Apartment living - Sound dampening.

I'm moving into a 2nd floor apartment. Having a small home studio, I'm concerned with how much sound will be going through my floor. The room I would be using has wood floors so they obviously have to be covered.

What is the best, cheapest covering to put on the floor to dampen some of the sound? I'm willing to spend a few bucks for some sound padding if such a thing exists. Don't want anything permanent though.

I actually don't tend to play too loud but I still want to minimize the sound transmission below as much as I can.

Thanks

Look for things that decouple vibrations from the floor. There's some sort of matting that does that, and of course, putting things on chairs or tables helps a little bit.

I have never mentioned this in this forum.

But I used to live in a one bedroom apartment.

I give away my bed and turned my bedroom into a control room.

Slept on the couch - the chicks did not complain!

I use this:

Then I noticed my pantry was large enough for a vocal booth.

So I went to the hardware store and purchased some hard boards. I asked the guys to custom cut the boards according to the size of the foams.

I then glued the foam to the boards and then drilled the boards into the walls.

Perfect!

Total, over about $4000.00

When I moved, I unscrewed the panels, use Spackle on the walls and painted the rooms.

It was perfect, never had a compliant and I lived on the third floor.

I'm not sure there is a cheaper way around this - but you can try mattress covers.

AI

Thanks. I'm mostly concerned with noise going through the floor to the people below. Decoupling things will def help in this regard.

Any advice on what is best to cover the floor?

The best advice so far is decoupling things from the floor when ever possible, but beyond that it is bad news. What is going down into the neighbors is low end transmission (neighbors do not complain about the high hat.) Unfortunately the actually useful methods for keeping sound from going into a neighboring apartment are insanely expensive. You are probably talking tens of thousands of dollars on the low end.

This is currently what I'm going through.... My neighbor lady below says she can hear the thumping of the bass. And this is true even when the overall volume on my monitors is low... surprisingly low.