I am starting from bare studs, and will soon be starting to finish the 'small' (500 sf) upstairs room, which will be an interim music/theater until I finish the 'large' (900 sf) theater room, but ultimately will be a listening room. I really don't care about sound transmission into the rest of the house, since there won't be a lot of multi-tasking going on. Similarly, I don't envision a lot of external noise existing which would migrate into the listening room.

It seems most/all the room acoustics discussion involves sound attenuation to/from external areas, or add-on traps, absorbers, diffusors, etc added to a finished room for internal reasons. I am wondering if any floor/wall/ceiling construction directed toward soundproofing - resilient channels, double wall, visco-elastic damping, etc etc - provide any sonic benefit inside the room for stereo listening?

Tim,

> I am wondering if any floor/wall/ceiling construction directed toward soundproofing - resilient channels, double wall, visco-elastic damping, etc etc - provide any sonic benefit inside the room for stereo listening? <

Usually it''s better to not increase wall mass etc unless it's really necessary. Construction that improves isolation harms the bass response inside the room, and vice versa.

--Ethan

What ethan said. IF you're not concerned about isolation, don't spend money on that. As said, it can actually make in room acoustics a bit more difficult because your walls may end up reflecting more bass which then you have to deal with.

There has to be a balance. Too light of a wall will be also be a resonator. Where do you stop?

Well, that's not entirely true. If you look at a Green Glue/RSIC-1 construction, you have good sound isolation. Now look at how that isolation is occuring ... damping, or a form of absorption. Very well isolated rooms can sound very, very good and some of those forms of isolation actually make calibration of the end result easier. Indeed, poorly isolated rooms can be very difficult to tune properly. If you allow a high ambient noise floor in the room, you must turn up the gain to overcome the noise floor. Turning up that gain increases the acoustic energy in the room making loud problems even louder.

I'm waiting for Dennis or Ethan to design engineered, preformed wall sections for a theater in a box that will be harmonically tuned; all you'll need is a wrench, a caulk gun and a helper.