Two of the 3 walls in our HT area are not insulated, and in fact one wall backs into the furnace room and has nothing behind it. I find that once the HT is playing loud enough, the sub makes the walls and the picture frames hanging on them rattle like crazy.

Any thoughts on what could reduce this without a huge cost? Blu-tack? Different securing to the wall? Styrofoam between the studs?

possibly adding some blue tack or something similar to the bottom edges of the pictures to help them from rattling. Maybe you have your sub cranked to much.

Frank, turn the damn thing down!

flying buttresses on both sides of the wall should do it. ;-)

Hi fhw,

Every object has a resonance frequency and at loud enough playback levels, objects, walls and the like will resonate or vibrate.

I concur with JohnK. Turn down the subwoofer/playback levels, otherwise you'll have to use various damping materials to suppress the resonances.

Regards,

Alan

HAHAHA, Frank, i have the EXACT same problem...!



So, in a way i can blame my issues on John

Here is a product you can get for your picture frames. Home depot, and Lowes as well as craft stores will carry this as well.
http://www.amazon.com/Waxman-4215395N-2-...6827&sr=8-1

What are your walls made of? Drywall? The walls in my family room are the 70's 1/4" wood paneling.. But, we put plastered the panels to "update" our family room. By adding the plaster, that added mass to the wood paneling, which reduced the resonante frequency.. Now, the "walls" do not rattle... If you can come up with a way of adding mass to your walls, that will reduce the resonante frequency and will most likely stop them from vibrating...

Plaster is pretty inexpensive, but takes a while to apply.. The final look that we achieved in our family room is similar to a stucco finish.

This would be the easiest fix... Another option would be to re-structure your walls, to add more studs, and possibly do 2 layers of drywall. But, that would cost much more money/time, and is not what you have indicated you want to do.

You may be able to add some extra studs in the heater room to test... Use construction adhesive as well as some dry wall screws, to ensure that you get maximum adhesion to the new studs. I would start with a few horizontal studs to lock the vertical ones in, and strengthen the entire structure, and go from there.

Such blasphemy!!

Indeed...what would be the point of turning the sub down?

Will try the blu-tack, because I'm pretty sure I have some around

Do what restaurants do: drywall screws thru each corner of the frame! Looks like hell, but won't go anywhere.

Or trade it all in for sculpture. Scott, ya gotta start frequenting better restaurants.

I live in a condo with neighbors downstairs. My EP500 made the walls and windows rattle and I wanted to tone it down a bit. So I ordered a GRAMMA pad from www.auralex.com

I still get bass, but the rattling has stopped. It's not that expensive so you could give it a try (and quite frankly, you can probably go the DIY route).

When I was in high school, I made an isolator that worked very well for my turntable. I've wondered how well a larger version would work for a sub.

Basically, I made a nice-looking wooden "pan" (say, 16"W x 16"D x 2"H) and filled it with sand. I placed a "floating" panel on top of the sand (For the example above, it would be maybe 15.5" x 15.5") and sat my turntable on top of that.

So, the TT was very well isolated from rumble as it was essentially sitting on 2" of sand and not touching anything else.

It's certainly quicker and easier to order a GRAMMA pad, but I've always wondered if my little device idea would work for a sub.

Sorry your fledgling teenage company didn't pan out. I woulda bought a Johnson Isolator, had I been aware. Maybe it was the name?