Allergy and Noise Reduction Issues

Q: My parents are moving into a co-op building with hardwood floors. However, now they have chosen to enforce the wall to wall carpet rules in ways they had not chosen to do before and they are making my parents oblige to this rule. My mother happens to be allergic to dust and as per her allergist has been recommended to use area rugs instead. The board is not allowing them to do this for reasons they haven’t really wanted to specify although the option is the only one included in lieu of wall to wall carpet. Instead they mentioned putting wall laminate with noise reduction padding. We had an appointment with an installer and they told us that the use a product called “Quiet Walk” and that although it reduces the noise, it is not as good as carpet, which takes us back to my mother’s health issues. I guess my question is: Can area rugs with the appropriate padding used in the high maintenance areas of the apartment provide the same kind of results as putting putting carpet or wood laminate floor padding to reduce noise for the people who live downstairs?
Thank you
A: Generally speaking, most area rugs are weaved in a way that will reduce noise when compared to hardwood or laminate flooring, but I don’t think it would reduce noise quite as well as carpet, although this difference will be minimal. My concern here is that area rugs can accumulate just as much dust as carpet and could be similarly problematic with your Mother’s allergies.
As far as sound reduction and allergies are concerned I would look into a floating cork floor using cork or Sound 6 underlayment. Cork is naturally hypoallergenic which will be a big plus for your mother. Combine this with corks natural sound reduction capability and you should get exactly what you are after. As far as rest of the co-op is concerned, cork is the standard underlayment required by most HOAs (Home Owner’s Associations) in condos for sound reduction underneath a wood floor.
The key things to pay attention to here will be the STC (sound transmission control) and the IIC (impact isolation control) ratings of your underlayment. In this case I would steer toward using Sound 6 Barrier Acoustical underlayment because of its superior ratings in this category. Sound 6 has an impressive STC rating of 73 and an IIC rating of 71. If you compare this to the Quiet Walk which was suggested to you, it has an IIC rating of 60. Normally IIC and STC ratings are very close, so more than likely Quiet Walk’s STC is no more than about 65, which only marginally better than 6mm cork. Now if you combine Sound 6′s ratings with the benefits of cork flooring (which usually has a top layer of about 3mm or so in cork and then another roughly 2mm of cork on the backboard) you will have a very quiet floor which will perform very similar to carpet without the allergy worries.