michaellpenman wrote: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 !