I recently moved into a new house, and where I now face a conundrum; Where we have moved to is very quiet, and it seems the whole street is in bed pretty early on a weeknight. The new game room, a brick garage, seems to not be good at deadening sound, and my lovely machines that I love to play for hours are now clacking and popping louder than ever before and they can be heard on the road clearly. Additionally, the sound goes through the house like the walls don't even exits.

I can't imagine this is an unusual situation as I'm sure it's more common than rare amongst those who have game rooms. What do people do? Just not play at night? Install sound proofing? What do people recommend?

Thanks everyone for the great responses. Insulating looks like the thing to do, but in the meantime I will try some of what you guys have suggested in regards to foam etc on the garage door (yes it's a tin roll up thing), and the walls.

Personally, I do want to be a good neighbourhood citizen considering the reason we moved was because of horribly noisy neighbours at our old place! The last thing I want to do is put other people through that hell...

I've actually found my Tron is quite a bit louder than my BoP and Gorgar. I'm not talking about speech and music volume, I'm talking about the clacks and pops of jets, flippers, kickouts etc. I'm pretty sure they are more powerful on new pins like the Stern machines, and that's why.

So yes, it's these sounds that are the problem in my area. I can turn the music / speech down to almost nothing, but the physical mechanicals of the game are set at one volume level only! Even the flipper buttons are noisy and especially during a slap save...

Taking advice from this thread and other things I have read, I've done a bit of work on my garage. I've sealed a lot of cracks and gaps with sealant, such as around windows (which had gaping holes) and large cracks in the brickwork. I've also covered up vents with some foam I had lying around. This has actually produced a surprisingly good result. I read (from a link posted here) that sealing even a small crack in brickwork can reduce noise escaping by about a third. And I think that is certainly true at least in my environment.

Walking around the outside of the garage while the game is played, I only really have 3 problem areas now. One is the back door to the garage which I'm not concerned about. The others are the window (sound goes straight through that glass) and the garage door which is much worse than the window. The garage door is so bad it may as well not even be there. If I walk up my driveway to the road I can hear the game clearly, which is bad news for 10pm and onward play...

So, good results but still some work to do. I'm going to get some sound proofing blankets like the ones posted in this thread for the window and garage door. I'm hoping, and to be honest reasonably confident, that this will get my garage to an acceptable level for the short to mid term and I can just play my games. Long term I'll look at either insulation or perhaps knocking the garage down and building a proper game room from scratch.