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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

I've thought about how one would design and market soundproofed apartments and houses. You'd need to condense full-spectrum measurements of ambient levels, indoor transmission, and outdoor transmission into just one or a few numbers or letter grades, and convince other apartment buildings and homebuilders to let you run measuring microphones and speakers for a week.

Are there any standards for soundproofed construction like there are for energy-minimized construction?

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If you've ever been inside a house that has insulation installed in all interior walls, the sound mitigation is really something else. That's a feature quite high on my list, if I ever construct a home.

There is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_transmission_class

Cool! Though unfortunately it only goes down to 125Hz or so, so it won't cover water hammer pipe noise, flushing toilets, or footsteps on higher floors.

> The STC is useful for evaluating annoyance due to speech sounds, but not music or machinery noise as these sources contain more low frequency energy than speech.

There's also Room Criteria or Noise Criteria, which measures ambient noise from 16Hz to 4kHz, but not transmission.

My dream is to have greater than 60dB of isolation across 20-20k, and preferably more like 80+. I'd like to be able to sleep inside if there's a marching band, a motorcycle tour, an airshow, and a hurricane all going on outside at the same time (and, in reverse, to be able to do all those things inside without bothering the neighbors).

STC rating, or as you point out maybe a more expansive take on noise attenuation, is going to be high on my requirements list next time I look at an apartment. I think that and general sanitation (i.e lack of rats, roaches, bedbugs, mold) are the things that have the most acute effect on livability. And not having to walk on tiptoes is nice too. Unfortunately new construction is all about making a building cheaply, but soundproofing is almost impossible to do after the fact unless you want to gut a place.

I'm not sure how soundproof it needs to be but my Marine Corps barracks never had sounds come through the ceilings or walls. Concrete.

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