The relationship between post-construction testing and sound insulation performance

This paper looks at the effect of post-construction testing on the sound in sulation performance of housing. As a result of simpler and cheaper instrum entation, wide scale testing of sound transmission was carried out on housi ng in central Scotland during the 1980s. This testing showed that, initiall y, there was a very high number of houses that failed to meet the desired s ound insulation standard but that as architects and contractors came to ter ms with the knowledge that completed houses might be tested, so the number of failures decreased. The results showed that post-construction testing co uld reduce the failure rate from around 60% to around 20%. (C) 1998 Elsevie r Science Ltd. All rights reserved.