Hello, i just moved to a new apartment near a train station so we hear the train horn everyhour the walls are super thin paper thin. We have a really long wall, and inwantsd to know what I could buy to use to put on the walls to reduce the train sound horn you can hear it all thoughout the apartment. And insight would be greatly appreciated. 🙏
Philip Newell has a great method of using 4" 5lb/ft3 of reconstituted polyurethane foam glued to your exisiting walls, and then two layers of 5/8" drywall then glued to the foam. This creates a mass spring mass system without demoing your existing walls. If you did that on your walls and ceiling it could help, but sound would still travel through the foor, doors and windows, and HVAC if those are not addressed as well.
Currently building a studio in BC (Canada). Inspector made us fill the entire cavity with insulation (no air gap between the 2 structures). This was the only solution he allowed other than adding a layer of drywall between the 2 structures (triple leaf system). I'm pretty sure his interpretation of the code wasn't accurate but it's something others may run into. He wouldn't allow using something like rigid fiberglass (or even drywall) across only the top plates as fire could still travel down the length of the wall between stud cavities. It really just came down to his definition of "concealed spaces" which need to be firestopped between each other.
Yes, codes will always make studio design much harder. Some are stricter than others. The good news is that the isolation filling the gap will not hurt your soundproofing, in fact it really does help.
Good topic 😮 Actually, I never thought about this. I'd imagine once you have the fire stop in place, you would want to install the resilient mount bracket from wall to ceiling. So technically you can screw down the fire stop to the resilient mount bracket and keep some form of isolation. However, what if you don't have space for a wall gap and you only build a resilient wall or hat channel wall. Would you still need some sort of a fire stop?
I don't usually do fire stops for resilient channel, but you make a good point that there technically is still an air gap. Rockwool is a great fire stopping tool and its qualities mean it won't transfer sound easily.
