Soundproofing for Laminate and Resilient Flooring

If there’s one thing that laminate flooring and resilient flooring can’t do, it cannot deaden sound very well.

Carpeting dulls sound (especially in conjunction with a nice, thick pad).  Solid hardwood does a great job of quieting things down.  Engineered wood flooring, too.

But laminate flooring is so thin and built on such a worthless base, that it does a crap job of slowing the transmission of sound from one floor to another.  Resilient flooring has no base whatsoever.  So, for these materials more than almost any other kind of flooring, you seriously need to think about your subfloor or underlayment materials.

Sound-deadening panels such as Georgia-Pacific’s Hushboard are available which normally are used for walls.  But Hushboard can also be laid down for flooring, in addition to minimum 19/32″ plywood or OSB.  Predictably, Hushboard is a fiberboard type of material, so problems can result if you try to install the stuff under or next to something that will sharply press on it, such as partition walls.

Installing Hushboard

Hushboard is an easy install with 5d roofing nails or type W drywall screws.  GP recommends a grid-like layout of fasteners every 12 inches, and a half-inch from the panel edges.

Then lay another 15/32″ plywood underlayment on top of the Hushboard.  It’s like a Hushboard sandwich.

You’re really building up the floor high–two plywoods, one Hushboard, one finish floor.  But I guarantee, this will bring down the sound volume a long ways.