sound Isolated Room Beats the Best Possible One I came to sound isolation as a working musician who taught himself acoustics. I had no background in construction besides some hands-on experience for a year building my own studio with my contractor. I really didn't understand how the whole design and construction industry worked as a system....

SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN  ·  SPYS DESIGNS Sound Isolation in a Detached ADU: Two Projects, Two Different Paths By Wilson Harwood, Sound Isolation Designer and Principal of SPYS Designs   Two clients came to me with nearly the same idea. Each wanted a detached building in the backyard with a high-performance sound isolated studio, a kitchen, and a bathroom. In other words, each wanted...

SPYS DESIGNS  ·  SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN Who Designs the Mechanical System for a Sound Isolated Room? I am working on a project right now with three sound isolated rooms: a live room, a production room, and a vocal booth. Each one is framed independently inside a larger building, airtight, and heavily insulated. On paper, heating and cooling three small rooms should be the easy part of th...

SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN  ·  SPYS DESIGNS Setbacks, Overlays, and Recorded Documents: What a Backyard Room Has to Clear Before It Can Be Designed Recently, two projects came to us with the same problem. Both clients wanted a room in their backyard, and both assumed the first step would be designing the structure. It was not. Before we could design a single assembly or sketch a floor plan,...

SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN  ·  SPYS DESIGNS What a Sound Isolation Design Fee Actually Buys You A few months ago I was on a live video inspection, walking a client's build room by room before the walls closed up. In the wall, I caught something small that almost cost him a finished room he couldn't actually use. I want to walk through what that was, because it explains what a sound isolation...

SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN  ·  SPYS DESIGNS Redlining a Sound Isolation Plan Set: Which Cuts Are Free, and Which Ones Cost You A builder in Colorado sat down with a plan set we had spent months developing for a detached backyard studio and asked whether he could take some things out of it to bring the cost down. That is a normal conversation. It happens on most projects. What made this one w...

SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN  ·  SPYS DESIGNS The Three Circles of Construction Cost Why a set of drawings is the only thing that meaningfully narrows the number, and why anyone who hands you a figure before that point is guessing.   A client called us about a sound isolated studio behind his house in Colorado. The number he had in his head was fifty thousand dollars. Eighteen months late...

SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN  ·  SPYS DESIGNS You Do Not Need an Architect First The instinct to get an architect on board before anyone else is reasonable. For a room with real performance requirements, it is also backwards.   I hear a version of the same plan constantly from people building a serious space. Get the architect first, get a full scope and a real budget number, then bring i...

The Standard I Wouldn't Lower, Even for My Own Studio My own studio has been fully designed for months. Complete construction documents, engineered to the exact standard I hold every client to. Room within a room. HVAC engineered for silence, not just comfort. Finish detail that matches what I would sign off on for anyone else. I still have not broken ground. Not because the design is wrong. Becau...

A Correct Drawing and a Buildable Drawing Are Two Different Documents A finished plan set for a Florida sound isolation project, a framer who asked how it was actually going to get built, and a roof we are still redesigning. About three weeks ago I learned a way of framing a roof that I did not know existed. I have been designing sound isolated rooms for years, and I had never heard of it. When I...

SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN  ·  SPYS DESIGNS Sound Isolation Assemblies Are Moisture Traps by Design What a roof detail on a Tallahassee project taught me about vapor, and why the sound isolation designer has to be the one who asks the question. Two weeks ago I was on the phone with the builder on a project we designed in Tallahassee, Florida. I asked him how the roof assembly was going to ha...

You Can't Soundproof Half a Room. Here's Proof. “...but the persistent faint low frequency that finds its way inside, keeps me having some regret that I didn't go more "all in" with my west and north walls, but mainly the north wall.” - Andy “Now that I've blocked that pathway for most of the mid to upper frequency exterior noise, the only thing that remains is the very low frequency rumble from t...

Does Green Glue Actually Work? What 20 Lab Reports Show   I never was a huge fan of Green Glue, I thought it wasn’t worth the money. This year, a real project made me stop and actually read the lab data instead of going back to my catchall “I don’t use Green Glue”. What I found changed how I view the product, and it explains something I had noticed for years without fully understanding why: m...

SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN · SPYS DESIGNS The Ceiling Trade-Off: Why More Drywall Wasn't the Answer in This Basement Sound Isolation Build A client we'll call Sam wanted to play drums in his basement and hold band rehearsals with his bandmates. The goals were simple to state and hard to deliver: don't bother the neighbors, and keep as much sound as possible out of the rest of the house. The walls were...

SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN  ·  SPYS DESIGNS He Researched Whisper Rooms and Rejected Them. Here's What He Built Instead. Jim Datovech didn't need convincing that his home voiceover setup had a noise floor problem. He already owned a Sennheiser MKH50, a pair of Neumann mics including a U87 AI, and an RME interface with clean A-to-D conversion. The gear wasn't the issue. The room was. Like mos...

When people hire me to design a sound isolation system, they often think they're paying for a set of drawings. They're not. The drawings are only one part of the process. The real work continues throughout construction—answering contractor questions, adapting to field conditions, reviewing material substitutions, and solving problems before they become expensive acoustic failures. In this episode,...

SPYS DESIGNS  ·  SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN   What a $3M Show House Listening Room Actually Requires Sound isolation design on a multi-million dollar show house means coordinating five professional teams, solving three HVAC decisions before the first meeting, and documenting every choice before a single tool touches the space. This project is not a typical residential build. A show hous...

SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN  ·  SPYS DESIGNS The HVAC Coordination Gap That Quietly Ruins ADU Studio Builds When an architect designs the roof, a contractor quotes the equipment, and no one is responsible for the acoustic result, the room fails in the field, where it is most expensive to fix. Here is what it looks like to close that gap before framing starts.     Right now we have t...

There is a version of the dream studio that serious builders have seen in magazines, on YouTube, and in commercial facility tours. Floor to ceiling fabric-wrapped panels, integrated diffuser arrays, custom millwork that signals the room was designed with intention. It looks like a finished, professional space. It looks like it performs better than anything with panels hanging on a wall. In my late...

SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN  ·  SPYS DESIGNS We Just Finished the Plans for His Garage Recording Studio. Here Is What We Had to Solve. A detached two-car garage in California. A vintage guitar collection. A client who knew exactly what he wanted. This is what a complete sound isolation plan set has to account for.       The Garage Already Had One Advantage Most detached garages...

The Three-Person Team Every High-Performance Build Requires By Wilson Harwood  ·  SPYS Designs  ·  Sound Isolation Design   The three roles every high-performance sound isolation build requires. Remove any one and something breaks.   Most people planning a high-performance room think the hard part is finding the right builder. Or the right designer. Or figuring out wh...

SPYS DESIGNS  ·  CASE STUDY  ·  CALIFORNIA ADU This Contractor Did Something 99% of Contractors Would Never Do What happens when a contractor knows the limits of his scope  and makes the call before he says yes to his client.   A contractor in California had a client who wanted to convert a garage into an ADU. Not unusual. But the client also wanted the space to be fu...

This Client Broke Every Studio Design Rule. Here’s Why We Let Him. SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN · SPYS DESIGNS · CASE STUDY       Most studio designers would have taken this project. They would have listened to the brief, nodded along, and then designed exactly the room they wanted to design. French doors would have been replaced with a solid slab. The corner desk would have been moved. T...

SOUND ISOLATION DESIGN  ·  SPYS DESIGNS  ·  CASE STUDY Why Every Ceiling We Design Requires a Different Solution   If you have spent any time researching how to soundproof a basement ceiling, you have probably encountered confident advice about adding more drywall, installing resilient channel, or filling the joist cavity with insulation. That advice is not wrong. But it i...