Originally Posted by: hifistan 
I had just about gotten my basement listening room the way I wanted it and am faced with the prospect of changing houses. Louisville,Ky , which I live across the Ohio river from, had 85 days above 90 degrees F in 2010; this Summer is even hotter. The tempeture here today was 97 F; the town I intend to move to had a temperature of 79 F. It is located in the Appalachian Mountains at an elevation of 900 M. While I would ideally like a house with plaster walls they are hard to find in this country in recent construction. I have had so much trouble in the past with suspended floors that I intend to look for a basement room again. I am torn between getting an unfinished basement so I could do it up to my requirements and finding one already finished to save the time and bother of finishing one. Also not sure of what wall material I would use; I am well aware of the deficiencies of dry wall construction. I know that there are several specialized products available but haven't worked with any. Have seen some with wood paneling but haven't seen the actual house so don't know what quality it is. What are the things members wound advise me to keep in mind as I look? I was temped to look at a log house but my wife hates them; I don't suppose they are common over there but I thought the wood walls and cathedral ceilings might be good for sound. My present basement room has 7' ceilings which I always thought was a serious deficiency. While I have lived at a similar elevation in the past it was during a period when I was not as involved with audio, what difference should I expect from listening close to sea level? I fondly remember living in some old apartment buildings with high ceilings and solid walls in my student days in Chicago but such things are not found where I am moving. All suggestions appreciated.
Don't know the US market but certainly here in the UK there are available a variety of multi-level dry-wall coverings you can use of varying thickness - the thicker the better - specifically designed for their acoustic performance, mostly designed to meet inter-room transmission requirements for planning authorities. Good inter-room insulation is not necesarily linked directly to good absorbtion properties in the room itself, but is usually a pretty good guide. Similarly floor acoustic properties can be improved by using multi-level DIFFERENT THICKNESS chipboards with a visco-elastic glue between them. Traditional lath-and-plaster ceilings are much better damped than dry plaster-board linings.
I'm spoilt because the wall on my house are 2ft thick random built stone, with stone floors and reed-and-soft-plaster ceilings in between oak or elm beams, so is as acoustically dead at low frequencies as you could possibly want.
But the problems I've found with most domestic installations is higher up the frequency range, with far too much hard flat surfaces, often parallel with each other. Not helped by listeners who place speakers equidistant from end wall and listen right in the centre of the room against a flat wall facing the speakers, pretty well a recipe for standing wave problems. "Modern" style rooms, pretty minimalistic, often have acoustics that sound like a public toilet. We have a TV programme here in the UK called Grand Designs, where spectacular modernistic new builds or rebuilds are shown, and even on the TV's speakers the interviews with the proud owners are often highly acoustically coloured.
You can't beat lots of soft furnishing to clean up a room. Nice thick rugs or carpets, soft squishy sofas, bookshelves stuffed with books, hanging rugs, thick well-lined curtains. Decent remote control for the audio and/or video recording equipment so that it can be tucked out of the way rather than staring one in the face. Who wants to stare at a rack of electronic equipment when you could have a nice log fire (especially appropriate in the area it sounds like you are considering) and some decent pictures as the focal point?
