In Urban War for Peace and Quiet, Soundproofers Are Busier Than Ever Erez Zohar was desperate. The neighbors" air-conditioners outside his $1.2 million condo hummed and rattled around the clock through the summer and into the fall. His patio, larger than the living room, was unusable. Nights with the windows open were impossible. "It got to the point where my wife told me we have to move," said Mr. Zohar, who works for a software company that scours the Internet for potential credit-card fraud. He called Mason Wyatt, a noise specialist who prescribes treatments to quiet the throbbing and thundering city. Mr. Wyatt recommended making mufflers, essentially boxlike covers with sound-absorbing tubing and material inside, and fitting them over the neighbors" air-conditioners. He said they would reroute the sound - for a price: about $1,000 apiece, less if Mr. Zohar did some of the carpentry himself. If the city seems noisier than ever, soundproofers like Mr. Wyatt say they are busier than ever as consumers search for quiet. People complain that their coffee cups are rattling on the kitchen table, that the neighbor's dog is barking day and night, that the neighbor's subwoofer is generating that low, low pipe-organ sound that makes the walls tremble. And that is just the inside noise. Outside, there are bus brakes that squeal in the morning, jackhammers that pound during dinner parties and subways that are both heard and felt, day and night. So it is no surprise that noise is the No. 1 reason people call 311, New York City's help line. "That says a lot about all the issues you're dealing with in New York," said Benjamin H. Sachwald, a vice president who specializes in acoustics at AKRF, an engineering consulting firm in Manhattan. The construction is endless. Dozens of new buildings are rising, and two major projects beneath the streets are bringing unusual levels of noise and vibration to the East Side of Manhattan: the Second Avenue subway and the Long Island Rail Road's expansion to Grand Central Terminal. Last year, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's president of capital construction, Michael Horodniceanu, had to shout to be heard at a news conference about construction noise on the Second Avenue project. "If you really want quiet," he said, "go to the country." That was a year after the transportation authority said it had stopped underground blasts after 7 p.m. on weekdays. On Friday, the agency said the last blast had taken place beneath East 86th Street on Monday, a little over four years after the first explosion, which was detonated beneath East 96th Street. As for the Long Island Rail Road project beneath Grand Central, the M.T.A. said several months ago that it had completed the last of about 2,400 explosions deep below the streets, where the new tracks will be laid. For each explosion, sandhogs packed in several hundred pounds of blasting powder. Stuart Levy of the Vibration Eliminator Company said things should quiet down once trains start running, because the tracks will be "isolated" on vibration-absorbing pads, a technique he said had been used on the BART system in California in the 1970s. New York City revised its noise code in 2007, requiring developers to develop a "noise mitigation plan" before beginning major projects. But sometimes developers discover noise they did not know they would have to mitigate. That was the case as an apartment house began to take shape at 65th Street and Lexington Avenue. The developer, Toll Brothers City Living, had rented space in a building next door as the headquarters for its construction team. Peter J. Monte, a senior vice president of the company, remembered his reaction to the rumble during the first meeting in the conference room. "I said, "Jeez, what was that?" " he recalled. "My construction team said, "Oh, yeah, that's the subway. We've been hearing that quite frequently. You could actually feel it. He consulted Mr. Sachwald, who recommended an important design change for the new building: adding material originally developed as a filler for ski boots. On the slopes, it absorbed vibrations from hard downhill maneuvers. In the basement on Lexington Avenue, Mr. Monte said, it "decoupled" the foundation from the adjacent ground, reducing the vibrations from the subway. He said surveys had shown the filler did its job in that building so well that the team was using it on another building, at Park Avenue and East 89th Street, adjacent to the tunnel that carries Metro-North Railroad trains toward Harlem. Mr. Sachwald said changing neighborhoods had exposed people to noise in new ways. Long Island City, in Queens, and Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, were old manufacturing centers but are now mainly residential. The elevated subway tracks in Long Island City were not considered a problem when the area was dominated by small factories. "It doesn't take an acoustical consultant to know that subway trains produce noise," Mr. Sachwald said. That doesn't mean a site is unfit for residential use, it just means thought has to go into the design so people who live there won't be bothered by vibration and sound. Sometimes the problem is not the world outside, or the neighbors. "I'm the problem," said Anthony Manoli, who lives on the 12th floor of a building on the Upper West Side. I'm an opera coach. From his apartment he has worked with big voices from the Metropolitan Opera, like the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky and the mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick. Last summer Mr. Manoli paid Mr. Wyatt's company, City Soundproofing, $9,000 to soundproof not his apartment but the apartment next door. "It was a paper-thin wall," Mr. Manoli said, explaining that he had coexisted with his next-door neighbor for years. Then she moved out. He asked the building management to let him soundproof that apartment to avoid losing space in his, because Mr. Wyatt's proposed solution - two double layers of wallboard with sound-absorbing material in between - would subtract about four inches from a room. The management agreed. New neighbors have yet to move in, but Mr. Manoli said the other day that they would not hear much. He knows this because he has sneaked into the adjacent apartment after telling singers he was coaching, "Feel like you're on the stage of the Met, do what you do, I'll be back." "It took 85 percent of the sound away," he said. You could take a chain saw to a singer in my apartment now, and nobody next door would know.