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I wrote about this on Quora [1] some time ago. Here are the highlights on some ways to check if the unit you're touring has an above average acoustical design without just making noise in an adjacent unit:

(1) Is the floor construction concrete and steel or a wood joist system. The concrete/steel building type is preferred. A caveat is if it is a "loft" style with no ceiling (drywall, etc) and is open to the concrete structure for reasons I'll describe at the end.

(2) Ask if the apartment building was designed to convert to condos at some point. If the potential conversion was known during design, an acoustics professional may have been involved.

(3) Is the space marketed as "luxury?" While dangerous to trust marketing this much, if legitimately so, should have "above norm" acoustical separation between spaces.

(4) Pull a wall plate off a switch that's in a demising wall between units and look for fiberglass in the wall cavity around the edges of the backbox. You may be able to knock on walls and tell if they're hollow or fiberglass filled. If you find two layers of drywall between the plate and backbox, that's a good sign.

(5) Often the bathroom/toilet plumbing is along the corridor wall in newer buildings. Can you hear the water running from the corridor? If so, you can expect to hear the neighbors' plumbing above your unit too. Listen for water hissing in the walls while you run the kitchen sink.

Yes there's noise through walls from adjacent neighbors, but be aware of impact noises above. If floors are hard (not carpet) expect to hear footfall noise unless a resilient underlayment was properly installed in the units and/or the ceiling is isolated in the unit below. If the unit has hardwood floors, check for a gap between the baseboard trim and the floor by running a business card between. If it doesn't fit, then the resilient floor is compromised and your neighbors below are likely to hear your footfalls, and chances are you will hear your neighbors' above too.

[1] https://www.quora.com/When-renting-an-apartment-how-can-I-te...

At this point, if I ever have to look at living in apartments/condos again, I will limit my search only to concrete high rise buildings. Which usually means at least 8 floors or taller -- I don't think it's possible to build that tall with plywood garbage.

I lived in a concrete high rise recently and it wasn't very nice. It didn't feel like a home, more like an office. There was noise from the plumbing and the car park was so noisey I couldn't use it because the ventilation system was almost as loud as a jet engine.

I am moving into a brand new 3 story building made with concrete slab floors and masonry block walls. It has nice high ceilings and I got the best corner with only 1 shared wall, lots of Windows and natural light, and quiet street. Unfortunately, it is very rare to find an apartment this good.

Why can't you use the car park? The noise prevents you from parking your car there?

Honestly, I would too. Having plywood subfloors might be ok if they topped it with gypcrete, but living with floor squeaks and footfalls from another tenant above is no fun.

Plywood has it's place in economical housing that's earthquake safe. The shame is just if the market rent is high enough that better construction could have been afforded by the developer in the first place.

Sounds like the entire of Japan, no wonder you have to take your shoes off before entering. All in China is concrete, I don't think I've ever heard my neighbors above me. However, I remember in my old place, they had a small dog and I heard his paws all the time. Never people feet, just paws (well, we are supposed to take off our shoes here also, floors are all hardwood, no carpet in the entire country).

Gypcrete is better than plain old floors and probably the best that can be done with wood framing.

That won't be enough unfortunately - a lot of solid brick/concrete buildings have cheap non-load-bearing walls.

Or do what I used to do - just ask the neighbours what the noise is like.

What for buildings that are brick-on-mortar?

I presume this is the exterior facade? What's the interior construction?

Chalk-Sandstone bricks on common mortar interior, it’s the most common interior construction here.

The exterior is clay bricks on mortar.

I'm not familiar with the details of this construction, but in general massive building materials (concrete, CMU, brick) are your friend. The risks are penetrations through these materials for pipes and electrical conduit or other openings at the top of wall.

It would make for a good blog post to talk about how mass relates to sound blocking between spaces and how we've learned to "hack" wall partitions using mass-air-mass assemblies (like standard drywall walls) instead of just mass alone.

I guess you should just make sure the sound reduction standard is part of the specs. The country where I live (Germany) uses a pretty simple rule to reduce the number of court cases for sound protection issues like this - a certain standard is considered "state of the art", and if a developer wants to deviate from it he needs to specify it explicitly in the contract. For residential multi-tenant buildings, state of the art is considered what is specified in class II in DIN norm 4109 appendix 2. that stated a minimum reduction of 55 DB for walls and ceilings under a certain measurement regime, and a maximum level of 25 DB for technical installments in the building, among other things. I moved into such a building lately, and most of the times (like now) it is dead silent to the point you can listen to the clock ticking. If a baby cries at night in the floor above, it can be audible, but not to the point where one gets woken up. Overall it is a good compromise that is as good or better to the places I lived in previously.

I'm sure this is all true, but I've also heard that Neubau apartment buildings tend to transmit a lot more noise (I've never lived in one), as compared to Altbau apartments with much thicker walls.

Lived in altbau buildings for 10+ years. It totally depends. In our previous flat the most silent wall was the (modern) drywall to the adjacent apartment. In the one before there were steal beams which transmitted noise if something like a speaker was positioned too close.

The worst buildings are probably the postwar period buildings which were built both cheaply and without the regulatory framework in use today.

I lived in a very quiet building from the 50s in east Germany. But my apartment was at the top, so no noises from above, and only quiet people to one site.

Take note building developers. I WILL PAY MORE.

There are three potential problems that we frequently come across:

1. Many building developers just don't care, so long as the structure meets minimum code (which is typically based on the International Building Code model standard of STC 50)

2. Many building developers (and architects) may care, but don't have the knowledge to pull it off. They may even design sound insulation measures based on existing designs, but may not be aware that a particular detail difference between the reference design and their design may render the the sound insulation moot.

3. The developers and/or architects may care and may have the knowledge to properly design the structure, but the contractors either don't care or don't have the knowledge to construct the building properly leading to short-circuits or substitutions the render the sound insulation design useless.

I'm not an architect, or familiar with construction practices, etc.

My theory is however that because the demand for high end, luxury rental apartments, or even just apartments in general, is so high in some places right now that contractors/investors know that despite short-cuts and things like sound insulation, they know they can still fill the complex and meet/beat their ROI goals.

The problem with that, I believe, is the demand will come and go and these buildings 10-20 years from now might have a hard time keeping the needed occupancy rate. So many things can affect that, i.e., young couples/families actually may not mind living in urban apartments, however; If a large number of complexes are terrible with noise pollution, they may opt to move to a stand alone house in the suburbs. And many other societal trends, etc.

I think we are cutting corners on many new buildings right now that may create low occupancy areas later on. All the growth and development of today will be for nothing. It's the mentality of, "I don't care about this neighborhood or what it will be like in 10 years+, I can make my money now and move on, who cares".

How do we make the large capital investment world care and stay interested long-term (10+ years).

In the case of sound insulation, the solution would be to mandate sound insulation (STC) and ceiling/floor insulation (IIC) testing as a condition of obtaining the occupancy permit.

Such testing is performed on HUD-financed housing and for housing where state and/or Federal authorities are kicking in funds to mitigate noise from a capital project (typically an airport, highway or rail project). For private developments, it's typically not done unless the developer thinks the architect or contractor screwed up and wants to cover his ass in the event of a lawsuit down the line.

Individuals care about the future market worth of their home quite a lot (more than is healthy, IMO). If you can tell them a particular apartment will be unsellable in 10 or 20 years, they'll listen, and may well buy a different one.

My theory is that there are enough people who don't care that much about noise that they'll sell fine in 10+ years too.

Overall people are not so smart and builders take advantage of it. They can advertise "Granite countertops" but not "concrete construction"

The problem is most people don't know enough about construction that they can tell whether a place is going to be noisy or not. Once they're in it's too much of a hassle to move just because you can hear your neighbors fighting at 2:00 am.

I toured an apartment building several years ago that had 2-story units, where a unit's living space was on top of it's bedrooms, so a cross-section of the building would look something like:

Unit C living space

Unit C bedrooms

Unit B living space

Unit B bedrooms

Unit A living space

Unit A bedrooms

This means that the space directly above one's bedrooms - their very own living space - was less likely to be occupied while they were sleeping. Seemed like a very ingenious design to me.

My life has taken me to live in SFHs now, so I don't really look at a lot of apartment buildings anymore, but I've never seen another building with this design.

Except if your sleep-awake cycle don't align. This goes horribly wrong if you are entertaining guests while your neighbours are trying to sleep, or the family upstairs is having children's saturday playtime while the doctor downstairs is trying to sleep off a 36-hour double night shift.

Read the comment again. Your room above your bedroom is your own living room. This means that the family upstairs having a party is your own family :)

Most modern buildings with concrete ceilings have little sounds transmission to the apartment above, the most annoying sound transmission is from footsteps to the apartment below. That's why that idea works so nicely.

Oh, I see! The text layout confused me. I thought you meant the layouts are stacked so that identical apartments aren't exactly on top of one another, but shifted.

^^^ This, SO much.

I'm single. I ended up in a house solely because every shared living space tried had serious noise issues.

I don't need all this room -- nor the maintenance. But I am most reluctant to share walls, ceiling, even a floor with someone else, ever again. Even if it's quiet, moving in, who knows what you're going to get next month, year?

Urban planners want us to live more densely and "efficiently." My primary response: Fix the noise problems. Then we can talk.

Urban planners want us to live more densely and "efficiently." My primary response: Fix the noise problems. Then we can talk.

Absolutely. It's not a small problem or minor inconvenience. I once got home to my flat after work to find that my downstairs neighbours had come round and aggressively criticised my then-girlfriend for the noise we'd been making walking around the previous night... when we were staying with family 50 miles away. The noise was bad enough that normally pleasant people had apparently been very much not pleasant, and it was carrying across multiple homes such that they couldn't even tell who it was that was keeping them up all night. (Spoiler: It turned out to be the flat adjacent to ours on the same level, where the thin carpets originally installed had been replaced by otherwise attractive wood flooring.)

I had to make this decision recently. I am moving into an apartment soon. It is all concrete though, so I think it might be different to the types of apartments you tried. I did think about moving into a house in the middle of nowhere but the thought of a single person living in a 4 bedroom house with a yard was just too ridiculous for me. Also, the windows of the houses were only a few metres apart so I am not sure it would have been an better. The other problem was that the demographic was very different to me.

> My primary response: Fix the noise problems. Then we can talk.

People in some other parts of the world already denser and quieter. It's a shame the US is so backward there.

This resonates (!?) with me. For 10 years or so noise from above was perhaps the single most annoying thing in my life. You can adapt to a continuous noise, but intermittent stomping ... oy vey. If I ever go back to apartment living, somehow ensuring this is not a problem (if you are just viewing it's hard to know whether pleasant quietness is temporary or permanent) is my number one priority.

There was a good article a few weeks ago about apartment noise:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/realestate/soundproofing-f...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10766672

I noticed this when I lived in a 12 story concrete cinderblock in Crystal city Virginia. I never once heard my neighbors. It was literally concrete between every floor. Then I moved out to Fairfax Virginia into a newer, plywood construction. I could hear my neighbors quite well. Newer buildings used cheaper materials, and as such sound travels easily.

> I would pay so much more in rent per month for a place that had more sound insulation. Take note building developers. I WILL PAY MORE.

I wonder where you live. I live in a under-developed nation with bad real-estate and there is a good number of building with special noise isolation. Granted, they are double the price. Not only because of noise isolation, they come with other perks (security, pool, quality of materials...).

If you are living in a 2million+ city, my guess this kind of estate already exists. Maybe you should search better.

United States. City is 2 million +, however the area I'm in is very hip/wealthy (mostly young professionals between 23 - 40 with salary jobs). I like to joke that our city's official bird is the crane, because there is a construction crane on every block. The speed at which they build new apartments is ridiculous. They are simply cranking them out as fast as possible to meet demand.

This city is also had the 1/2nd highest growth rate in the US in 14'/15'...if that's any clue. (it's Dallas...)

And yes, apartments do exist here that have great sound insulation, however out of the newer complexes, I'd say most do not. That is my point really.

I live in a 20million+ city in China (we call 2million a village). Everything is concrete and overbuilt (walls, floors are thick); so noise for the units around you is fine. However, outside is another story: I've had many sleepless nights with construction outside, and delivery trucks with backup warning sounds...ugh. Right now is dance-in-the-square time, and I can hear whatever music the old ladies are dancing to pretty clearly!

> Architects, engineers, whoever...please, please, please, stop skimping out on noise insulation in new construction.

Noise isolation is expensive. Owners and developers rarely want to pay for it. The problem is rarely the architect/engineer, the problem is that it's an expensive up-front design+construction cost, and also difficult to achieve after construction.

They don't care. The bottom dollar is all they care about. Even new single family custom construction will be built like crap if you don't ride them hard and pay premium prices.

The only quiet low/mid rise buildings built now are the precast concrete building (think Hampton inn). They only get built that way because of the building codes.

>> I now base what apartment I live in by the thickness and sound isolation of the walls and ceilings/floors.

>> I have to take the people above me a bottle of wine and ask them kindly to try and not make as much noise ...

I just live on the top floor.

When I was apartment hunting I refuse to live on any floor but the top for this exact reason. My heating and cooling bills are terrible because there's not much insulation, but there's no one walking around above my head.

I vaguely recall reading an article summarising research that found that one of the overlooked methods of reducing crime in densely populated cities was better sound insulation.

The problem is that it rarely is a direct cause, except in rare crime passionnel situations. However, there's a measurable indirect effect when you add up the extra irritation, lack of sleep, etc. which affects all inhabitants of an apartment block. The consequences are measurable when you look at the "average".

I can remember looking at a new build apartment in Bath (UK) and having my wife go next door and talk loudly. We walked away from it. Building regs are minimum standards.

If you are ready to pay more, why not to soundproof your room? It's not expensive.

How can you after the fact effectively silence sound from below (floor) and above (ceiling)? Genuinely curious what's possible and not expensive.

"Expensive" is in the eye of the payer. Do you think a few thousand is expensive? A developer absolutely does. Also, it takes more space, so doing it after the fact may lower your ceiling more than you're comfortable with (assuming your landlord is even willing.)

We could solve this with code updates and strict enforcement. However, pro business types will complain that it increases rents (probably true in the short term) and drives down development (probably not actually true.) Also, better sound management generates more livable spaces that better support city growth in 10 or 20 years, which is also important from a sustainability point of view. But nobody wants to pay for that. That's "someone else's" problem.

Note: Ceiling heights are part of spec. Even losing 1" could put you out of spec.

As a renter you have very little power to do anything.

Where I live you're allowed to stick things on the ceiling as long as you take them off again when you leave.

Cheaper and easier to do it during development vs. after the fact. He wants to move to a new place with sound insulation and not do it himself.

Because installing soundproofing that effectively blocks footsteps of a 3-year old is impossible after the building was built in the wrong way.

Sound propagates through floors, heating installations, windows, cable ducts etc. If those weren't properly installed and shielded it's pretty much impossible to dampen sound without rebuilding several floors.

Assuming the poster is American, he's likely talking about a rental unit (apartment), not an owner-occupied unit (condominium).

If that's the case, what can one do to alleviate noise problems in an apartment? Changing the flooring, or adding drywall, isn't usually feasible.

We recently converted an apartment space in a mixed use building to an office. It was very loft-like with 18ft exposed steal ceilings and mostly glass and concrete walls. It sounded like a gymnasium when I lived in it as an apartment. You could hear the neighbor walking around his living room and could barely understand someone speaking normally across the room. An acoustics expert recommended a number of changes but for a rental space acoustic panels like Armstrong Soundsoak and area rugs on the wood floors (with high quality padding below) are two things we did that are removable and not as expensive as you might think. They made up about half of the dampening effect while a drop ceiling did the rest. It now sounds like a library and we can no longer hear the neighbor at all (nor can he hear us).

I hadn't thought of the Armstrong panels. How do they install? I always assumed they were permanent (or nearly so), glued to the walls.

Ours are held on with strapping and few sheetrock screws since they are way overhead but they are very light weight. Picture hangers[1] would work for a small lowdown install or maybe some sort of double stick something... you would have to repaint and patch some holes/paint but its a huge difference. While we where waiting for them to be installed we just had them leaning against the walls like paintings waiting to be hanged. Even that was amazingly different.

http://www.caseyswood.com/shoppingcart/zen-cart/images/Sawto...

Offically! you do this with a thing called "Impaling Clips"

http://www.armstrong.com/pdbupimages/209751.pdf

https://acousticalsolutions.com/product/impaling-clip/

My new favorite product name

This is what regulation is for. It would never work just by asking them.

The free market ought to be able to handle this fine. It's not that hard to find out how noisy an apartment will be when you're considering moving in.