QUIETEST ISO CAB on the Planet?? (DIY) 

For all those asking/wondering, there wasn’t any good way to let you hear the cabinet with the lids off versus with the lids on. The difference in volume is pretty extreme so by the time I had a room mic loud enough to actually hear what the cabinet sounds like with the lid on it would be completely over driven and distorting the preamp when the lid was off. And if I set the microphone to be able to handle the volume level with the lid off, you would hear literally nothing with the lid on. The noise reduction of the cabinet is right about 65 DB. Hope that helps someone, thanks y’all for watching!

WOW ---- WOW ! Colt I am turning 66 next month and I live and breath what you are doing and have done, and have to say I am totally jealous. I am working on my second studio in my home and I just keep running out of room, energy and time. What you have accomplished is incredible and I can see the enthusiasm and excitement in your videos, something we called passion back in the day because $50 a night never changed and the mold we were cut from, well you just do not come across that often anymore, or at least I don't. Keep pushing the envelope and know you are raising the bar for those who follow. And my hat is off to your other half. It takes a lot of support to get where your at and I believe you know what I am saying. So don't forget to say thank you occasionally, because behind every guitar and every hour there is a wonderful person who supported that. Keep it up and great job.

Would love to hear a room mic of you playing and taking the two lids off vs having them both on.

would love to hear a comparison of iso cab to a proper in room mic'd cab and some Impulse responses to see how they all differ in and out of a mix.

Damn, man! That's one kick-ass design. You must have spent your nights thinking it over. Thank you for sharing your fantastic ideas with the rest of us.

I had never seen one as a box inside a box. I had the same idea about the same time you did. I did mine five or six hears ago. Mine is very similar but weight was my #1 concern, so mine is 100% carbon fiber. I used nidacore and honeycomb for vibration and frequency differentiation between box 1 and 2. Mine weighs way less than a 4x12 cab. Both of my boxes are lined with different densities of sound deadening foam. I built a double box and a single box both, but like the double box design better. I am glad I found this because I am tired of people telling me I wasted my time and created something useless. Actually, I am super surprised that more people aren't looking for these/making these. They are so useful in a studio situation. Great job and great documentation.

Brilliant. Probably heavy. Love it.

You need to patent this design. Seriously! Nice job.

Your guitar tone sounds so good. I would have never guessed it’s from an iso cab. That’s for the detailed information on the build. Must be heavy!!!!!

I’m very impressed with your iso cab. And by your attitude. Thank you for sharing this.

It would be really cool to illustrate swapping out a few different speakers and the tonal difference they make.

The opening tune was AWESOME😀😀😀😀😣

Your channel is invaluable in the sense that many channels tell you about gear and how to get sounds but very few if any actually explain how to build the studio correctly. Your iso cab is a stroke of genius in my opinion. I am a fan.

My ISO cab builds sounded so bad, I literally threw them in the garbage. These days I kill a lot less volume, and use an entire 4x4x8 area to keep 10 speakers quiet. Carpet, foam, and ceiling tile. Very Red Green (duct tape!) style build. Love your work, no cut corners.

This is an exceptionally intelligent design and to my ears the guitar tone was open and natural. It triggered an idea instantly. One could have an array of these in a room and create a situation where a band could play a take togther live and the bleed would be almost non existent. Obviously they'd need earphones, but they'd have the visual feed back and feeling. Vocalist would need to be in a booth. All of this aside, have you considered creating a complete design for this? An accurate piece by piece construction manual? I can see why, weight considered it would be difficult to sell commercially because the shipping alone would cost the same as the unit I guess. I would pay for a manual happily, because the level of detail is beyond my Capabilities, or at least it would be way harder without the manual. I have done everything from building furniture, pointing, wiring and I know how an idea expands as you go through the project, but for example the idea of staggering the joints. I don't think I would have thought of that, let alone the decoupling. You should definitely patent this idea if you haven't and you definitely deserved that Pepsi.

Bro ,so jelly.....in a great way , love to tune in and great jam by the way .

love all your vids and knew you had "the stuff" but that solo at the intro caught me off guard!!! nice playing dude!

one could use Quiet Rock Dry wall ( Sheet of QuietRock is the equivalent of 8 sheets of the same thickness of stacked ) to further soundproof the ISO cab

This is outstanding! I happen to be in the process of building my own ISOCab and found many of your requirements for this "box" to be similar to my own. I do not live in an apartment so I do not have a common wall between my studio and a grumpy neighbor....but I DO have a wife who tolerates my sonic abuse. She has been a "good sport" for several years as I built the studio in one end of OUR home after our daughter moved away. It occurred to me that perhaps I should not force her to endure the noise ( her description ) late into the night so the ISO BOX was conceived. I built my box to hold a pair of 2x12 cabs. I drive them with a Morin modified JCM800 Marshall head. I used 3/4 inch MDF sheets ( REAL DENSE ). The floor is doubled-up so it is 1 1/2 inch thick. I installed the BIG 6 inch ball bearing castors with brakes. I considered using the "suspension" technique for the speaker cabs but it was not practical for the cabinets I have. I de-coupled the box ( walls & top ) with two layers of 3/4 inch "R-TECH" foam insulation spaced 1/4 inch apart. Then I have 4" acoustic pyramid foam on the walls and top fixed to the foam insulation. The floor is 3" neoprene mat. ( It was a yoga mat in it's first life ). All the XLR & speaker jacks have been wired just as you have done. This box is a 48" cube. It lives most of it's life in a storage shed just outside my house and will only fit through a sliding glass door into my living room . With the speaker cabinets inside it weighs a little over 600 pounds. My wife is happy with the results , therefore I am happy. Please share with me WHERE you found those latches for the top of your box!!! Jeff Cramer Rat Nest Studios San Bernardino California

Another great video, I really enjoy seeing how you customize everything based on your needs and build it yourself. Super cool.

I like the way you floated the inner box. Nice job and thanks for posting.

Awesome Colt. Great job , love the iso cab.

I’m underway on my own copy of this cab. I work in a cabinet shop with tons of access to scrap plywood. Im trying to make mine lighter and smaller so I’ve gone with 3/4” plywood with 1/2” drywall green glued to the insides. I have 1” thick acoustic panels I salvaged from an old work project. All of this has allowed me to get down to a 36” long by 26” wide by 26” tall outer dimension. I’ve ordered my audio jacks as well as handles and latches. So far I’ve spent less than $60 since I got the plywood and acoustic panels free. If I can get 40 dB of reduction I’ll be extremely happy. If not I’ll have to up the insulation and add more layers of plywood to the outside

suspension idea is brilliant for taming low end. 65db! that is amazing when folks are buying isocabs for over $1k that only reduce around 30 db. .

Fantastic design.

Absolutely fantastic! Issue #1 I’m not handy issue#2 I’m really not handy like this.

Now you just need the trick Sylvia Massy uses for feedback for solos when she has her 4x12 in an isolated room... Patch in a small tube combo in the control room. You can do feedback with studio monitors, but a lot of people complain it's not the same, kinda like with an FRFR cabinet. Haven't tried it myself, but I'm no soloist. Normally, I'd do some gibberish and outsource it to someone better. In the meantime, it's usually in the same room, but I'm looking for a quiet solution other than digital. Keith Merrow has good results with just a Randall iso cab, but he still keeps it in another room, and usually uses the same speaker, and I guess the combination works for him. He just skipped the v30 and uses some WGS speaker that gives him what he needs... But that might not be ideal if one wants to use a different speaker I suppose. That specific combination might just work for him... Could sound like garbage with a different speaker.. Would be cool to make something where you could change the dimensions of the speaker box by adding / pulling boards... But that could make the whole setup bigger... I've thought about doing this with Mesa cabs though... To convert an OS to Traditional. One would just have to put small brackets inside, on the top and bottom to change the height from 32" to 30" (doing the math because those are the outer dimensions of the OS and Trad cabs). I suppose that if someone has room, they can just have two cabs, but it saves some cheese and room for people that are in a bit more of a cramped situation, if they want to experiment.

Like it! I'm thinking of building a couple of these but using lightweight concrete blocks to build the outer enclosure. The ones that are airated like pumice. My studio is about 12 x 5 meters, so a reasonable size. There's actually only one corner of the room that is solid walls (its a solid stone, former cowshed), the other corners have two doorways and a large window, so thinking i could build the two booths in that solid corner with gaps behind and they will double as a giant bass trap.

Great demo and understanding of acoustics/Sound Treatment and damping, just what I was looking for. Great Craftsmen ship as well. I also really appreciate the fact that sometimes, you just got to build this stuff yourself to appease your needs!

Yep, you designed and built it right Colt! I studied acoustics and studio building from writings of some of the best in the biz, including Rod Gervais, (author of "Build It Like A Pro"), "Boggy" Petrovic, Andre Vare, John L. Sayers, John H. Brandt, and many more. I did this for 1-1/2 years before my last personal studio build just to learn how to do it right. You've covered all the concepts Mass, Decoupling, Resonance Damping (mechanical and air-borne), Resonance Shifting, etc. using Green Glue, Rubber Isolation Hangers, Staggered Butt Joints, "Safe Door" Step Seals, etc. The only area that your design possibly doesn't cover completely (but it's obviously still great for guitar) is internal volume to get the air in the boxes to be of low resonance (yep, a sealed container has air resonance as well as panel resonance). This too could be mitigated by building a second "breather" iso box that had a "port within a port" out of steel water pipes as a connector-way between the two (separate) iso boxes. A lot of work to make this idea work, but it would yield approximately an octave lower resonance from the standpoint of the internal volume. Then you could design in an accommodation for bass speakers (maybe limiting it to a single 15")! Anyway, great video and excellent writing and playing - rock on!

Yours is the most complex and creatively designed iso cab I've seen. Excellent Job. Thank you for sharing your design. Great video, too.

Man, you are genius! I'm pretty happy with the one I've made my own but this is definitely on another level, awesome playing as well, you're fkn inspiring! 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻🤟🏻

Nice job and thanks for the explanations.

Just discover your channel! Sick project! Greats videos. Thanks for sharing!

What a brilliant idea re floating the inner iso cab in the larger box!!!!! Superb :)

To give people an idea on how heavy this thing would be coming from a construction guy of many years (I'm out of that biz for a long time now) 1 4x8 3/4 sheet of plywood (or 23/32) is about 65-70 pounds. Considering all the layers, and looking like this is 8+ sheets, that's about 500 pounds. That would not be fun hauling that upstairs, no sir. What is even HEAVIER is MDF 4x8s, which are by my estimation 2x the weight, it's hard to handle solo. That's what I I'm going to use on my iso box. My studio is downstairs, and I'm happy for it.

Clever design, my dude.

Damn man you know your stuff. Thanks for the concise information.

Aaaahhhhh!!!! Get a new stool!!!!! Nice video and great info, but got dang that creaking is driving me nuts!

That intro, is just so wicked, sir.

Great playing buddy!

Consider trying mass loaded vinyl for this sort of project. It will take care of a lot of mechanical vibration and sound transmission.

Great design.

BEST INFORMATIVE - EDUCATIONAL video !! Thank you for sharing your experience and education !

Very cool man! I built one and sounded great as yours does, but had to take it apart because my wife didn’t want to look at it in our house(even if it was my studio room). I made a choice to shop around to find an iso cab that could fit in my closet. The best sounding, isolating and looking one I found was the SG-BOX by Grossmann! It is incredible as is the customer service. Plus it cost less to ship from overseas than building one and will save your back. It’s also ‘quiet enough’ that I can blast my EVH while our triplets sleep upstairs hehe! Great vid though!

Awesome! Thanks for sharing this. I really wanna build myself a nice ISO cab like yours now.

Man. So great. Well done. I've always wanted to make my own. One day!

Amazing concept! Really great idea, especially with the decoupling :-)

I like the hanging inner box concept to remove contact vibrations. When I build my iso boxes, I'll probably do a hanging floor I can just set my amps/cabs onto, as opposed to a second inner box.

Great job Looks very impressive I would love to hear the sound

Would love a short follow up video with how quiet the can sounds!!

A sample of in room volume with cabinet compared to iso box would be nice.

That's really cool! Unfortunately $1200-$1500 2 years ago when this video published probably equals about $4k today considering the cost of ply wood more than doubled & even tripled & quadrupled in some cases then factoring in this crazy inflation we're facing where prices on everything have skyrocketed, things really get crazy. I may try to convert a portion of my closet into an iso cab but I really like your design!!!

Super informative and easy to understand

Most cabinets are about 30-35dB down. If this one is over 60 dB down, that is roughly 99.9% down from an SPL level, or about an 87.5% down from a perceived volume level, because decibels are base-10 logarithmic. AWESOME JOB!!!

Looks great, man. Nice cab.

You deserve more subscribers!

Built one after watching this! Its so great!! Sounds amazing and can be used in my apartment!!(thick walls though). Cannot thank you enough.

some serious engineering went into this build. I would have never thought to do the suspended inner cab. Thanks for the knowledge

Thanks for sharing your design, very cool. If I'm not mistaken, it looks like you have gaps in the weatherstripping on your inner box at the corners. If you tighten up those corners I bet it will get even quieter! You went through as many measures as possible on the outer box, so it might be a nice, easy improvement!

FANTASTIC video! Great design and presentation. I have a friend interested in building an ISO box and I will be sending him this video for sure.

thats one badass cab brother

Please take us through what you did in the production pretty please Colt

That's awesome. My wife and neighbors would love this..lol

Great stuff. I will keep watching your vids! Good communicator. Look forward to more. Best to you

Man your channel is becoming one of my favourite channels in youtube! Great videos!! Thanks!!

man, that is impressive to say the least. well done!!

I’m working on my own version. I am going to try building the outer box from the inside out so that I can test it as I build and see if multiple plywood/drywall layers are necessary. I think 3/4” Baltic birch and 2” of acoustic panels may be enough and would save my a lot of weight and cut down on size.

wow!! That's a pretty robust construction.. phew!!

Great Idea, box in box, kinda like a microphone basket.

6 String Sill Set !! 😎🎸🎶🎵

Fantastic job! Would it be possible to post the measurements of both speaker cabinet and the iso chamber?

Not exactly the same, but a number of years ago, we built something similar for a very loud server that was going into a small office with no server closet. It worked wonders to keep things quiet. The big challenge with that was creating a dramatic drop in noise while building in a fan system to air cool the server that ran pretty hot. Anyway, nice work!

So Glad I found you! You've covered quite a few of the things banging around in my head. Thanks dude!!

Brilliant construction and design!

Dimensions for inside and outside box would've been awesome. I see multiple have asked but I don't see an answer. Anyway thanks for the video. Well done.

I have one too in my studio, works well with a greenback.... I think i might need to do one with a 10" driver though... could be cool

Great information. Thanks

Hi Colt,- thanks for your kind reply. In case you were wondering what progressive operatic symphonic vikingr folk metal actually sounds like ( as I have a feeling it´s probably not THE most in vogue style of music in Nashville, Tennessee :) ) I have taken the liberty to put together a suggestion list to some bands and some characteristic songs,- if for no other reason than to bring y´all up to speed on what the international rock scene sounds like today. Should give you and all of the other hard working music people following your channel a slight competitive edge, hopefully. Hope you´re gonna enjoy it ( even though it´s a bit different from what you people are normally used to). Here goes: Nightwish- Storytime and Song Of Myself - Live At Wacken 2013 ( Floor Jansen ) ( Symphonic Metal) Jinjer - Pisces- Live Session and Teacher, Teacher ( Tatiana Shmaylyuk) ( Progressive Metalcore) Epica - Sancta Terra - Live Retrospect Show Ft. Floor Jansen (Simone Simons) ( Operatic Symphonic Metal ) Nightwish - Phantom Of The Opera - End Of An Era dvd 2008 ( Tarja Turunen ) ( Operatic Symphonic Metal ) Epica - Consign To Oblivion and Cry For The Moon (studio version)( Simone Simons)( Operatic Symphonic Metal ) Arch Enemy - Nemesis - Live At Wacken ( Alissa White-Gluz) ( Melodic Death Metal ) Eluveitie - Thousandfold and Rebirth (Chrigel Glanzmann / Anna Murphy) ( Folk Metal ) Faun - Federkleid and Walpurgisnacht ( Fiona Rüggeberg / Katja Moslehner) ( Think Euro Bluegrass and Good Ole Boys from the Middle Ages :) ) Blackmore´s Night - Name Of A Rose ( Candice Night / Ritchie Blackmore) (Faun and Blackmore´s Night - The precursor genre of music for modern day Operatic Symphonic Metal, Power Metal, Folk Metal and Viking Metal - modern day European Folk) Amon Amarth - Guardians Of Asgaard - Live At Summer Breeze and Twilight Of The Thunder God- Live Official Video ( Johan Hegg) ( Papa Bear King Vikingr and his raiders having a ball - Swedish/ Finnish Viking Metal ) Tyr- Hold the Heathen Hammer High and Sunset Shore - Official Videos ( Faroese Viking Metal ) Eivor Pálsdottir - Trøllabundin - (live or studio) ( Eivør Pálsdottir) ( Faroese ancient pagan Roots-Folk) Blackbriar - I´d Rather Burn ( official video) ( Zora Cock) ( Dutch Power Metal ) Delain - Masters Of Destiny and Burning Bridges - Official Videos ( Charlotte Wessels ) ( Dutch Symphonic Metal) Frozen Crown - Neverending ( Italian Power Metal ) Wardruna ft. Aurora - Helvegen - live ( Einar Kvitrafn Selvik / Aurora) ( Original Viking Age lyrics,- modern Scandinavian Vikingr-Folk ) Heilung I Lifa - Krigsgaldr ( Maria Franz) ( shamanistic Late Bronze Age tribal music ) Give them all a listen,- you will not regret it. Enjoy.

Hi there... I always enjoy your videos is like talk with a friend...never change your style...

Dude, you didn't make an isocab, this is a bunker! I'm researching some projects to build one, and I got a lot of lessons from yours, Thank you.

Don't stop making videos your a very interesting dude and I love your videos! I know nothing about music but it makes me wanna start learning! Keep it UP!!!

What a great idea!!! Well done Colt!!!

Mass is mass. Weight is the force of gravity or acceleration acting on that mass. :)

Really like your playing dude. The intro track was killer 👏👏🤘

discovered you the other day, top tips and congratulations on your new studio. I have just spent alot of my money on starting my own PA and live recording set up, I am hoping to use the profits I make to start funding a decent home studio like you have now. Thanks for inspiring!

Thanks for the in-depth explanations!

226KG !! thats a big fella. great design love the decoupling idea.

Colt that iso cab is awesome!

Awesome video amigo. Great to hear more rock out of Nashville

Amazing and obviously well thought out iso cab, man! Great playing as well. New sub!

i see you pinned a comment below. i was thinking the same thing. unless you had a decibel meter in the room showing the difference in sound, there is no way to set the levels for youtube to demonstrate that. pretty cool man ill be checking this out, bc i also reside in an apartment and it sucks

Hey Colt, thanks for this video! Super helpful. I tried building something a number of years ago and it worked ok, but this looks like the bees knees! What are the exterior dimensions of the internal cabinet and the main isolation cabinet.

I loved the opener 😄

New to the channel! Great tones, guitars and very impressive craftsmanship on that iso cab! What do you think about labyrinth Rivera built in their Silent sister to allow the speaker to breath while still keeping it soundproof?

great video, super informative! thank you for taking the time to make this

Very nice! I am sure that you took extra precaution around those saws and fingers, lol 👍

Nice Job.. Would have been nice to see a db meter reading inside and outside :-) Ok after seeing your part 2 i understood how quiet it is.. Great job

Dude, this thing is friggin amazing. Living in an apartment I have always wanted to build something like this!

thanx for showing this impressive isocab, subscribed!