"Forever, people who live close to one another have suffered from the noises of their neighbors. In litigation, the second highest level of complaints comes from noise—the first is uninvited water. So, what’s the biggest complaint about noise?
Footfall from the neighbor above draws the most complaints. Next, would be party wall noise and depending on the environment, dogs or trains.
The longtime solution in design has come from two components—sound mat and resilient channels. Both are now specified in almost every apartment or condo built in North America. In today’s day and age, every conceivable assembly type has been tested to show compliance with building codes including: nominal lumber joists, open web joists, TJI and metal systems.
These assemblies perform better than the 1980’s assemblies. In the ’90s building codes established rigid criteria for what’s acceptable. Airborne noise and structural noise were designated under ASTM standards for sound transmission classification and impact insulation classification, respectively. The ASTM provided for a single number designation for how well the system performed and the building codes adopted the number 50 as the point of success. The scale was not linear, so as the number increased, the performance logarithmically increased by a constant multiple, making improvements harder to achieve and the cost of 'luxury' difficult to justify."
To read the full article from Walls & Ceilings, please click here.
To contact Nick regarding our noise control products, email him at nq@keenebuilding.com