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As someone who grew up in an apartment building with concrete floors, I assure you that concrete is useless for internal noise dampening.
by cauterized 10y ago
As someone who grew up in an apartment building with concrete floors, I assure you that concrete is useless for internal noise dampening.
- exodust 10y agoConcrete is much better at noise insulation than dry wall and timber flooring.
- cauterized 10y agoPlaster and timber flooring isn't so bad. Brick is also better than concrete. More rigid materials tend to transmit sound better.
- exodust 10y agoPlaster walls need to be the double-thickness type, AND have sound-proofing material between each wall. I've suffered a few piss-weak plaster walls in my time, thin enough to punch a hole through with my fist and strangle neighbour on the other side (never actioned). Once I lived on the bottom apartment in a two storey apartment block. The floor boards were a nightmare and eventually we had to move. Upstairs footsteps across the floor were loud enough to wake us up, and I don't just mean squeaky boards, but just the thumping knocking sound resonation. Sometimes I could make out the words being said in their conversations. Never again.
- cauterized 10y agoDefinitely depends on the construction type. I will say that floor-to-floor noise transmission in a 19thC brownstone is a tiny fraction of what it is in a mid-20th-C apartment block. In the latter, you can hear people moving furniture or turning on the shower multiple floors away on the far side of the building.
- Johnny555 10y agoAs someone that's lived both in a concrete 10 story "high rise" apartment building as well as a 3 story wood-framed apartment building, concrete is far superior for noise dampening as wood. In the concrete building, we could never hear neighbors above of below us, in the wood framed building, we could hear foot steps and even voices. Our upstairs neighbor had a squeaky bed and we could clearly hear the bed every time they were intimate.
- cauterized 10y agoI think the difference is that in wood frame you can sometimes hear things through the walls. Whereas with concrete, any sort of impact (chairs moving, doors slamming, people walking in heels, the guy putting a nail in the wall to hang a picture on) gets transmitted to the entire building.