Acoustics question - Isolating bass from floor

[lem]

Throw a high pass on the mix during "shared" hours and don't work on low end material. Find times when your neighbor is gone to bypass the HPF. I go so far as to know my neighbor's work/family schedule so I know which days and hours I can bang it. His toddler's room is right above my studio room.

+1

I also try to use the time to do high frequency stuff and programming etc.... maybe even tidy up? working in a clean pleasant workspace definitly speeds up workflow and if you have limited time to bang it out, you will want to make the most of it.

[mehta]

I lived in a house for a few years and had tracks playing 24 hours a day at what I thought was a pretty reasonable volume. Directly below me was a vacant suite until a few months before I moved out, and it was amazing how loud it was down there.

Thankfully now my sound equipment is underground or in buildings that are empty at night.

Concrete and empty space are the only things that really eliminate bass in my experience.

[Hades]

you can always just try a very think rug under your gear.

two absorbers behind your speakers and some bass traps in the corners
this may help a little.
Also what might be good is to get a spl measure device that can let you know how loud you are

I'll 2nd that.
my studio is on the 1st floor of my house, and the ground floor used to be rented to other people before we took the whole house back 2 months ago.
I never had a single complaint about noise from them.
Of course, it could be that it helps that I owned the house they rented in...
But I never had a single complaint from any neighbour either, plus one of my side walls used to be open to the next room, and I had to close it with bricks and isolation. There's almost no sound leaking to the other room as well, and that's our main bedroom. In fact, I'm convinced that the little sound that you can hear comes from the doors leaking sound.

Anyways, what I'm trying to say is : I have exactly what michael here says : absorbers in the room, and 2 bass traps in each corner behind my monitors.
I used these :

http://www.primacoustic.com/maxtrap.htm

Plus I also used their recoil stabilizers to decouple the speakers from the stands (and therefore from the floor) :

http://www.primacoustic.com/recoil.htm

And on top of that I got these stands from Zaor which decouple as well, even though that wasn't really necessary if I used the recoils as well :

http://www.studio-furniture.com/stands_isostand.html

It's probably way over-kill, but the recoils definitely do their job.

If you rent and you can't change the floor, think about what you can get to minimize the sound leaking as much as possible.
And those things do work.

Of course if your floor is still total crap, then you're fucked, but it's still worth a try, no ?

good luck !