Need some soundproofing advice

Need some soundproofing advice.
I like to play games late at night (often up till 4-5am) and if I talk more than a whisper my housemates get disturbed, especially in the room above mine.
I've got about £50 to spend and looking for a way to soundproof my room, or maybe just an area around my PC.
Any ideas?

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Headphones

Stop being a gamer fag and sleep at night so you can wake up in the morning and go to work

Mattress up against the wall facing their rooms

I don't think you understand, it's my talking that causes issues. I already use headphones.

I'll try this but it doesn't really work for ceilings

Use towels they work better than foam. layer them up and put them in wooden frames and set them up as you would sound traps.

My band went into a butcher's and ased for a load of egg boxes. They were happy to part with them, and they do actually provide a surprising amount of sound proofing. Well; softening. Sound *proofing* would require an Isobaric chamber but I know what you mean.

Foam is obviously better but it's about £30/m^2. For gaming, I'd genuinely go with egg boxes, OP.

What's wrong with headphones?

those acoustic foams have nothing to do with soundproofing on their own. You gotta spend way more to actually soundproof your room. You need to make it float

Yeah I know, just illustrates the idea.
I've considered making a small drop-ceiling to go above my pc and some removable walls (plywood and some insulation/soundproofing materials to enclose the space. not sure if that'd work though

What about a blanket fort? Not even fucking with you. Blankets would block a hell of a lot of sound.
But make sure your pc doesn't overheat.

Ow fuck you, you know that's the best advice in this tread.

is that you elite-s?
don't do it, everyone loves your whispers. makes us all tingly inside.

Don't you fucking ignore me

With this advice i've considered a new plan.
I could buy a bunch of 1"x2" timber and build a small frame and then hang blankets or whatever over it. Woould make an impromptu 'room' for my pc and desk whilst not costing much?

Buy these to your neighbours

Or just don't be a faggot and don't give a fuck what your neighbors think.

I was looking into this myself. It turns out that foam and fabric just stops echoes. You need something called "sound-blocking" as opposed to "sound-absorbing"

Get some 2x4s, canvas and foam. Make some sound panels for your wall

You want to build a rape dungeon do you OP

That's stupid, just use a ball gag. Building a dungeon is just going to attract attention.

The two biggest components to soundproofing:

Isolation (separation) and dampening.

Isolation is impossible for you: that's the whole "floating room" thing which obviously you cannot do. You basically try to limit the direct transfer of sound through objects, e.g. don't put a subwoofer leaning against a wall. However, I doubt your body is transferring your voice in any significant manner to your chair to the floor to the next room. It's really just you projecting over the air.

Dampening is what you're going for, and anyone who suggests any kind of foam is dumb. Those are pretty much for decoration. It can stop a tiny bit of reflection, but not really.

All professional setups that are worth a shit use fiberglass panels. They're heavy as fuck because mass is a huge, huge component in dampening.

Blankets and what not on the walls do work to an extent, but again, it's mostly mass you're looking for, so if you're hanging stuff that is light as fuck, it's going to perform proportionally poorly.

Even just furniture and a carpet helps, which is why in some audiophile listening rooms of people who have too much money you'll see bookshelves filled with shit they're obviously never going to read. It dampens the sound a bit (so the room isn't too "lively") while still looking aesthetic.

Thanks for the advice, here's the problem.
My room is well furnished and honestly the chance of reverb is almost negative (shelves, desks, furniture, couple of bikes, etc).
However I have quite a deep voice so naturally my voice carries further due to the high level of bass, and the main problem is disturbing the above room which has only it's floor between me and the people in it obviously, no furniture or anything.

That's unfortunate, that's the hardest shit to dampen, logistically. Your blanket fort MAY help a bit but you'd really need to create an entire box. Just a ceiling likely won't do much unless it is actually covering the entire ceiling of the room.

I'm a consultant and I work regularly with acoustics dudes in my company. The problem with most solutions is that it doesn't actually dampen the sound. Generally, especially for offices, we install white noise devices to raise the noise floor. In practice it's much more effective to lower the dynamic range of the listener than to attempt to dampen out all the sound (not to mention actually feasible; no one is going to hang shit tons of fiberglass everywhere unless it's a sound studio or performance hall). That doesn't work for you because the noise generator needs to be at the listener's room, not you.

You could also try moving your PC around. With deep bass especially there are places in a room where it will just reverb more. An easy way to test is to have a source (speakers/subwoofer) right where your head would be then go around the room and listen, and see if it happens to be unexpectedly loud in certain areas (corners of rooms, near the ceiling, etc).

Alright I'll give that a shot. Is there any options that could be done in the above room, it's not my room but the guys in there are good friends and would be willing to do something to eliminate the noise somewhat.

...

OOH, if that's the case, then it's super easy.

Like I said, get a white noise generator. It doesn't have to be blasting white noise; you can adjust as necessary but it is very surprising how well it works.

You don't need a dedicated machine to do it, you could technically just youtube it and have it playing while they sleep, but I believe there are some super cheapo units that do it for ease of use.

You may even want to try brown noise (lower freq noise).

Again, it doesn't have to be loud. Just a tiny bit helps. It doesn't have to completely drown out your voice, it just has to make the difference in sound level between your voice and the constant background noise less (dynamic range).

It's huge differences in dynamic range that disturbs people sleeping, however if there is a constant, unchanging hum, people will sleep right through that shit, and even sleep better than usual. It's the reason why some people sleep super well with light rain.

Get a solid core door installed on your room, more density = less noise transfer out in the hall. Not much else you can do to help the upstairs m8

Reminds me of the classic David Thorne noise complaint email.

27bslash6.com/strata.html

Egg cartons work best allover your walls

soundproof doors
soundproof door seals with weather stripping
works wonders
I can't hear my roommate ever

Alright I'll look into it, is there a way I could test the effectiveness?
Like could I use my phone to make some white noise via youtube or whatever whilst I do the speaker thing you suggested in my room?

put bag over your head also helps keep rain out

buy some headphones

yes, op, play the brown note while they sleep
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_note

r u dense

I guess you could replay some sound during game to simulate what you say and how you say it (e.g. replay a Twitch stream of yours or something).

Unfortunately I'm not the acoustics dudes in my company so I can't give you a definitive guideline for setting the white noise (e.g. you should have xx dBa of white/brown/pink noise for your purposes), so you'll have to adjust as necessary.

I also highly suggest using a real speaker system and not your phone speakers for the white noise. The noise outputs on all frequencies, and the low frequencies are more important for your purposes, and phones have terrible speakers in general, but especially in the lower end, even the iPhone.

People who are sensitive to sound should be using white noise while they sleep. If you can still be heard over a reasonable amount of white noise, that much is on you, but FFS if ANY sound is bothersome that is something they need to deal with on their end.

BTW, you should google up some general info on white noise/brown noise on sleep so you can tell your bros WTF you're doing and why and how it may actually help them sleep better in general.

BTW, I did recently try this in a residential setting with my GF; her main room's floor-to-ceiling window is facing a major street so in the night, every time a car infrequently passes by, it wakes her up. She just youtubed white noise and it did help her sleep.

I'll see if I can find an app or something that'll let me alter the frequency composition of the noise. As for speakers I have a portable one that I could use, dont really want to move my HiFi up there

are you in the uk or? scan.co.uk has some good shit

Yup

good

Yeah hifi would be super overkill. Don't worry too much about tailoring the sound for now. Just simple white noise will be fine. I always suggest trying factory default settings to get a baseline reading (control group) for any experiment.

Faggot, just kill them.

If all else fails you could still use headphones

You are so fucking dumb, its unreal.