Guitar Den - Controlling volume at home

Doug,

Thanks for that. I just gave them a call. The stuff is very cost effective (£108 to cover 17sqm). Thanks for the tip.

Ben

I have used this source for marine applications to damp engine noise. Not in the UK but the site has application notes and will give you some options and ideas.
Rick

You've got almost zero chance of "sound proofing" a room at home without going to massive expense, most studios are "Acoustically treated" which is a big difference, you break up all the big flat surfaces that can reflect back, its quite difficult to get a studio to sound good, you don't want it completely dead nor do you want a lot of reverb in there that you can't control. My friend runs a professional studio in part of his home and he has gone to a lot (A lot!) of expense but still did not even try to sound "proof" the performance room and concentrated on getting it to sound as good as possible.
Bass frequencies can travel a very long way and also are stupidly difficult to deaden out completely, the best you can hope for is some mid and high frequency sound reduction, it really is a minefield and you will probably never be satisfied with the results.
If you are serious about running your amps hot then isolation cabs will be probably your best bet, there are a few blogs online on home build ones which work quite well (See Peter Thorn's channel on YT, he is an LA session player and gets fantastic results with his) of course the old issue is that a completely boxed in speaker will sound stifled in such a thing and running miss into it can also be a pain. You can buy ready made iso cabs, Jet City do a cheapish one but the best I've seen is the Rivera silent sister, its actually ported and has a tuned and attenuated air path for the speaker to breathe as normal, it isn't completely silent but its massively reduced, the demos are quite staggering on Riveras website and the results speak for themselves.
Other options are speaker emulators such as the palmer PDI or even better the sequis mother load elemental, they have complete dummy loads and can be run without a speaker attachment and sound pretty damn good, there is always a trade off with these things though, they can shorten tube life considerably and some manufacturers state that their warranty will be void should such an item be used.
Hope that helped mate, got a bit carried away there but it is a vast subject!

Have you ever considered using an isolation box?  Run your amp out in the open but have the speaker inclosed in a cabinet that is sound proofed.  Some of the nice ones you could buy have an option for a mic to be placed in the cab with it and you could send the signal to a mixer to control the overall volume.  Thats currently what I'm doing at home.  I don't have an isolation cab but I'm using an amp that has a head phone jack line out that mutes the speaker when engaged.  I send the signal to a 8 channel Yamaha mixing board where I have a couple of mics set up to sing in (but I am not a singer) or some acoustic guitars going.  Then I can use studio monitors to bring my volume to a resonable volume where I don't wake my 3 kids at night, or piss my neighbors off.  Really works good when I'm wanting to play to a backing track.  Now you've got a home studio to record with all you need is a computer and your set. 

Isolation box about $600
mic less then $100
mixing board $150 on sale at musicians friend 4 years ago could go for better but this works.
monitors I paid $100 for mine you could even use a home stereo.  Definately there is better.
And a computer if you want to record which we eventually all do!  I paid $400 for a family Notebook that we all share.

Less then $1400 for a room thats going to sound good, lets see you build a sound proof room for this low a price!  Foam alone could cost you $1000 or more!  Now if money isn't an object go nuts with the sound proof room, but I prefer to control my volume in a confined place rather being confined to my space.

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