Sound is so hard to shop for - in every product category. Im shopping for a home now and I detest open floor plan homes because I was raised in a large family

Sound is so hard to shop for - in every product category. Im shopping for a home now and I detest open floor plan homes because I was raised in a large family and know how a house sounds when sound can take the shortest path to reach your ears. Similarly, in my area the style of renovated homes is to strip the ceiling of any tiles or insulation to expose the bare baseboards to the room below - which is essentially a giant diaphragm to propagate footsteps. Laundries have moved upstairs or into kitchens and pantries to add a spare bathroom or bedroom/office in the basement as well. The cumulative effect of all these changes is to make homes louder. But you would never notice it until you lived there. On the plus side modern double paned windows with argon/low pressure gaps (often sold as energy efficiency windows) and good weather sealing makes an enormous difference in sound isolation from the outside. It's an expensive upgrade, to be sure, but well worth it. That and some hidden foam paneling with thick carpets to reduce echoes, but that is mostly an illusion and doesn't affect sound transmission between rooms.