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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

I live in a modern apartment in Norway (2019). I guess some of our heat insulation demands make it so that we get extra thick walls and floors, but I've never heard any noise from neighbors. No tv sounds, no stamping feet etc. Maybe twice a year someone drills a hole to mount something on the walls and I hear that for a few minutes. Even have a train passing by outside I can't hear with the windows closed.

Point being that it depends.

Edit: modern fire safety also dictates a bit how contained each unit should be, I guess.

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I live in a modern mid-rise in Dallas.

Same experience. Most noise comes from people in the hallways because a solid wood door does not insulate sound.

Traffic noise could be improved with triple pane windows, but really it's just un-restricted mufflers that penetrate, and that should be handled by the city.

Just a tip for anyone dealing with noise in a multi-tenant situation. Get yourself a white noise machine. It's a life changer. I thought I was going to murder my neighbor with his own leaf blower until I got it.

I find that a thunderstorm soundtrack hides external noise better than white noise. It also seems psychologically more relaxing, but YMMV

I just discovered the white noise generator in iOS/macOS. It's in Accessibility settings under Audio Visual. It's been a gamechanger for me.

I envy anyone this works for. For me, white noise is just even more noise.

The most important thing is that it be 'non looping'. I hated white noise until I ponied up for a machine that generated non looping white noise. My mind would automatically latch on to any repetition.

Anecdotally, I've heard the opposite about a lot of the new 5-over-1's going up in the bay area. Several people I know that have moved into recently-built units have complained that they can hear far more neighbor noise than they used to in their old units. This also seems to track with my experience -- I live in an older unit and can only hear my adjacent neighbors when they slam their front door, or when they're having a very loud party on a weekend. Yet when I visit friends that live in newer units, sometimes I can hear the neighbors talking at normal conversation levels through the walls.

I'm completely speculating, but maybe in newer construction, they can now use insulation materials with a very high R rating that are still fairly thin, so while you get the good thermal insulation, sound transmission is increased because there's less material in the way now. Older buildings that made up for the materials not being as high R-rated tended to do so via volume, which also helped with sound deadening. I think in a lot of places, you also need to have firewalls between units so that fire in one unit doesn't easily spread to others, but I expect those materials have also improved over the decades to where they still provide the same fire protection, but no longer have the mass to offer as much sound deadening.

A lot of units use 1/2 inch or in many cases less. Upgrading to 5/8" makes a big difference, and installing another 1/2" on top of that gives impressive noise dampening via additional mass. As does fiberglass insulation, and filling gaps around the edges. If you don't have to meet firewall code for certain walls, you can go a lot thinner and noise reduction goes down dramatically. We had an apartment that was converted from condos and noise dampening was significant. Noise was a major consideration (closely after neighborhood) when doing selection.

There's often not much insulation requirement between units because the entire building envelope is what carries the main insulation, so it's builder's choice if they want to noise insulate above and beyond the firewall requirements.

The worst in my experience has been units originally designed for rich quiet people that now are being rented by families.

The problem is that while the shape of single-family home suburbs are meticulously controlled (e.g. minimum width between each house, minimum width from the street to your home), the world of apartments are conversely very lightly regulated. California building codes added an optional appendix for noiseproofing standards for multi-family units that cities can opt-into and yet the cities with some of the strictest/most expansive SFH zoning in the Bay Area refuse to opt into this standard. I live in a multi-family unit where the HOA meticulously controls R-value of the units and puts up a huge process/review phase when changing any flooring material, but the end result is that unless kids are screaming at the top of their lungs we hear nothing. We've held karaoke parties past midnight and our neighbors have heard nothing (we've asked.)

In other words, the problem is politics. Cities need to want to make multi-family development appealing to encourage their residents to live there. There's a bit of deliberate neglect going on for multi-family housing specifically to encourage single-family living.

> California building codes added an optional appendix for noiseproofing standards for multi-family units that cities can opt-into and yet the cities with some of the strictest/most expansive SFH zoning in the Bay Area refuse to opt into this standard.

Why am I not surprised? This is why we need more city council members who rent. Renter issues are completely invisible to those holding political power.

Renters are generally much less likely to vote and so their issues get less attention.

I think this is very similar to how city council members generally never ride bicycles, so they don't care about bike-safety issues.

I viewed an apartment recently that had quadruple pane windows! The aparment faced a noisy freeway. They worked quite well.

Having stayed in Norwegian houses many times, I can attest they've really sorted their insulation out. Similarily my Swedish sister-in-law always complains about British houses when she visits, saying their cold and draughty

British houses have a worldwide reputation of bad insulation. They live in a mild climate where you don't need to heat the entire house to ensure the pipes don't freeze, and don't really need much AC to be livable in the summer. As such it is really common for people who live there to only heat the room they are in.

Also a lot of them date from the XIX century or earlier and can't be touched.

Nonsense. Most of the 19th century buildings are perfectly ordinary brick terraced houses and the later ones have cavity walls. I lived in one built in 1890 in Southampton for four years. Solid house but not of any kind of historical importance. They can be insulated by blowing fibre into the cavity or filling it with expanding foam..

British construction has bad reputation in general. They put carpets in the toilets.

Oh wow. Norway and Sweden sound like heaven for apartment living. (Or Valhalla, as the case may be.)

It also depends on a neighbor. I heard my previous downstair neighbors only when they had guests. Now, there’s a single person who is a god damn elephant. They way she always stomps and throws things on the floor…

> even have a train passing by outside I can't hear with the windows closed.

My wife and I lived in a top floor flat in Drammen for two years. We swore we would never, ever, live that close to neighbours again. In the summer it's nice to have the windows open until your divorcée neighbour downstairs comes home and argues with her umpteenth boyfriend and her sulky teenage daughter and then the three of them each try to drown out the others with loud music and television.

It didn't matter that I couldn't hear them through the floor.

Norwegians are also some of those most quiet people I've ever met.

Not disagreeing with your point but I’d like to support what the op said regarding “modern” buildings often having excellent sound deadening. My previous Dutch residence also had those “fake” (non concrete) walls but I couldn’t hear others in their rooms even when they played loud music (and they had different nationalities). But if no effort goes into soundproofing, it can be unsurprisingly pretty bad.

Yeah, before living where I live now, I lived for a while in an building from the late 1800s. The smaller units were of course added cheaply in modern times, and didn't align well with how it was originally built.

One example is the original thick wooden beams that was the floor went through the unit walls. So they same piece of wood I was walking on was also being walked on by the neighbors. That was a great transmission of vibrations, especially when their kid were playing on the floor hehe.

I lived in a relatively old apartment block in Austria. Only time I heard my neighbours was when they did drilling. The sound outside echo'd a lot so I could hear things in the courtyard (3 floors down) and people in nearby blocks louder than my neighbours.

It's because of heat insulation, like you guessed.

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