I hate sheet rock in general.The house I grew up in has something called Plaster of Paris. I ran across a video by Paul McGowan of PS Audion who mentioned something called Quiet Rock (trademark). Those with dedicated rooms might wat to consider it. https://doesitreallywork.org/quietrock/
in 2010 installed 10+ sheets of Quietrock 545 in my listening room. i used it to establish equal side to side solid room boundaries to even out my room bass response. i had a situation where one side was load bearing and the other side was not, which was causing an imbalance in my totally symmetrical room.
i put it around the speaker end walls. even made my window inserts with it.
it is 1 and 3/8th thick and very heavy stuff and hard to cut (has a 1/4" layer of aluminum).......will burn through saw blades so your contractor will not like it.
but it works. it's equivalent to 6 sheets of 5/8's sheetrock in sound insulation.
it can be painted like any sheet rock, but i screwed and glued a finished grade maple 3/4" ply over the top of mine. below it my whole room is cocooned with 2 layers of 5/8" sheetrock. as my room is in a barn, a separate building away from my house, which is in the middle of 5 acres in the mountains, and my room is already well insulated for sound, i already had exceptional sound isolation. so i cannot comment on any change on that issue. but it did fix my bass imbalance issue.
if you are already building a room, in the context of material costs it's not that much more compared to other approaches, the labor to install it will be similar. and it will fix problems in one thin layer not otherwise fixed without a much thicker (space-eating) wall.
I never heard of this until now, I bookmarked the site.
My current lath and plaster walls have served me well.
I am not a fan of drywall either but it's in the building code, anything that I've looked into instead of it needs to be applied over drywall as an interior finish including OSB and plywood.
Yes, but still quite far from Quite rock 545 - that as far as I have read has a magnesium oxide inner layer, not aluminum. Some years ago I looked for a similar product in Europe and could not find anything similar.
Yes, we looked into that metal internal which they do here (with concrete)...we were going to take the concrete/roc wall and add a sheet of aluminum separately, but in the end realized that with somewhere on the order of 45 db, and the rest of the entire house being solid masonry (12 inches thick) and an acoustic underlay in the floor, it was 'enough'...the reality is that the plaster finish on the walls is unfortunately creating quite a 'live' sound...and it is a requirement as a historically significant building. So while the rocwall did make a nice improvement in sound attenuation (as did brand new doors everywhere), it was not going to solve the internal room issue of the hard plaster.
I have read that some of the really cheap stuff from China can dissolve metal screws as the PH is off. I have never used it or even seen it on the shelves in Michigan, just wondering if it has any special dampening properties.
EDIT:
I found this tread from 2012 in another forum where people brought it into the conversation.