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Back in February I booked a Hackney studio for a dialogue-heavy branded content shoot. Listing said "soundproofed against street noise." What I didn't realise until 9am on the shoot day was that "soundproofed" in this context meant "the owner has put some acoustic foam on one wall." The studio was on a main bus route. We spent the day rolling on every bus, pausing for every delivery van, and watching the actress's energy die a slow death.

After that day I developed a process. Five minutes. One phone. Here's how I now test any studio I plan to shoot sound in — and the two specific questions every owner should be able to answer.

What "soundproof" actually means

Soundproofing and acoustic treatment are completely different things. Studios, and worse, listing copywriters, mix them up constantly.

Soundproofing is about stopping sound from getting in or out of a room. That's a construction concern. You need mass — thick walls, dense doors, proper seals, decoupled structures. Real soundproofing is expensive. Studios that have it cost more to build and advertise that fact.

Acoustic treatment is about managing the sound inside the room. Foam panels, bass traps, diffusers. This stops your recording sounding like a bathroom. It does not stop the 38 bus going past the window.

You need both for serious audio work. You often get neither. You sometimes get one labelled as both.

The two numbers that matter

When I'm considering a studio for sound-sensitive work, there are two figures I want to know:

1. Noise floor in dB(A). Measured with the studio as you'd shoot in it — HVAC on, lights on, cameras running — and no one talking. Anything below 30 dB(A) is good. Below 35 is workable. Above 40 and you'll hear it on the track and the sound mixer will hate you.

2. External noise bleed through walls at peak. This is harder to measure reliably but you can approximate by having someone stand outside the studio and speak normally at 1m from the wall, while you listen inside. If you can make out words clearly, the walls won't block a motorbike. If you can hear a muffled rhythm but no words, you're probably fine for most work.

Ask the owner for the first number. Most won't know it. The ones who do — especially if they can tell you the peak number at morning rush hour — have taken soundproofing seriously. Those are the ones I book for ADR, podcast work, or anything where the audio is the deliverable.

The five-minute phone test

Even without a meter, you can do a quick assessment on a site visit. Or ask the owner to do it for you and video it.

Step 1: Walk into the room. Close all doors and windows. Stand still.

Step 2: Count, out loud, the sounds you can hear in 60 seconds. Every one. Distant traffic. The hum of an air vent. The fridge in the green room. The fluorescent ballast. Every single one. If the count is above five, you have work to do.

Step 3: Have someone close another door in the building — hard. Listen for it through the wall. A properly dense partition will dull it to a muffled thump. A stud-wall-with-foam setup will transmit it with a recognisable slam.

Step 4: Check the windows. Are they sealed double-glazing? Can you see any gap at the frame? Single-glazed Victorian windows are an acoustic nightmare, no matter what's on the walls.

Step 5: Walk around the perimeter and run your hand along every join — floor-to-wall, wall-to-ceiling, around door frames. Any gap you can fit a finger into is a soundproofing gap. Small gaps leak sound astonishingly well.

If the studio passes this five-minute test, it's probably usable for most sound work. If it fails at step 2 with seven distinct sounds audible, don't book it for anything with a spoken word.

What to ask the owner

Before you even book a site visit, send the owner these questions:

What's the typical noise floor inside the space during a shoot — can you hold a phone there for 60 seconds and let me hear the ambient?
Is the space on any of the usual bus routes, near a train line, under a flight path, or on a busy road?
Are the windows sealed double-glazing? When were they installed?
What's above, below, and either side of the studio? A co-working space, a workshop, a pub, residential?
Do you have any time restrictions because of noise complaints from neighbours?

That last one is gold. A studio with neighbour complaints is a studio where the landlord or council is watching. Which means if your shoot runs a bit loud, you might be the reason they get another complaint.

The location tells you most of the story

Honest reality: most of what determines sound quality in a UK studio is the location, not the treatment. A well-treated room on the Caledonian Road will be worse for sound than a bare-walled room in a quiet Deptford backstreet.

Rough heuristics I use for London:

Anything on the A501 inner ring road — hard no for dialogue work, even if treated.
Basements on quiet residential streets — usually the best option, if the HVAC is quiet.
Converted arches near rail lines — decent walls, but train vibration passes through the structure and you'll hear rolling stock on your track.
First-floor spaces on main roads — the worst combination, double-glazing or not.
Park Royal / Tottenham / the industrial estates — quiet enough at weekends, noisy on weekdays because of lorries loading. Ask about the schedule.
Shoreditch, Hackney Road — tough, due to traffic, but a few treated basement spaces are genuinely good.

Manchester is broadly easier — less continuous traffic, fewer main roads with residential-over-retail. Bristol and Leeds similar.

HVAC is the hidden killer

The single biggest cause of a bad noise floor in a treated studio isn't the street outside. It's the air conditioning. Modern studios need climate control — they run lights, they run hot — but cheap HVAC is loud.

When you visit, ask the owner to turn the AC on full. Listen for a minute. If you can still hold a conversation comfortably, it's fine. If the AC drowns out casual speech, you have a problem. Either you'll be sweating through the shoot with it off, or you'll be picking up fan hum on every take.

Good studios have zoned HVAC you can turn off in the shooting area for takes, leaving it running in the prep rooms. The best ones have properly ducted systems with the compressor outdoors. You won't hear them at all.

The carpet trick

One quick observation that tells you a surprising amount. Look at the floor. Carpet or rubber? Or hard cyc floor and nothing else?

Carpeted or rubber floors absorb mid frequencies and foot traffic noise. Hard floors reflect everything and make the room acoustically live. You can fix a live room with some rugs and absorbers for a shoot, but you can't fix one that's also getting bus rumble through the walls.

A studio I regularly book in Bermondsey has a hard resin floor on the cyc side and a matched rubber surface on the prep side. Purposeful. You can tell the owner thought about acoustics when they were thinking about floor choice. That's the level of care I look for.

Cheap soundproofing that isn't

Be suspicious when you see these claims in listings:

"Acoustic foam on the walls" — treatment, not soundproofing. Fine for controlling reverb. Does nothing for bus noise.
"Heavy curtains throughout" — help slightly. Don't solve anything.
"Soundproof door" — singular. A room is only as soundproof as its weakest wall, and a single soundproof door doesn't help if the rest of the space leaks.
"Treated by a professional" — means nothing without specifics. Which professional? What did they do? Is there a report?
"Suitable for audio work" — listing-spiel. Often means the owner has hosted one voiceover session and it went okay.

When you see legit soundproofing, the listing will say something specific: "dB(A) ambient noise floor 28," or "walls double-layered plasterboard on resilient bars with mineral wool insulation," or "windows are acoustic laminated 6.4mm." That's engineering-speak that tells you someone spent money properly.

A note on what you actually need

Not every shoot needs a properly soundproofed studio. Let's be honest about this.

If you're shooting:

Still photography only — don't worry about soundproofing. Worry about power and light.
Video with dialogue to be dubbed in post — treatment matters more than soundproofing, so you can get a clean reference.
Branded content with music-bed and minimal dialogue — moderate treatment is fine, minor street noise is forgivable.
Podcast or ADR or voiceover — properly soundproofed is non-negotiable.
Live-recorded performance or interviews — properly soundproofed, and isolated from HVAC noise.

Ask yourself what tier you're actually in before spending twice the day rate on a space you don't need.

The owner's side

If you're a studio owner reading this and wondering whether the investment is worth it — here's my honest view. Properly soundproofing a room costs £8k to £20k in materials and labour for a small space, significantly more for a bigger one. That's real money. But it opens you up to podcast regulars, branded content work, voiceover session bookings, and ADR — all of which are premium rates, £100 to £180/hour vs £40 to £60/hour for general photography work.

Measure your space, get a proper assessment, and if the maths works, do it. Then put the actual dB(A) figure in your listing. You'll stand out instantly.

For studios that have already done this right — and the ones still doing it — see creativestudiohire.com. We flag studios with actual dB measurements in listings, not marketing fluff. Because the day your podcast client's audio is ruined by a bus, nobody's re-booking anyone.

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