posted 02-19-2010 06:25 PM                    

quote: Richard May

---

She has cursed the staff out a number of times

---

posted 02-19-2010 09:15 PM                    

quote: Richard May

---

I think building a wall and ceiling inside the existing one will help a lot. My main concern is what type of insulation to use.

---

posted 02-19-2010 10:55 PM                    

quote: Louis Bornwasser

---

Does seem odd that an actress is bugged by playback of her trade??

---

Being a professional actress she knows or should know that there are loud sounds in movie theaters. It is part and parcel of the movie business ever since Al Jolson appeared on screen. Living directly next door to a movie theater she should EXPECT to hear loud sounds. If the movie theater was there before she moved in to the apartment she must have had knowledge of what her neighbor's business was. She has no grounds to complain and she certainly does not have the right to cuss at theater employees.

I live right next to an airport. Literally.



My house is less than 300 yards from the runway. You can sit at my dining room table, look out the window and watch jets take off while you eat dinner.



The airport was there before we moved in. We knew about it when we bought the house. We have limited room to complain about airplane noise unless it is an extraordinary circumstance. In fact, if I didn't think airplanes were cool I wouldn't have moved in here at all!

If Patricia Clarkson, who should know about movie theaters, moves into an apartment next door to an existing movie theater she should know what she is likely to hear. If she doesn't like that she should not have moved in.

Her trying to cuss out theater employees is about as sensible as if I tried to cuss out the air traffic controllers!

posted 03-05-2010 04:18 PM                   

quote:

---

THE rumbling bass from the party animals next door need no longer keep you awake at night. Cheap and effective soundproofing can be yours in the shape of novel tiles made from latex and a few plastic buttons.

Low-frequency sounds, especially, seem to seep through most domestic walls. That's because of their long wavelength, says Zhiyu Yang at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Kowloon. Bass sounds at 100 hertz have a wavelength of over 3 metres in air, "and several times longer in solids", he says.

To block out all sound, buildings would need walls several metres thick. Now Yang and his team have developed soundproof panels made of latex and plastic buttons, that will do the job.

These noise-cancelling panels consist of a latex rubber membrane stretched over a 3-millimetre-thick rigid plastic grid of 1-centimetre-wide squares. In the middle of each square is a small, weighted, plastic button.

When sound waves hit the panel, the membrane and weighted buttons resonate at difference frequencies. "The inner part of the membrane vibrates in opposite phase to the outer region," says Yang. That means the sound waves cancel each other out and no sound gets through.

Each weighted membrane only cancels out sound waves within a small band of frequencies. But changing the weight of the buttons alters the operational frequency, says Yang. By stacking five membranes together, each tuned to a specific band, you can create a soundproof panel that works in the range from 70 to 550 hertz.

---