Wood or concrete floor? - A comparison of direct sound insulation

In the process of designing buildings, architects have to consider many aspects from different disciplines in order to choose the most appropriate materials and design details. Regarding only sound insulation, a 320 mm deep wood framed floor performs better for most sound insulation ratings than an eight times heavier 150 mm thick concrete floor, especially if a heavy topping on a resilient layer is added on both. This paper presents the results of a small study comparing the direct sound insulation of a wood frame and a concrete base floor (both bare and with a heavy topping), measured with four standardized sources (Airborne Sound and Tapping Machine according to ISO 10140 Parts 2 & 3 respectively, and Ball and Tire both according JIS 1418-2 and KS F 2810-2). As mentioned above, this study shows that with a topping the wood floor performs better than the concrete floor over all standard frequency ranges. It was also found that the improvement of sound insulation due to a topping is very similar for all sources except for the Tire or "Bang Machine", which is an outlier probably due to its extremely forceful impact.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye