To a 4-year old, staying in a peaceful room for some "quiet time" is serious punishment. But to a grown-up -- someone who might have had a noisy train ride to work, eight hours in a workplace full of phones and machines, or a trip home through the horns and traffic of a commute by car -- the idea of a calm, quiet room sounds like heaven.
Such quiet places are increasingly rare. As we add more humans and their raucous paraphernalia into the urban/suburban mix, the background noise gets louder, and closer to home. And home is no refuge if you can hear the neighbors, the traffic, the airplanes and the lawn mowers from your favorite chair, right through the walls and windows.
Acoustical engineers and building product manufacturers have some new approaches to keep the noise outside your space, all based on the behavior of sound waves. Martin Beam, acoustical consultant with Miller, Beam & Paganelli Inc. of McLean, works on high-end residential and commercial sound control problems, everything from making sure the home theater system doesn't wake the kids to controlling the roar of the 20,000-strong crowd at MCI Center in downtown Washington with acoustic design.
But whatever the scope of the work, he says, there are three basic approaches to keeping noise out:
• Between you and the noise, you need to "make sure there's a big air space, preferably one that's insulated.
• Put mass -- heavy material that doesn't move easily -- between you and the noise.
• And decouple -- separate your own floor, wall or ceiling from the material that is vibrating."
For outside noise, the first things to look for are holes, cracks or gaps in an outside wall or window frame that allow air -- and thus, noise -- to enter. Those need to be filled or closed off.
The next weak link is the window itself. A typical double-pane window has a sound transmission classification (STC) between 30 and 36. The engineers at Milgard Windows have just introduced a vinyl replacement window called Quiet Line that is rated as high as 47 (http://www.milgard.com/).
Now, that might not sound like much of an improvement, but the rating scale is logarithmic: a rise of 10 points cuts the amount of sound transmitted in half. So these windows provide about twice the sound-deadening capability of standard varieties. They use a frame with a double-pane window on one side and a layer of heavy laminated glass -- like car windshield glass -- on the other, for a total of three panes.
"Our product brings the STC of the window up to that of the average insulated wall," says Randy Stone, acoustical products manager for Milgard in Tacoma, Wash. One difficulty in a retrofit is that the vinyl frames are 4 1/2 inches thick. In a wall with 2-by-4 stud framing, that means "you lose the inside window sill, unless you have the windows extend on the outside of the house, which actually looks quite nice," says Stone. But if you're building a house and opt for 2-by-6 framing, these windows fit perfectly. They aren't inexpensive. Stone estimates they'll average twice the price of a similar double-pane vinyl replacement window.
The other obstacle to installing Milgard windows? You can't get them on the East Coast yet. Distribution is limited to the West and Midwest, except for a few projects -- new home communities in noise abatement areas around airports and freeways, for example.
But local homeowners can get a product with a long history of working in existing homes. It's called the Soundproof Window, and although it's made in California, more than 90 percent of sales take place via the Internet (http://www.soundproofwindows.com/).
Bob Gray, executive vice president of Soundproof Windows in Antioch, Calif., describes his window as a very thick laminated glass -- glass with a plastic layer between glass layers -- in an aluminum frame. There's a sound-deadening system built into the frame, with spring-loaded channels to keep the glass still, so it can't vibrate. There's also a foam gasket between the frame and the wall, and caulk seals the unit inside and out.
It's not a replacement window -- it is installed on the interior side of an existing window. "Adding a soundproof window to a single-pane window," says Gray, "raises the STC to a 41-to-45 range. Adding it to a double-pane window gives you 44 to 48."
And if that still isn't quiet enough, you can add two soundproof windows to a single-pane window and, says Gray, get "an STC range of 50 to 58."
Nor is it as expensive as a replacement sound- controlling window. "Since each of our windows is custom made," Gray says, "we have a wide range of prices, but most average-size Soundproof Windows cost around $400 to $450."
To do all the windows on an average-size house, he says, would cost $6,000 or $7,000. Gray also notes that laminated glass is a security plus: "You can hit it with a hammer, and the broken glass stays in place. It's hard to get through." And because it stops air movement, it insulates against heat and cold as well as sound.
One of Gray's recent clients is the Swissotel Watergate Hotel, right next to the Potomac River and in the flight path of planes to and from Reagan National Airport. According to Mehmet Bahtiyar, the hotel's director of housekeeping, the product has been put on all the hotel's windows. "There are no noise complaints from guests. We don't hear any plane noise at all."
The Soundproof Windows worked for Greg Link, as well. Link, who runs the home fixtures and fittings store Home Rule on 14th Street NW, lived above his shop. But the street noise kept him out of his living room. "First, I tried installing storm windows outside. Then I added another set inside. It didn't make much difference. Then I went onto the Web and found this company. Their windows were easy to install, and I'd say they cut out between 60 percent to 70 percent of the noise. Now you can read or watch TV in that room. You can still hear the buses, but that's mostly vibration. The high sounds and the car noises are gone."
But the low-range vibration -- in this case, from the nightclub in the next building -- finally forced Link to move. He has been looking for a way to address that problem as well. A group of acoustical engineers from Australia might have an answer for him, and for condo residents who have noisy upstairs neighbors.
Their product, introduced in the United States last year, is called the Resilient Sound Isolation Clip, or RSIC. It helps homeowners decouple, or isolate, their walls and ceilings from their upstairs neighbors (or their own rambunctious children playing upstairs).
In the four decades before RSIC, the standard recommendation for decoupling was to take down the ceiling, install furring strips in a V-shape, insulate and then attach the new ceiling to the furring strips instead of to the joists. Elzo Gernhart, vice president of Pac International Inc. in Hillsboro, Ore., the U.S. manufacturer of RSIC clips, says that did make a difference. He says a standard hardwood floor with joists has an impact isolation classification rating, a measure of foot-fall noise, of about 30. Adding carpet and padding pushes it to "the low 40s." With resilient channels, says Gernhart, "you can get to the low 50s."
But with the RSIC clips isolating the new ceiling (with its two layers of drywall) from the floor above, "the rating rises to 82 -- a 50-point difference, and each 10-point rise cuts the noise in half." Installing the dropped ceiling on RSIC clips lowers the height of the room below by only two or three inches, he says.
The price averages 70 cents a square foot, but can vary depending on the labor required, the installation method and whether it's being applied on an existing surface or in new construction.
Different styles of RSIC clip are available for use on standard walls -- Gernhart says people whose homes face a highway often do both windows and facing walls -- and for ceilings and walls made of concrete.
Beam recommends RSIC clips for his clients. He says they're easy to install, but that carpenters, who are used to thinking that tighter connections are always better, should know that a super-tight connection will allow more sound to come through.
Homeowners in Virginia can get the RSIC clips from Acoustical Solutions Inc., in Richmond (800-782-5742; http://www.acousticalsolutions.com/). Resi- dents in Maryland and the District can contact Professional Acoustics Co. (800-341-3700 or http://www.professionalacousticsco.com/).
None of these products will keep your dog from barking or your child from practicing the saxophone or the snare drum. But they will keep the outside noise outside, and that might just be the difference between sleep and no sleep, between stress and calm.