Sounds are a great part of life—your favorite songs blasting through the speakers, your children’s laughter, the peaceful murmur of a mountain creek. However, not all sounds are created equal nor can you always control the sounds around you. The sounds of low-flying planes, lawnmowers, and honking traffic creep their way into your home, interrupting the tranquility that you’ve worked so hard to maintain.
Or maybe you’re burgeoning rock star who doesn’t want to anger the neighbors. Regardless, one of the best ways to keep outdoor sounds out and indoor sounds in is to install sound control windows. Let’s take a look at how soundproof windows work.
Understanding Sound
Before we take a look at soundproof windows, we have to understand some basics about sound. Sound travels in waves caused by vibrations in air. The waves eventually hit your eardrum, causing a series of vibrations that are interpreted by the brain as sound.
There are generally three ways that sound can be blocked or reduced.
- Space: Sound can only travel a certain distance. The farther away you are from a source of sound, the less likely you’ll hear the sound. For example, it would be harder to hear your friend from across the street than if he were right next to you. It’s the same reason you might not hear a party raging six houses down but you can easily hear your next-door neighbor’s loud television.
- Mass: The more mass between you and the origin of a sound wave, the lower the volume when the sound does eventually reach your ears. Closing your bedroom door, for instance, would make your stereo less audible than if you kept the door open.
- Dampening: Through dampening, sound waves are forced to travel through several layers of a material that absorb the sound waves before they have a chance to spread into the air. This works by limiting the sound wave’s ability to vibrate through different structures.
Soundproofing Windows
How do you control the sound coming out of and into your windows? You can’t exactly cover your windows in foam and egg cartons.
Many people turn to double-paned windows. It’s the simplest and most affordable means of soundproofing your windows. Double paned windows will logically offer more soundproofing than single-paned windows. The idea is to couple an extra pane with a cushion of air between the two pieces of glass to block some of the sound waves.
In reality, double-paned glass alone is only mildly more effective than single-paned glass. The sheets of glass are often quite thin, and because both panes are set into the same frame, they vibrate together, much like a tuning fork.
You can make your double-pane windows more effective by applying a laminate to the glass. Laminate consists of layers of plastic of varying length. The laminate strengthens the window, making it firmer to prevent vibrations from sound waves. Sound also has a harder time penetrating the plastic laminate.
A more effective solution: thick glass. Thicker glass is stiffer, which naturally makes it less prone to vibration, significantly reducing sounds trying to enter through the window.
Sound control windows combine all of these techniques to various degrees while also sealing up any potential cracks and leaks around your window to effectively control noise inside and outside your home.
Remember, however, that completely blocking out all of the noise is exceptionally expensive and not entirely plausible. You would need incredibly thick glass. Thicker glass means heavier glass, and the material supporting the average window frame can only handle so much weight. Even in recording studios, where a quiet environment is a necessity, the glass cannot resist 100% of sound.
Sound control windows are a valuable investment for those suffering from too much city noise. For sound control windows in Southern California, contact US Window and Door today!
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