Dampers to Limit Piano Hammer Noise in Apartments

[Mikeo1938]

We're planning to move to an apartment and I'm anxious about disturbance to below caused by piano-hammer noise. Apparently this can occur with keyboards with weighted keys as well as with traditional pianos. I gather it can be quite a problem.

My piano is a Yamaha U1 Silent. The flat in question has a concrete floor - whether this is better or worse than an older, converted apartment with a wooden floor I do not know. The floors will be carpeted but I've heard of people using additional rubber matting to help.

On the other hand, there are special dampers for this purpose. The website is at (www.piattino.de) but the description is in German.

Has anyone experienced this problem? What remedies have been tried and with what degree of success? Has anyone tried these special 'Piattino' dampers?

Comments appreciated

M

 

[The Y_man]

I can't imagine it would be an issue with concrete floor.....

The Y-man

 

[goldi5210]

I would recommend the following with only a fifths of the your price.

https://www.thomann.de/gb/jahn_piano_gleiter.htm

 

[Mikeo1938]

Thanks to both of you for your help ... I'll check out the latter via e-mail.
M

 

[Biggles]

Be careful, a lot of the products on sale are intended for floor protection from damage by piano casters.

A hard ridid material between piano and floor will do nothing to dampen transmitted sounds.

For sound damping you need a rubber or silicon material between the floor and piano.

 

[Mikeo1938]

Thanks again.
Has anyone experienced this problem in a building with concrete floors?
Certainly in our present house with wooden floors, you can indeed hear the hammering in the room below. Perhaps a double-whammy solution with a rubber mat and the special dampers from Germany will be best. I absolutely don't want there to be a problem.
M

 

[Biggles]

Prior to retiring I was a Building Services Engineer where I spent a fair amount of time limiting noise transmission within concrete constructed buildings.

Your wooden floors are a giant loudspeaker with you pounding the keys as though they are the coils in a speaker, the resultant effect is that the floor resonates.

It depends upon how far you want to go, the piano reductors are principally to protect floor surfaces from damage that the small surface area of casters will cause, they are also hard and hence their dampening properties will be limited, they will work since they offer a greater contact area and this will have a dampening effect.

For a good starter I suggest you consider a dedicated area for the instrument mounted on a floating hardwood timber floor, now whilst this may seem strange the floor would be floating on top of a sound absorbing pad.

As a worst case you may need to add dampening material to the walls and even to the ceilings of the neighbours below.

Alas there is no easy one size fits all solution, its an incremental process to limit the effects to acceptable levels within the available budget.

 

[Mikeo1938]

Thanks very much, Biggles, for your detailed and helpful reply.
Don't know whether you've heard of, or have experience with, the "piattino" dampers (www.piattino.de) but I think I'll go for them in any case.

What I don't want is to wait for complaints and then try to fix the issue. Your suggestion about the dedicated area and the floating timber floor is interesting. Presumably this could be like a large plinth just for the piano itself and for the stool. It would not need to be for the entire room

And how about the concrete floor of a purpose-built block of flats? I trust that, for starters, this will be better than the wooden floor in our existing house.

It would be interesting to know whether others have experienced this problem.

M

 

[happyrat1]

FWIW I live in a 9th floor apartment in a high rise built in 1979.

The entire place is concrete walls, ceiling and floors except for the hollow drywall along the main corridors.

I've been here for a year and enjoy my music quite loud and have yet to hear a peep from the neighbours about any noise complaints.

If you move to a well constructed high rise tower I seriously doubt you'd have any problems at all.

Gary

 

[Biggles]

Thanks very much, Biggles, for your detailed and helpful reply.
Don't know whether you've heard of, or have experience with, the "piattino" dampers (www.piattino.de) but I think I'll go for them in any case.

What I don't want is to wait for complaints and then try to fix the issue. Your suggestion about the dedicated area and the floating timber floor is interesting. Presumably this could be like a large plinth just for the piano itself and for the stool. It would not need to be for the entire room

And how about the concrete floor of a purpose-built block of flats? I trust that, for starters, this will be better than the wooden floor in our existing house.

It would be interesting to know whether others have experienced this problem.

M

What appears to be a concrete floor may be nothing more than a thin concrete screed used to level the floor. Hence the floor may be of a fairly lightweight material. Often a floor is constructed of essentially preloaded concrete beams seperated by about 18” and the 18” is filled with what looks like breeze blocks. Solid concrete floors generally only occur on the ground floor and not on the upper floors due to the timescales and spans that would result.

In your situation I would have a suck it and see tendancy. Move in and visit neighbours and ask them to let you know if they hear anything. After all no need to spend any of your hard earned cash unless you really have to.

If the do hear you playing, try the feet pads first and work up from there.

In answer to your question you would not need to build up the whole floor only enough to give you what in effect would be a small stage area for the keyboard, stool and any other kit you want on it. Btw once made being a floating structure you could have it moved with you if you change Appartment again.

I suggest that the piattino dampers look exactly the product that will provide the necessary isolation and these would be the place to start.

Incidentally Bridgewater Hall concert venue in Manchester, England has the whole 2000 seat auditorium suspended on what look like a series of the Piattino’s big brothers dampers to limit transmission of sounds and vibration from the external traffic and trams into the Auditorium.

 

[Eric Barker]

I can't imagine it would be an issue with concrete floor...

On the contrary, concrete floors are the worst, they don't absorb anything, they just transmit all the low frequencies perfectly, like it's not even there, or worse. Super hard surfaces do that, they 100% reflect high frequencies, and 100% transmit low frequencies, and don't absorb anything. So you get a cave inside with only high frequencies and outside you hear nothing but booms.

Concrete is Satan. Wood is where it's at.

 

[Mikeo1938]

I think I'm going to cry!
But let's hear from someone with 'concrete' evidence ... I mean someone who, for better or for worse, has experienced this problem in an apartment block.
M

 

[Eric Barker]

Thats me, I live in Honolulu, the vertical city. Concrete apartment, worst acoustics I’ve ever lived in. My downstairs neighbors complain when I even play a note. I gotta wait until they’re at work to play. I’ve been able to tame it a bit by putting towels under the board, but that doesn’t solve everything.

 

[Biggles]

As is written on the cover of that great guide book The Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy......DON’T PANIC.

Certainly if you suffer from noise coming from neighbours a discussion with them and a coordinated approach from your Residents Association to the Landlord may elicit action to improve soundproofing between Apartments.

There is soundproofing material available to fasten to the undersurface of a concrete floor if the room below has a false ceiling accessible void between said false ceiling and the concrete floor above, that said if it does not exist then there are alternatives.

Again there is sound and impact absorbing materials out there that can be laid directly on top of a concrete floor, then a floating timber floor can be laid and then carpet underlay and carpet.

It is a suck it and see situation as it all depends upon the construction methods and the Building Codes applicable at the time of the build.

I see Eric is lucky enough to live on Oahu, a place I have visited a couple of times and what I did notice whilst there was generally the light weight contruction of the buildings. Hence Building Codes in the US probably vary considerably from State to State.

Hence, Don’t Panic......... yet ;-)

 

[happyrat1]

A couple of things I've noted in my past year in the high rise.

1) I keep sensible hours and don't play my keyboards after 10 PM.

2) When the stereo or the TV are not playing and the apartment is dead silent, I can hear the occasional scrape or thud from the apartment above me. Normal listening levels of the TV are sufficient to completely drown those sounds out.

3) I have yet to hear so much as a single complaint from the neighbours.

4) Don't be a dick about it, keep your playing hours limited to reasonable hours of the day and evening and I really don't think anyone will have anything to complain about.

5) If your building was built with any sort of decent engineering I really don't think you'll have to go to any extreme measures to drown out a bit of clicky clacky that may filter down to your neighbours.

6) I live in Canada. If your building was built to survive in a northern climate I seriously doubt you'll have problems. Buildings constructed in the sun belt, on the other hand, tend to be built from spit, baling wire and tissue paper. So the climate where you live is as important as the type of structure you are moving to.

7) If you haven't signed a lease already, ask the property manager about the soundproofing of the building BEFORE you close the deal.


Gary

 

[Eric Barker]

6 is definitely something I didn’t expect when I moved from Alaska to Hawaii. Even still I had a horrible downstairs neighbor that would complain if I played at 2pm with headphones on.

 

[happyrat1]

In that case your neighbour was the dick

Some people have nothing better to do than to make everyone else's lives miserable.

I hope you told him you were perfectly within your legal leaseholder's rights to make a modest amount of noise during daylight hours and that he should thank his lucky stars that you are not a flamenco dancer

Seriously, either you wait him out and hope he moves out and somebody with a day job moves in...

OR...

You start scanning the classifieds for a soundproof condo or apartment somewhere in Hawaii.

Either way he shouldn't have any sort of legal leg to stand on if he filed a complaint during those hours.

Gary

 

[happyrat1]

BTW, I'm a tobacco smoker and the first month I moved in several neighbours complained about a smell of smoke in the hallways when I opened my front door.

Not to be a dick about it, I agreed to open windows and run the exhaust fans but nowhere in the lease was any prohibition against me smoking in my own home and I explained that I would not be able to keep windows open and fans a blazing during the winter months. It's -22C outside as I type this.

Upshot is, they got used to it, the property manager set them straight and there has not been a complaint since.

It's one thing to try and accomodate the feelings of others, but it's a whole different thing to cave in when you're in the legal right.

Gary

 

[Eric Barker]

Oh, that b**** is gone, thank god. She was awful. Young kid, complained to everyone, tried to cheat on rent when she left. Made life miserable for the landlord, so I wasn’t too concerned, but it was annoying to say the least.

 

[GeraldR]

Interesting problem. I'm a heavy handed player so I've observed the problem when fingering a keyboard with the amps of but never had an issue. Passive vibration isolation is simple enough: what you need is suspension i.e. a spring and damping. For simple applications, vibration isolation pads are used which are typically a specially engineered synthetic rubber material which may come as simple squares or discs or as 'feet' where the pad is mounted to a metal plate typically with a screw thread for attachment. While any rubber pad or rubber furniture coaster will work to some extent, the specialty polymers are the best having been optimized for stiffness versus damping. Note the cutoff frequency i.e. lower limit of sound frequency where sound transmission is attenuated is a function of how much the weight of the thing being isolated compresses the isolator; for example, line operated compressors that produce strong vibration at 60 Hz are often supported by an isolator with 3" of compression which reduces the transmitted vibration by 99,9%. The hardest thing to explain to newbies is that isolation means just that: the isolated thing will not be so tightly coupled to the floor. You probably don't want your keyboard floating around as you try to play so practicality suggests more stiffness and less isolation; practical applications typically use pads with compression in the order of a few mm / 0.1 in. One should always check that the isolator is compressed when the weight of the object is applied (the lower the ratio of mass to stiffness, the higher the cutoff frequency). To properly size pads or feet, one starts by taking the weight of the object (your keyboard) and dividing by the number of legs then selecting an appropriate device from the tech specs (without published specs, it's probably a vibration isolator in name more than fact).
I've also engineered floors in audio production facilities to minimize sound transmission: for retrofit this typically consisted of layers starting with a hard glass fiber acoustic insulation sheet, closed cellular neoprene foam sheet, optionally a layer of gypsum (drywall), a plywood sub-floor with rubber backed carpet on top - works but raises the floor a few inches.