Our team recently traveled to a confidential client’s luxury condominium on the island of Maui to test their floor-ceiling assembly. Using specialized equipment including a tapping machine and loudspeaker, our engineer Zane evaluated how well the building’s floor-ceiling construction controls two critical types of noise: footfall noise (the thuds and footsteps from the unit above) and airborne noise (voices, music, and other sounds that travel through the air and structure).

In luxury residential buildings, this matters more than most people realize. House rules and building standards typically require a minimum level of acoustic performance. Meeting that bar is harder than it looks. Test results consistently show that hard floor finishes like hardwood and luxury vinyl tile (LVT) perform significantly worse for footfall noise than carpet.

For high-end buildings where hard floors are increasingly the design standard in Hawaii, that gap has to be made up somewhere. That’s where acoustical treatments come in: resilient underlayments beneath the flooring, suspended ceiling systems below, and fiberglass insulation within the assembly all work together to bring performance up to where it needs to be.

Acoustical consulting during design and post-install testing helps architects, contractors, and private clients make informed decisions before problems and complaints arise.