HT room new construction - room treatments, etc

Rives,perhaps you can speak about these room de-couplers. My basement room is below our family room,which is two story vaulted. The entire downstairs is an open floor plan, and all upstairs bedrooms open to a bridge over the downstairs. In other words, low frequency that gets to the room above gets to the WHOLE house, and I like to listen to music and movies pretty loud. The basement is already framed with two by sixes, so I can use a good bit of insulation in the spaces around the theater room. The question is: how effective are these room de-couplers to further confine low frequencies from getting out and bothering people in the rest of the house, versus just screwing one or two sheets of 5/8 drywall to the studs with insulation in the spaces. Thanks to all of you for your responses.

Room decouplers work very well. What you need to be careful of, is that low frequency travels through the studs of the walls. So it's not enough to just decouple the ceiling, because the bass will travel to the sidewall studs and up into the house. What you need is to just about build a romm within a room and decouple the inner room. We use Kinetics products for much of our isolation work. You can really get almost total isolation, but my guess is you don't need to take it to that extreme. This is one of the areas we regularly include in our plans (and evaluate the degree of isolation needed for a given environment)--in fact probably 75% of our clients have had us design isolation for their listening rooms. Another area to watch out for is HVAC duct systems. These can be very bad sources for sound leakage, and there are some good inexpensive tricks that can be used to just about eliminate the ducts as problems.

First to comment on Rives remarks I completely agree with his sentiments. Unfortuately I was unaware of him or I would have called him or someone like him for advice and gladly paid his fee. My rub is not with experts such as rives but companies who package and sell at exorbitant prices off the shelf building materials. I was quoted a several thousand dollar fee just to be told what I was going to be sold. Many people wanting to make a major investment in audio/video rooms have been financially successful and don't have time to research these things. This does not justify a rip off. Selling special acoustical panels that are nothing more than cloth on wood framing at a high price ect.
When these people spend this money and then find out they have been ripped the image of the whole industry is damaged. In my case this is one of my hobbies and I spent 8 months researching and calling people around the country getting advice. I wish I could have just called rives and paid his fee because my time has value even though I enjoyed the knowledge. Further I took a great risk doing this myself and really held my breath when I fired up everything only to be thoroughly pleased. Certainly the room can still be tweaked, but the structure is right. Jswarncke you should consider hiring Rives or someone like him. My media room is next my master bath and bedroom. At night when I crank it up you can barely hear a muffled sound in the next rooms. With my acoustic doors closed you can't hear anything elsewhere in the house. I have Revel Studios, center Voice, 4 embrace surrounds, 2 revel sub15s. Major amps to power all. Big sound. Think about what truly good acoustical treatment can do.