Gaming rooms are gaming havens, albeit the occasional angry complaint from the next-door apartment or the “you woke me up, tone it down” knock from your partner. How, then, will you keep the experience up while keeping the angry knocks down?
Soundproofing a gaming room requires patience, determination, and wit. Using soundproofing materials such as sound-absorbing foam, weather strippings, and more is one way to prevent sound from leaking out of the gaming room.
Always consider that turning down the volume is always an option. However, if you can’t live with that, read on.
How to Soundproof a Gaming Room Effectively
There are many methods to soundproof your room. As intimidating as this process may be, it isn’t that hard once you grasp everything. We have listed out the steps to make this process a little bit easier.
1. Check the gaming room dimensions
Instead of rushing to Amazon to buy those soundproofing items, how about you take a breather? The first and most crucial step we should do whenever we attempt to start soundproofing a gaming room is to measure the room’s dimensions.
It’s just like the famous quote, “know your enemy.” We must know the room itself before we start going non compos mentis all over it. Let’s start going through with the game plan first, folks!
2. Soundproof the Door
You enter the room with that door, and you exit the room with that door. Do you know what this means? You start with the door.
Shocking as it may be, doors have a gap from the floor to the door itself, allowing all that sound to go in and out. There are many soundproofing options for doors, one of them being Acoustidoor.
The Acoustidoor is a retractable sound-blocking panel that acts a little bit like Spiderman and hangs over your door frame.
This retractable industrial design choice is to retract the panel whenever one wants to go in and out of the door. However, if you want the sound to stay inside, you can also just lower down that panel to ensure your neighbors won’t hear a squeak.
The good thing is that not only does this block sound from going out through your door, it also absorbs sound to reduce echo, providing better acoustics.
If you want a less clunky option and want a clean yet working option, you can start considering weather strippings. Weather strippings are easy to install around your door, and they also enable you not to see them all the time. Door sweeps and perimeter seals also work just as fine.
Now you’re done. That one-inch gap is now closed for good. Now let’s pray that your door doesn’t drag whenever you open and close it.
3. Add some pillows
Now the gaming room isn’t necessarily a sleeping area (or is it?), but keeping pillows nearby, even just for the sake of aesthetics, can help reduce noise. Hard surfaces are notorious for their sound reflecting abilities.
This property is the reason why when you go to a closed room with just walls and no furniture, you’ll notice echoes bouncing around the room.
However, if you don’t have those body pillows, maybe consider buying a giant floor pillow to use for your “guests” (do you invite guests inside your gaming room?). Not only do they serve as comfortable seating, but they are also excellent sound absorbent material.
4. Add carpets
Many people forget the power the floor holds. You step on them, you ignore them, but they’ll always be there for you, supporting your every move (#RespectFloors). Carpets are the same too; sometimes they stay there, years on end, without even a single wash.
Carpets are good sound absorbent materials. Their soft and varied structure enables them to absorb a considerable span of frequencies and has the efficacy to absorb up to 70% of airborne sound.
The carpet is an affordable yet aesthetically pleasing soundproofing choice.
The best types of carpets to use for sound absorption are wool, as they contain different lengths and widths of fibers that are not too clustered, nor are they too far apart.
5. Use sound-absorbing blankets
If you want to have an excellent acoustic experience, meaning ensuring your room is optimal for crisp and fantastic audio, then considering sound-absorbing blankets is a no-brainer.
Sound-absorbing blankets or sound blankets are renowned for their outstanding sound-absorbing abilities (hence the name) that trap up to 80% of all airborne air.
Sound absorbing blankets are used and still used in studios, a testament to their prowess and acoustic ability.
Not only are they easy to install, but they are also pretty darn cheap in comparison to the performance they offer.
They can be installed on your walls, on your windows, even on your ceilings and help a lot when soundproofing a gaming room.
Although you can use nails to stick the blankets to your walls, you can opt to tape or glue it if you want less of a commitment on these sound blankets. Another trick is to install curtain rods so that you can hang your sound blankets just like curtains on a wall.
Instead of buying acoustic curtains, you can even use the sound blankets as curtains over your windows. Windows are notoriously hard to soundproof, as they let sound in through the air gaps.
With sound blankets, not only do they ensure a snug fit to your windows, but they also offer you less clutter.
6. Use Acoustic Foam
Whenever we see studios on television, we always see those egg tray esque material sound engineers always use. Personally, when I was a kid, I used to think that those were egg trays.
This conjecture made me question if I could use egg trays to soundproof my room too.
No. Bad idea. Just don’t.
Instead of eating a gazillion eggs to obtain those amounts of egg trays, you can opt to buy the real deal: an acoustic foam.
The materials composition is made of not only sound absorbent material; these specialty foams have designs that, by themselves, are also engineering marvels that absorb specific frequencies of sound.
Those small cells within the acoustic foam trap sound energy, so whenever they hit the cells, they bounce again and again until they lose energy. What the material lacks for, the design delivers. These foams are light, easy to install, and very effective.
Soundproofing Your Equipment
Now that we have soundproofed your room let us not forget that the gaming equipment may be a tad bit noisy (or more like a leaf blower) and does not enhance the experience.
Below is a list that helps you quiet your gaming equipment, ensuring that your gaming equipment will not sound like a space shuttle.
The fans
If you have ever owned a desktop computer, you know that those fans can go crazy. At times, they’ll run so fast that they will make you think as if they are trying to cool your computer or stop global warming.
This excruciating noise is why we have dedicated an entire segment itself just for the fans.
A great start to silence your fans is to install quiet fan cases. These ensure that the cases that encapsulate your fans aren’t cheering on your fans to run faster, like the Madridistas cheering on Real Madrid.
Another way to silence the fans of your desktop computer is to install anti-vibration fan mouths. By using this, you’ll be surprised at how quiet your fans will turn out to be.
Everything else
There are many tips to silence your computer, especially the computer case. Quiet cases are computer chassis that specialize in shutting up. These cases reduce the overall ambient noises made by the machine.
Another thing is to replace other components, like, for example, HDDs. HDDs or hard disk drives are notorious for their moving components, thus noise. HDDs are also slower and are at a higher risk of failure.
Switching to the faster, albeit more expensive, SSDs will save you the trouble and all that noise.
Frequently Asked Questions About Making Your Gaming Room Quiet
My computer is still noisy. What are the other steps I can take?
One of the essential things people often forget to check is whether their computer unit is optimal. Putting your computer and your desktop in areas with noisy, vibrating parts can increase noise. Another thing is to put your desktop and your computer unit on a flat surface.
Can installing curtains help?
Of course! Although a bit basic, installing curtains is a pretty helpful way to ensure that sound does not leak from your room. Your curtains do not necessarily need to be acoustic to be able to block sound.
Can cleaning my computer help with noise problems?
Yes. A million times yes on this one.
Cleaning your computer, especially your fans, with compressed air will take out the dust accumulating within the nooks and crannies, ensuring your fan a smoother ride.