The big moment! Until this point, I couldn't know if I had missed something fundamental in my approach. And by now, it was too late to fix something done early on. The worst case would have been ending up with a room that has no more sound isolation than my current office, which is just regular 1/2" rock over fiberglass insulation.

Here is what I did for my sound test. I brought my electronic drum set's brain and amp into the drum room.

I started playing a loop and cranked the volume up. I don't have a dB meter, and the room right now is extremely live, so I can't really tell if I reached typical acoustic kit levels, but just going by me ear, it sounded to me to be as loud as my Yamaha kit would be in this small room.

I closed the door and was amazed! I could stand directly outside the door and have a conversation at normal levels with my family. It was obvious something loud was going on in the drum room, but it was greatly attenuated.

Going directly next door (to my office) and thus out of a direct sight-line to the drum room door, the volume dropped dramatically. What I was hearing was coming in through the open doorway. This made it clear to me that the weak link is the door, as expected.

I was pleased to note that the sound coming through the HVAC was completely overwhelmed by the sound coming in the office door. This meant that my HVAC work was succesful.

Going down the hall to our family room, you almost couldn't hear the drums. There was no need to adjust the TV volume at all. During quiet parts of the TV broadcast, you could catch some of the drum sounds, but they were very muted.

Outside of my house, the drum room sound is much less than my typical TV volume as heard outside. So, my neighbors won't even know I'm playing drums.

Finally, it was time for the most critical test: The master bedroom is directly above the drum room. The sound there was completely absent, except for the extreme low frequencies of the bass drum. This was to be expected, as the low frequencies are the hardest to stop. But the wife said that the sound heard in the bedroom wouldn't keep her from falling asleep. Sweet!

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