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Comment by elendee | Hacker News Reader

But the noise.. this has been a huge factor in my quality of life, having lived in both buildings. That issue trumps any advantage drywall has, and I spent about 10 years working with it as well.

I think the market forces have simply dominated our natural, economically inefficient, home-dwelling instincts. I think this article means well, but it is written from the perspective of a landlord basically.

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It's not really a drywall problem, but a drawback of the usual construction method. If you insulate the interior walls then noise isn't really a problem. Of course, most builders are not insulating or noise-proofing interior walls, so there you have it. I suppose with other building materials (bricks, concrete blocks) you get the solution "for free", so to speak.

It's a problem because with stick frame and drywall, the builder has to take special effort to noise-isolate a house, which in effects ensures that not even 0.1% of housing has those properties. European regulations make for a much higher noise isolation by default.

Noise barriers are incredibly cheap. They're a tiny fraction of the cost of putting up a drywall or plaster wall. Codes say how far apart the studs should be, so you just buy a roll of batting, and unroll it into the gap between the two walls. You have to cut it to fit, but that's not a big deal.

It costs a few thousand bucks to do a whole house (during construction), even in areas with high labor costs. You can usually tack it on to the cost of insulating the exterior walls (which is basically the same process, but with a more expensive material).

Nobody does it. Not even supposedly "luxury condos". And that's assuming it's really that cheap, which it isn't because to be effective, one needs to stop all sound transmission, not just for walls, but floors too, as well as interrupting the noise transmitted through the house's wooden structure. It's quite expensive.

> one needs to stop all sound transmission

One does not need to stop all sound transmission.

Why wouldn't I want to stop the noise of my neighbour's lawn mower, or the garbage truck very slowly passing by at 7:30 when I should be sound asleep, or the washing machine furiously spinning, or my visiting inlaws cooking in the kitchen when I want to get an afternoon nap ? These sh*tty houses let all noises through.

Off-Topic, but not really: Mack’s Ultra Soft earplugs

I'd rather not. I expect more from a modern house.

I identify with that frustration more than most!

But, how many additional decades will you expect it for,

without giving your nervous system the rest it’s asking you for?

My plan is threefold:

1) move to a very quiet neighbourhood that's far from downtown (DONE). My wife doesn't like the commute but we'll live with it for the moment.

2) get my startup going so that I can afford to buy a house and spend the ~1-2M required to renovate it Euro-style. Hopefully within 3-4 years. That way I'll be able to live basically in downtown (Midwest) but still have a comfortable house.

3) move back to Europe as soon as possible

P.s. I found Mack earplugs not that good. Honeywell Laser Lite are much better.

Thanks! :]

Everything costs money. It's not like drywall doesn't allow you to soundproof, 2x layers of 5/8" is a common method as well as staggering 2x4's in a 2x6 wall.

It's not just the drywall, for comfort you need to soundproof the floors and the structure as well.

My house is plastered, and it is substantially more soundproofed than drywalled houses in the neighborhood. It is not a function of the construction method, since my house is stick framed just like my neighbors.

Possibly the solution would be to have some kind of soundproofing backing material on the converse side of the drywall panels. Including this could be required by regulation which would be easier to enforce than some kind of abstract acoustic property. One of the interesting arguments that Brian Potter made is that you're usually better off trying to move the issue from construction to manufacturing.

This is basically similar to how leaded drywall is used to shield X-rays. Of course, there are additional costs associated with the hazards of lead.

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