Sound Proof???

[juneaudrey]

Hello All,

My neighbors are stating to complain about my sound system. I live on the second floor of an apartment complex. I'm in the middle of the two neighbors. One above & one below.

Is there away to absorb or reflect my sound?

[Bryan]

Have you already calibrated your system? Do you have a SPL meter? What times are they complaining? (I.E. late night or is this middle of the day?) What gear do you have?

[cam]

Bass sound travels far and through everything. What sounds moderate to you can be unbearable through a wall to your neighbours. My system is calibrated but when I stick my head into my closet in my bedroom two walls away it sounds like my bass is boosted about 10 db. There is nothing you can do in an apartment to capture those frequencies from going to your neighbours. If you were building a dedicated ht room in a house, you would have to use soundproof insulation and preferably 2 layers of drywall. Even then some frequencies will travel through and sound louder then they really are.

[Woochifer]

As others have stated, the bass is probably the culprit here, and in an apartment building you have no way of really controlling how the bass travels from room to room. What sounds reasonable to you can be intolerably loud from where you neighbor sits.

You might just need to set aside some appropriate times for when to turn the volume higher, and if you have a subwoofer, you should step down the level. Once it's past 9 or 10pm, you should use change the Dolby Digital compression setting on your receiver. That will keep the excessive volume swings to a minimum. With other sources like CDs and analog sources, the compression setting probably won't work, but at least with movies the compression will help.