Often yes, and the thing that decides it is the year the building was permitted rather than anything you can buy at a music shop. A voice does not need a large room, and a modern one-bedroom in Studio City has enough soft furnishing to make a usable vocal booth out of a corner. What it may not have is separation from the unit next door and from Ventura Boulevard, and neither of those responds to acoustic treatment. Studio City is a neighbourhood of the city of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley, not a separate city, so the rules that apply to the building are the Los Angeles ones.
What does Los Angeles actually require of an apartment wall?
STC 50 in the laboratory, and only for buildings permitted after the standard came in.
LAMC section 91.1206 sets the noise insulation standards for new apartment houses and dwellings in the city. Subsection 91.1206.10 requires separating wall and floor-ceiling assemblies to provide airborne sound insulation equal to a sound transmission class of 50 based on laboratory tests, with field-tested assemblies meeting a noise isolation class of 45. That is the number to have in your head when you look at a listing.
Two qualifications make it less reassuring than it sounds.
First, it applies at permit stage. California adopted interdwelling sound insulation requirements in the early 1970s, so a 1958 stucco building on Moorpark Street was never held to any figure at all, and a great many of the buildings along this stretch of the Valley predate the rule.
Second, the code itself warns you off relying on the number. Subsection 91.1206.12 notes that STC ratings do not adequately characterise the sound insulation of an assembly when the intruding noise is predominantly low-pitched, as is often produced by amplified music or by large pieces of mechanical equipment. Your neighbour's subwoofer and the building's air handling unit are precisely the two sources that a compliant wall handles worst.
And the freeway?
The interior limit is 45 dB, measured as a 24-hour average rather than at the moment you press record.
Subsection 91.1206.14.2 requires that interior noise levels attributable to exterior sources not exceed 45 dB in any habitable room, using the day-night average sound level or the community noise equivalent level. Ldn adds a 10 dB penalty to anything happening between 10 pm and 7 am, which is a fair reflection of how annoying night noise is and a poor guide to whether you can track a quiet verse at two in the afternoon.
Forty-five dB of continuous room noise is a comfortable living room and an unusable vocal take. A vocal recorded at 20 cm with peaks around minus 12 dBFS wants a floor somewhere near 30 dB to give a signal to noise ratio that survives compression. Compress that vocal by 6 dB and boost 3 dB of air at 12 kHz, and the room comes up with it.
What is specific about the Studio City street plan?
A studio lot, a boulevard and a freeway, in that order of surprise.
Radford Studio Center sits at 4024 Radford Avenue, 55 acres with 18 sound stages ranging from 7,000 to 25,000 square feet. Mack Sennett opened a lot on this ground in 1928 and the neighbourhood took its name from it. The practical consequence for anyone recording nearby is traffic that does not follow ordinary commuter patterns: crew calls land early and wrap runs late, and a street two blocks from the Radford gate has a different profile from a street two blocks further into the hills.
Ventura Boulevard runs the length of the neighbourhood and the 101 runs parallel to it. Buildings on the flats between the two carry a broadband floor that no high-pass filter removes, because freeway noise is not only low frequency. The hillside streets south of the boulevard are quieter outside and worse inside, since hillside construction here means more glass and more parallel hard surfaces per room.
Parking decides more sessions than acoustics do. Most of the older buildings on and around the boulevard have tuck-under parking with one space per unit, and street parking near the commercial stretch is metered or permit-restricted. If someone is coming to you with a microphone case and a stand, find out where they will put the car before you agree a time.
How do you test the room in ten minutes?
Three recordings, no equipment beyond what you already have.
Record two minutes of silence at the exact position and gain you intend to sing at, then look at it rather than listen to it. A steady hiss is electrical and probably fixable. A slow rise and fall over 20 to 30 seconds is traffic. A hum with harmonics is the fridge or the air conditioning.
Then clap once, hard, standing where the singer will stand, and record that. If you can hear a distinct short ring after the clap, you are facing a hard parallel surface and should turn 45 degrees.
Then have someone speak at normal volume in the next room while you record. If their voice is intelligible in the recording, the wall is below what the code asks of new construction, and no amount of foam changes that.
What actually helps, in order?
Position, time of day, then soft mass, then nothing else.
Stand facing the softest thing in the room and put the microphone between you and it, so the wall you face is absorbing the energy you send at it. The wall behind you matters far less on a cardioid, because it sits in the null.
Book between 10 am and 2 pm on a weekday. Gardening crews are done, school traffic has not started, and the building is emptier than it will be at any other hour.
Hang a duvet on a stand at 60 to 90 cm behind the microphone. A duvet outperforms an equivalent area of open-cell foam below 500 Hz, which is where a small room does its damage. Reflection filters that clamp to the stand often make things worse, because a hard curved surface 10 cm behind the capsule produces comb filtering right in the 1 to 3 kHz band that carries intelligibility.
Turn the refrigerator off at the breaker if the kitchen shares a wall, and put every phone in the room into aeroplane mode.
When should you book a room instead?
When the record needs a low end you can trust, or when the schedule cannot absorb a lost afternoon.
An apartment take is right for a lead vocal on a song that is already arranged, and wrong when the vocal has to sit against a bass-heavy production, because a small untreated room bakes in a signature around 150 to 300 Hz that fights everything added later. Studio City to my room in Burbank is about seven miles, east on the 134, roughly fifteen minutes outside peak and closer to thirty at 5 pm. A workable split for people who want both: cut the takes at home on a quiet weekday morning, bring the session over for tuning, editing and mix in a room where the monitoring can be trusted.
Frequently asked
Will acoustic foam fix my neighbour problem? No. Absorption and transmission loss are different quantities. Foam can improve the recording and cannot improve the isolation.
Is a closet better than the room? Sometimes, because hanging clothes kill the early reflection off the wall the singer faces. It also traps heat, and an uncomfortable singer gives worse takes than a slightly roomy sound.
Biggest free improvement? Change the hour. On this corridor the difference between 8 am and 11 am is worth more than most treatment you could buy.
If you are looking at a lease or a session
Tell me the cross streets, the decade the building went up and whether the bedroom shares a wall with the neighbour, and I will tell you whether a release vocal is realistic there and which corner to stand in. Full credit list at /credits, background and contact at /about.