Best Floor Soundproofing Systems of 2024
iKoustic has dedicated 14 years to enhancing our floor soundproofing solutions. Annually, we refine these systems using testing data, innovative materials, and customer input to ensure we offer you the best floor soundproofing. Explore our 2024 review of the best floor soundproofing choices.
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Comparing the best floor soundproofing systems
| Floor System | Impact Sound Blocked | Installation Level | Price per m2 | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gold Floor System | 21dB | Intermediate | £115 | Sound Reduction |
| Silver Floor System | 19dB | Moderate | £82 | Price per dB Reduced |
| Bronze Floor System | 10dB | Easy | £23 | Cheapest Floor System |
Floor Soundproofing Overview
Floor soundproofing can be a single underlay or a whole system, but the idea is to block noise transmitting in or out through the floor. Most commonly, floor soundproofing will be to prevent impact noise, like footsteps, from disturbing the rooms below.
Floor soundproofing can look like regular underlay for carpet, or, can be a full system with multiple materials. The benefit of multiple materials are that you will be able to resist a wider range of sounds.
How floor soundproofing can block impact noise (footsteps)
The Best Floor Soundproofing for Homes and Flats
- Gold MuteMat+: This is best for the highest sound reduction, including of impact noise.
- Silver MuteMat 3: This is best for high performance against impact and airborne, with a financial saving.
- Bronze MuteMat 2: Best for impact sound reduction on a budget.
Features and Benefits
| Impact Sound Reduction | 21dB Ctr |
| Airborne Sound Reduction | 16dB |
| Suitable for | Timber Floors |
| Layers of mass | 3 |
| System width | 721mm |
| Works for | Footsteps, music, talking |
| Installation Level | Intermediate |
| Decoupling Device | Closed-cell foam |
| Price per m2 | £115 |
| Best pro | High impact & airborne reduction |
| Con | System cost |
1st Place Best Floor Soundproofing
Gold MuteMat+
Our best floor soundproofing for 2024 goes to the Gold MuteMat+ system. This can reduce both impact and airborne noises.
Our Gold floor soundproofing system offers the best performance for blocking both airborne and impact noise. This system’s strength lies in the use of 6 different soundproofing layers. These layers have been picked to ensure the system adds mass (to reflect airborne noise), decouples structures (to block impact noise) and uses absorption (to prevent amplification of sounds).
As is so often the case, the devil is in the detail! While this system is the most expensive, we use every floor soundproofing trick in the book. The perimeter flanking band and isolation strips are small but mighty components in this system. They help to fully isolate floor by preventing direct contact with the subfloor and the surrounding walls.
This system is also the thickest system, at 21mm, however an additional carpet underlay would not be required with this system. This system also has the advantage of being compatible with most flooring types.
What we like most
System draw backs
Features and Benefits
| Impact Sound Reduction | 19dB |
| Airborne Sound Reduction | 14dB |
| Suitable for | Timber Floor |
| Isolation Layers | 2 |
| System width | 17mm |
| Works for | Noisy neighbours, TV noise, music studio |
| Installation Level | Moderate |
| Price per m2 | £82 |
| Best pro | Cheapest for reduction |
| Con | Harder installation |
2nd Best Floor Soundproofing
MuteMat 3 Silver
Our second best floor soundproofing option goes to the Muteat 3 build up.This will protect you from both types of noise complaint.
Taking second place, our silver system offers a significant saving on the gold system, however, it has a weaker resistance to sound. That said, this system still reduces both impact and airborne noise to a very high level. It would be a good option if the best solution is financially out of reach.
This system is also a few millimeters slimmer, which for some people is very important due to threshold or stair heights. This system uses the same materials as our best performing option, however, it misses out the visco-elastic membrane. The loss of this membrane reduces the mass of the system and means less vibration energy can be absorbed.
While this system is not as high performing as the gold system, it still offers acoustic mineral wool, which is a must for impact reduction!
What we like most
System draw backs
Features and Benefits
| Impact Sound Reduction | 10dB |
| Airborne Sound Reduction | 8dB |
| Suitable for | Timber Floors |
| Layers of mass | 1 |
| System width | 10mm |
| Works for | Footsteps |
| Installation Level | Simple |
| Decoupling Device | Closed-cell foam |
| Price per m2 | £23 |
| Best pro | Incredible value |
| Con | Only 1 layer of mass |
3rd Best Floor Soundproofing of 2024
MuteMat 2 Bronze
When it comes to the best floor soundproofing, we also want to consider the best cheap wall soundproofing. This system is good for small spaces and small budgets, too.
The final option in our floor soundproofing round up, is the bronze system. This offers a reduction in both impact and airborne noise. As sound is perceived by the human ear, this system will offer an impressive halving of the impact noise.
The benefits of this system are clear; it’s incredibly affordable at only £23 per m2 and also only uses 10mm of head height. However, in comparison to the other two systems, this floor soundproofing solution has a reduced performance.
We like this system for its affordability, but it’s always better to install a solution that could exceed your noise issue. We would advise this because sound is subjective, the performance of a system will partly depend upon the structure it’s installed onto, and, finally, sound issues can change over time.
What we like most
System draw backs
Issues comparing floor soundproofing
The issue with comparing different flooring systems is that people measure performance very differently. This results in misleading data and disappointing performance. Many places promise impact reduction ratings of 50dB plus, which simply isn’t possible. What has been done here, is that companies display the post-treatment figure, which includes the performance of the floor.
What should be done, so that you can accurately compare systems, is the before reading (untreated) should be subtracted from the after reading to give you the improvement. While we rate our products using this method at iKoustic, many people don’t. Ultimately, we were unable to find examples of more than one other supplier who had this information. This means we can’t possibly compare other options, as the data is inflated and not comparable.
Unless you know the starting measurement for a floor, you can’t say how much a system has improved it!
