I recently watched this great new video from Jeff Randall, one of the drummers I like to follow on YouTube. He picked up a used WhisperRoom sound isolation booth and ran some sound level tests while playing drums.
The WhisperRoom sound booths have been around for a while and they make them in many different sizes and configurations for different purposes. They are used by musicians, broadcasters, recording engineers and more.
In Jeff’s video he has the booth set up in his garage. You can see that they take up a lot of space, pretty much a full parking spot in his garage. It looks like a shipping container sitting in his garage, actually. There’s enough room inside the booth for his drum kit and a small workstation desk. He also mentions how much work it was to move it to his place, which gives you an idea of the weight and size of the materials involved.
When he’s inside the booth, the tight sound and lack of natural reverberation remind of what it’s like to be in our smaller vocal recording room at Absolute Studios. You can hear the difference when he’s talking both outside and inside the booth.
While something like this looks like it works great for sound isolation, it’s definitely not for everybody. This is the type of sound isolation that would work better for drummers with houses rather apartments due to the space requirements and the fact that it’s not completely sound proof. There’s also the price tag. After some searching around for prices it looks like the isolation booths that are large enough for drum kits are potentially upwards of $10,000. That’s a large investment to make.
Either way, pretty neat stuff and it’s good to know that this option is out there. Sound isolation rooms like this can be a good alternative to building permanently installed rooms at home, which may or may not cost about the same depending on how much you put into it.
