Recently moved into the back room as an office/gaming room an its become apparent that theres a fair bit of sound leakage mainly lower end stuff through the wall into the next room. Fine during the day but at night when the person using said room is trying to sleep, its not ideal. Setup is two small bookshelf speakers with 4" woofers one is in a corner near the adjoining wall which I think is causing a fair amount of the problem. I looked online at acoustic tiles but it appears they are more for reducing reverb etc than actually dampening noise. While I know realistically I cant remove all the noise unless I wear a headset. Can anyone suggest anything for a reasonable cost that would at least reduce the perceived sound? Also anything that would reduce the reflections/echo would be amazing as I have next to zero soft surfaces in here so it sounds weird.
Been looking into sound proofing also. From what I've seen to do a wall right involves a lot of work and expense. You essentially build a second mechanically decoupled wall in front of the original. Other cheap options are likely a waste of money or won't have much impact. You could try decoupling the woofer from the floor to see if that helps. I'm not sure how you would go about that though. Headset is the cheapest most effective solution. Might be okay if you only use them at night.
For echo etc, look into "Bass traps" in the corners of the room. Also, try making your own acoustic panels for the walls with some bits from B&Q or similar. You could get fancy and have pictures printed onto acoustically transparent material for them.
Bass traps etc only help smooth out the comb effect in a room. To stop bass travelling you need mass, a floating room helps with sound a lot but you still need a lot of mass. As they're only small speakers but check they're not vibrating the stands they're on and passing sound through the floorboards etc
Think I may try both I wanted to angle the speakers up slightly so the acoustic foam wedges will do that an a nice big rockwool box frame, annoyingly I cant find anyone doing single panels of rockwool.
Hijacking the thread, the wall directly behind where i film is the adjoining wall to my neighbours, who will very soon have a new tiny tenant. I'd like to avoid pissing them off with any noise that could wake the baby and likewise avoid any noise coming back the other way. Is the best thing just plaster the entire wall some stuff? If I was a bit flush i'd get something nice and fancy like this: but we're just about managing to eat so £840 for a wall is a bit much There's just a ton of foam and felt panels; flat, cones, pyramids waves.... I'm almost certain a lot of it is crap, looks like cheap nasty foam that's used in packingetc. Cork any good? Can get enough 4mm cork tiles for £100. Can it be painted and still perform well?
Have you tried the "clearance" corner of DIY stores & builder's merchants in the area, to see if there's any open/damaged packs of rockwool?
Mass and decoupling is the only way to really reduce noise transmission between areas, and the lower the frequency the more of it you need. Soft furnishings and wall panels are more about reducing unwanted sound interactions inside the room than reducing noise next door. And even then you need something daft like a layer1.5m of rockwool to have any sort of meaningful effect on 50hz, let alone deep bass.
If you're willing to lose 55mm off the side of your room (and around £40 per square metre) then Gyproc GypLyner is a decent DIY sound damping system. The short of it is you screw some steel channels to the wall, fill it with insulation and then put two layers of plasterboard over the top.
I've found a couple layers of Tecsound (https://www.soundstop.co.uk/ZTECSO50S.php) to be very effective in removing fan noise from sneaking through to the room next door. But then something like fan noise is trivially easy to cut in comparison to a a baby, or music, or basically anything more dynamic. It won't hurt though, unless you count the way it smells for the first few weeks.