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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

I wish people spoke more about noise insulation in apartments.

If I don't have a baby, I don't want to be woken up in the middle of the night by crying babies. If I don't have any children, I don't want to hear them yelling all day long.

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In my newly built house, I asked for the master bedroom wall to be soundproofed with rockwool and its inner door to be solid wood. It works incredibly well, and it makes the house appear bigger: If someone's watching TV in the living room, I can just go to the master bedroom and shut the door and there's incredible silence.

I did this because as a teenager I always struggled with privacy in my parent's house. Even though the house wasn't small, it was hard to have a conversation with my girlfriend without it being heard in the nearby rooms (my parents rarely watched TV, so there was no sound to mask my voice).

If I ever get the chance to build another house, I will specify rockwool insulation in all inner walls and all-around solid doors. In that way, I can have a small house with great privacy. Or I can study while someone else is watching a movie with surround sound in the adjacent room with no problem.

Rockwool (as a substitution for fiberglass or cellulose insulation) by itself shouldn't do all that much. Are the internal walls 2x4 or 2x6 construction? Do you know the thickness of the drywall panels?

Almost certainly it's the solid door doing most of the work. Doors and windows are absolutely terrible at keeping noise out. I had new windows recently installed, laminated dual-pane, real beasts. In bedrooms that face the street, almost no noise, they're amazing. But in the front room where the front door is? The door might as well be open.

2x4s. I can't remember the specs, but I recall doing research and it was a pretty dense rockwool. I did ask for the drywall panels to be thicker than normal, but I don't recall how much. I found out about staggered 2x4s (http://images.meredith.com/diy/images/2008/12/p_SCTC_100_04....) too late.

I have to agree with Domenic_S, it's probably the solid core doors (I'm guess the jambs and sill are well-sealed also) that's providing most of the benefit moreso than the rockwool.

Staggered studs are an option, resilient channel also works well, provided that it's installed correctly.

Edit: The Rockwool didn't substitute fiberglass -- inner walls are normally not insulated, they're just made of 2x4s with sheetrock on top. I could probably have saved some money by just using regular fiberglass in all inner walls.

You might enjoy this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/realestate/soundproofing-f...

It cuts both ways.

If you had a baby, you wouldn't want them woken up in the middle of their nap by someone coming home and turning on a TV, closing a door, or something else equally normal. If you had children, you'd want them to have a quiet place to study and rest, even when the twenty-something neighbors are throwing a raucous party.

I think most people, including parents, both don't want to be disturbed and don't want to disturb others.

When my sister had her first baby, I was tip-toeing around their house when her baby was sleeping and was told not to.

Apparently if you go about your normal day, babies will get used to falling asleep in a semi-noisy environment. However, you go out of your way to create an ultra quiet place when they sleep, any slight disturbance will wake them up.

True, but there's a difference between "don't bother keeping your voice down when talking in the next room" and "my baby wakes up when the neighbor three apartments down the hall slams his door". I don't necessarily want noise insulation within a dwelling, but I sure want it insulated from my neighbors.

> I don't necessarily want noise insulation within a dwelling, but I sure want it insulated from my neighbors.

For me, this would be the goal. Being able to hear the next room over for loud noises could be a safety issue, but hearing my neighbor has never been a positive. I can see zones of sounds inside a dwelling (e.g. kitchen - dining room - living room sound separated from bedrooms or office).

In my 20 years of experience with apartments and noise, "most" people do not care about disturbing others. This is at best "some" people, but likely "a few".

I live on the ground floor of a six-unit building in a university area. Not too long after the new semester starts, I find myself having to politely get the attention of a new student renter because they are playing music loudly at 3AM.

Every single time I've done it, they've apologized, turned it down, and usually thanked me for doing it myself instead of calling the cops.

I've lived here for about three years now. It's a smaller pile of anecdata than yours but I don't feel like I'm likely to see a different trend any time soon.

I don't buy it. I think being a disturbance is just much easier than one realizes.

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