I’m autistic with relatively high sound sensitivity. I’m wondering if another autistic person in this community used any soundproofing in an apartment that actually reduced noise coming from a busy street. There are a lot of different products out there and I don’t want to buy something that doesn’t work.
Acoustics is one of my main hobbies. The others recommending noise cancelling headphones are spot on. Most of the “soundproofing” stuff won’t stop the sound, they’re actually made to reduce echo in a room.
To stop sound you need either mass or distance, both are hard to do unless you like straight up build an inner room in your room and carefully engineer it. It sucks but there’s no getting around physics
You forgot impedance layers and intentionally making them mismatch, which causes considerable energy loss between them without necessarily having to rely on a lot of mass.
Wood > low density foam > wood causes a ton of reflection.
Wood > pliable/stretchy rubber > wood causes a lot of sound energy to turn into deformation forces on the rubber, converting it to heat.
Yeah this. There’s a reason why recording studios are so expensive, treating a room basically requires very specific construction
Can you perform ANC via stereo system?
Only for low bass rumble/roar, but I haven’t seen any noise cancelling subwoofers for some reason. Passive bass traps exist. They work because a point sink can absorb bass from a large volume of air, because of the long wavelength of low-frequency sound.
It wouldn’t work for higher frequency (shorter wave) noise because the loudspeaker could only absorb the small part of the wavefront that collides with it, and the rest would pass by. As useless as trying to cancel light pollution from street lights by adding a few vantablack objects to the room.
Theoretically it could perform better if the system had microphones where the noise was coming inside (window probably), cameras to continuously track the positions of your ears, and some computation to solve what anti-noise to play from each loudspeaker when, so that the noises would combine out of phase at your ears. The system would have to be taught the room’s reflective properties by you wearing microphones in your ears for a few hours when the typical noise was active. It still wouldn’t be as effective as adding a better window on the noise leaking window.
This is the correct answer. Don’t waste your money on expensive solutions that won’t fix the problem.