Soundproofing for Dummies

Noise canceling wall along highway

Time and time again our research staff have run across self-appointed freelance writers; many counting on an English, "communications," or journalism degree to carry them through; who attempt to explain something outside their comfort zone and jut plain screw it up. Around the Antisocial Network office, we call this phenomenon the eHow effect. Today's DotD nominee is a perfect example: Jean Asta researched "How Do Noise Canceling Walls Work?"¹ and found reasonably good resources. Her problem was that she didn't understand them.

Asta seemed to think that the only application for a noise-canceling wall is a recording studio, so she went into excruciating detail about the difference between sound absorption and sound reduction; even going so far as to discuss building an anechoic chamber. Cool beans!
Where Jean's work went south, as eHow.com articles so frequently did, was a failure to understand that noise-canceling walls are found in places other than recording studios: that big barrier wall you see between a residential neighborhood and a highway (above)? It's a noise-canceling wall.

Asta's overly-narrow focus on recording studios aside, what we found most telling in her article was the section she called Building a Soundproof Room. We've extracted some of the more interesting material from that paragraph, which she cribbed, errr, "reworded," from an article about soundproofing aimed at musicians. "The most convenient way to go about making a soundproof room is to have a room ready for the materials. Drywall should be used and separated about a foot from the wall. This creates a room inside of a room, but helps reduce much of the noise spread to the outside. The outside walls can be covered with absorber sheets to further reduce noise. The inside walls might be covered with a diaphragmatic absorber."

We especially like the notion that "Drywall should be... separated about a foot from the wall," but hey: we're also happy to tweak Asta for her bull about "diaphragmatic absorbers," given that her definition of sound absorption goes something like

"Noise absorption, on the other hand, works by eliminating echoes or sound reverberations."

Say what? No, never mind... this is exactly the sort of rubbish you often get when English Lit graduates try to freelance on technical subjects. In this case, Asta couldn't wrap her head around either the physics of sound or simple construction techniques. As a result, her post hits all the marks on our checklist for Dumbass of the Day.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was    ehow.com/info_8704439_do-noise-canceling-walls-work.html

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