Have any of you had any experience with this stuff? It is a super heavy (1 or 2 lb per sq ft, depending on version selected). Effectiveness? Ease/difficulty of application? I am looking at it as a possible material for my room.
Acoustiblok
Hey Wayne, I obtained a sample of it. It seems to be a form of mass loaded vinyl. It is different from standard MLV, but I see no evidence that its better.
I am not against MLV, but I will say that the best direct research testing of MLV vs other methods that I have found suggest that MLV is less effective and more expensive than products like Green Glue. My suggestion is to use Green glue instead of Acoustiblok with two or three layers of drywall. You will likely find it to be cheaper with greater noise blocking.
I have also considered MLV in addition to Green Glue in the past, I suspect that MLV may have some benefits in blocking lower frequencies that when used in addition to CLD (drywall plus Green Glue) may be better.
The main issue with drywall and MLV is that Drywall is rigid and not well damped. It has two regions, the wall resonance region and the material coincidence frequency in which a huge dip in transmission loss takes place (It's fairly deep and wide). This is not improved by more mass. At these two frequencies you lose all benefit of the wall mass and only the MLV is stopping sound. It doesn't stop all that much sound. If you damp the drywall with CLD methods you not only gain the mass of two layers of drywall but get significant damping and so there is little to no dip in the transmission loss at these two critical frequencies.
If you are looking at sound isolation also look seriously at decoupling methods as that seems to be the single biggest improvement.
If you really want to get into exploring different transmission loss values for different approaches, let me know. I did a lot of research and saved a lot of the test documents for this. I tried to stick with only products that were tested by an NVLAP lab and where the method was reasonable for comparison. For example I found one company that claimed their spray foam insulation provided 45db's of transmission loss (STC45) but it turns out that was with steel studs, two layers of 5/8" drywall on both sides, and filled with this insulation. That wall with no insulation would have had similar transmission loss values. Simply adding green glue between the drywall layers would have improved that STC value well into the 50's.