Making a foam platform to "sound proof" DDR pads

[nbanyan]

Hi, I'm headding off to Washington State University this Fall, and I guess the dorm halls aren't soundproofed enough to prevent DDR from anoying the neighbors. (They said that "If you're jumping up and down, your neighbors would notice.")
So, I'm looking to make a platform to put under the DDR pads to attempt to reduce all (or most) of the impact noise caused by jumping on the pads. My primary idea is to have a reasonably thick foam bas topped with plywood or particle board. I was thinkgin that egg foam or something similar would work, but a guy at Lowes Hardware said that egg foam would crumble quickly under such compression/decompression. He suggested wrapping the wood board in carpet padding.
However, if I remember right, carpet padding can be fairly expensive and I'm trying to keep costs down (for college). Has anyone else tryied this or knows what materials or design would work well for a low cost?

Repost from here.

[theheter0c1ite]

This reminds me of when I first started to play ddr. I live on the second floor of an apartment, and me and my friend used to play all the time. It got so bad that we almost got kicked out from it. The neighbor said that we cracked a window and broke a lightbulb. lol I don't know if she was telling the truth though.. So we had a quest.. to soundproof the two soft pads as much as possible. It took much experimentation to perfect it, but we had it down to a science. First, we took a plywood board and taped 2 foam rafts to it. You know the ones that you can buy at walmart. Similar to this:

http://www.limboland.net/Merchant2/graphics/00000019/Standard%20Solid%20Foam%20Pool%20Floats.jpg

It was about 1.5" or 2" thick. Funny thing is, we made our own "ignition" pad before they were even brought to stores.

Well, you duct tape the rafts to the plywood, tape the pads to the top of the rafts, but it still needs a little bit more noise suppresion. We went to Stine and purchased about 10 foam pipe fitting insulators and taped that to the bottom of the plywood. That helped out some, and seemed to be the best solution. We also tried foam tube floaties on the bottom of the plywood. We cut a few tubes up into 2" thick sections and glued them to the bottom of the board. That worked, but they came unglued easy.

So thats our solution, hope it can give you a few ideas. Another thing that we found out was the structure of the building. If you play in like the living room, or a bedroom, there is a large ammount of space for the vibrations. We found that the smaller of a room that you played in, the less the noise was. We tried playing in the hallway, and even the bathroom. That worked best.

One time, we even ran an extension cord from the top floor to the bottom and played in the hall/outside. lol!

So goodluck, I hope this was useful to ya.

[Maxx301]

man thats sweet...
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[nbanyan]

Well, I'm here on campus and managed to get a small roll of rubber pad used for carpet padding. I tried testing it before I left, but my handheld voice recorder wasn't good enough to make a comparison on. Well see if I get any complaints. :-) Thanks for your input.