Which Type Of Glass Is Best For Soundproofing

how's it going youtube thanks so much for checking in today today we're going to talk about what type of glass is best for soundproofing so if you've been searching on the internet and thinking about a bunch of different options i'm going to break down the four types of glass that you could use why each of them has some pros and cons and hopefully give you a better understanding of which one i would recommend for building a soundproof studio alright before we jump into this video i want to let you know that i have a free sound proofing course below in the description so if you want to take a deeper dive into soundproofing then definitely check out that free course all right let's jump into the video [Applause] so the first type of glass is float glass float glass is the type of glass you probably have in the windows in your home it is really common it is also known as annealed glass and it can work for soundproofing although there are a couple drawbacks first it doesn't have the right physical properties to make it the superior type of sound isolation product that you might want therefore you need more of it you need more mass so you're going to have to get thicker thicker pieces of glass to compete with better products that i'll mention later in this video but it still is an option the other benefit of it is that you can cut it on site and it's a little cheaper than other class products out there annealed glass or float glass is an option but it's not the best the second type of glass we have is known as tempered glass now tempered glass is better at acoustic isolation than float glass and it is something that i would recommend using in your studio the downside to tempered glass is that if you nick it even a little bit it can shatter into a ton million little pieces and this is actually one of the reasons it's used in doors that have glass in them if you have a door with glass that is 18 inches from the floor you technically need to use tempered glass so that if someone breaks it it just shatters into a million little pieces and won't accidentally cut you and cause a big disaster it is great for sound proofing it is more expensive than float glass and it can break easily so it has these pros and a couple cons as well the third type of glass that you can use is what's known as laminate glass laminate glass is probably the best product you can use for soundproofing also like tempered glass it is going to be a little bit more expensive but it is really really good and i would highly recommend it the way that laminate glass works is that it's two pieces of glass that are bonded together with a piece of plastic or pvb layer in between this layer in between the glass actually helps with damping and makes it a superior acoustic isolation product to float glass otherwise known as annealed glass like the type in your home laminate glass is also something that you might see in your car windshield because of its safety factor having that piece of pvb means that it won't shatter into a million pieces and will simply just crack making it much more safe for driving around if you're in a crash or something like that laminate glass might be the best acoustic isolator of all the types of glass making it the best for soundproofing because of that inner layer that inner plastic layer it actually helps with the coincidence effect which i will talk about a little later in this video as well the fourth option is plexiglas now plexa glass is probably the worst option for soundproofing but it does have some possible benefits for you so i will first say that a lot of what i've learned is from rodger weiss from his book home recording studio build it like the pros which i'll have a link for that in the description below but he does not recommend using plexiglas at all and there's a couple good reasons for that one is that it scratches really easily therefore you could spend all this money building this amazing studio and then your windows get all scratched up and it's really hard to replace these soundproof windows once you've already put them in so that is a huge drawback and i agree with him on that the other downside is plexiglas just doesn't weigh as much it's made from a plastic acrylic material therefore it doesn't have as much mass and with soundproofing mass is always our friend so you're gonna need a whole lot more plexiglas to achieve the same amount of soundproofing as the other three types of glass i had mentioned before now the one positive the pretty much the only positive that plexiglass has is that it's cheap it's a lot cheaper and so if you really really are like i want to use plexiglas i want to save the money it could still potentially work if you get the mass right and we'll talk more about how to get the right thickness of glass after this as well i will say that this website called better soundproofing had a lot of great reasons why plexa glass could potentially still work even though they also agree that using tempered and laminate glass is going to be far superior for soundproofing i would say that if you're going to use plexiglass at all which i still don't technically recommend use window grade plexiglas because it will help you with getting a stronger better material than just regular old plexiglas all right so now let's talk a little bit about how to get the right thicknesses of glass for your window so in a soundproofing window situation you're gonna have two pieces of glass you're either gonna have a double wall system like i did in my studio where you're going to have about a 9-inch air gap from the outside to the inside wall or you could have a hat channel system where you probably have a smaller air gap because you didn't build the second wall out nonetheless you're still going to have the distance of the wall so you're going to need an outside pane of glass and an inside pane of glass i will note very quickly that the air space between the pieces of glass does help significantly with sound proofing so the larger the air gap the more sound proofing you're going to get so having the double wall system is a benefit in the sense that you can get that large space between your pieces of glass now rodger weiss in his book that i had recommended earlier has a formula for finding out what size glass or what weight of glass you should put on your windows the basic idea is you want to match the mass or the weight of your walls so that the window doesn't become a weak point in your wall but actually becomes another piece of mass that fills in that gap or hole you just created by drilling through it so to do that we need to do a little bit of very basic math so two layers of drywall which is what i always recommend on the inside and the outside of your wall if you're not if you're building a studio like i did and you just have an outside wall with plywood and then hardy board or some sort of surface on the outside you would want to figure out the weight of that as well but for these purposes we're going to say that we have two layers of drywall on the inside and two layers of drywall on the outside the total weight of having four layers of drywall is going to be 5.25 pounds per square foot so we know that that is the mass we need to achieve with our windows so if we look at float glass the typical glass in your home an eighth inch pane of float glass is only 1.65 pounds per square foot so in order to get the correct weight on our outside pane of glass we would need to have a half inch thick piece of annealed glass so this would get our weight up to 6.56 pounds per square feet which is greater than the amount we had on two layers of drywall on the outside now your second piece of glass should be at least a quarter of an inch thicker than your other piece of glass so in this case we had a half inch piece of float glass we're going to need to get a three quarter inch piece of float glass on the inside that will put the weight on the inside piece to 9.84 pounds per square feet so we have plenty of weight now even more than the weight of our walls which is totally fine you want to go over you just don't want to be under so as you can see you can still use float glass even though it doesn't have the greatest acoustic properties now if you wanted to use two pieces of laminate glass you could reduce the thickness because of the superior acoustic properties you could get a 3 8 inch piece and a 5 8 inch piece of laminate glass and get the same acoustic properties now this is what rod gervice recommends in his book so it kind of gives you an explanation of how you can choose glass mainly based on weight so the thing that i did is i went down to my local glass shop here in nashville and i asked them what they would recommend for soundproof windows now the beauty of it being nashville is they're like oh yeah we do this all the time there's tons of studios in nashville so they had a system already in place that they used so what we used is a 3 8 inch piece of tempered glass and a half inch piece of laminate glass now you might be thinking hey there's not that quarter inch difference between the glasses and that's true this is what they recommended and we're also using two different pieces of glass and i'll explain in a second why there might be some benefit in using both tempered and laminate glass now i will say it is a little bit more expensive than going with float glass and going with plexiglass and all that stuff but one thing that i want to drill home here with soundproofing is that if you're really worried about the budget i highly recommend maybe you rethink doing this whole soundproofing thing in the first place and i know that sounds harsh but to do it right you really want to spend the money and do it right otherwise you're going to be left with a half built product that's not doing what you wanted to do and you'll have wasted some money anyways so please take that advice and think about it because every time you cut try to cut corners with soundproofing it's going to come back and hurt you later down the road and all those cut corners can add up to a less than ideal soundproof studio all right i just wanted to get that out of the way so you could go with my option which was just those two different pieces and i'll say that my windows are perfectly soundproof they are freaking amazing they've never i've never had a problem at all if anything my door is by far the weakest point in the studio and the windows are completely fine they're rock solid so if you want just copy what i did i think it's a great way to go the other option is try to get those weights exactly right if you use two layers of drywall with green glue you essentially are getting a more massive wall by adding the green glue because you're having added benefits of sound proofing with that damping layer and i know that sounds kind of confusing but just to take that in effect you might need slightly heavier glass than just the mass of the two layers of drywall so keep that in mind but i want to leave on this one last note about the coincidence effect and this is something that is scientific and and may be fascinating but something that you don't need to really dwell on but it is interesting when you're talking about the theory behind choosing the two different types of glass every type of material that we use for soundproofing has a critical frequency and this is where the bending wavelengths of sound traveling through the actual material in this case glass matches the wavelength of the sound traveling through the air so essentially when the sound hits the material hits the glass at certain frequencies the critical frequency the sound will pass more easily through that material than at other frequencies and this is what's known as the coincidence effect so with using two different layers of glass you essentially are getting two different critical frequencies in the windows so sound that might easily pass through one pane of glass won't easily pass through the second pane of glass at the exact same frequency now i know that was a lot of science but it's something to consider with this added benefit of using both tempered and laminate glass versus just two panes of tempered or two panes of laminate alright that was a lot of information but i hope it was helpful again if you are interested in learning more about soundproofing i have a free soundproofing course down in the description please sign up we have a wonderful community of people and i would love to see you in the course again we have a new video every monday so definitely check back in subscribe like ring that bell all the good things and i hope to see you next week alright thanks so much for watching [Music]

Channel: Soundproof Your Studio

Views: 11,212

Keywords: Soundproofing, Windows, Build, How To, Home Recording, Home Studio, Construction, Laminate Glass, Plexiglass, Coincidence Frequency, Critical Frequency, Coincidence Effect, Float Glass, Tempered Glass, Soundproof Your Studio

Id: knotUIr2w_4

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 11 2022