About the shoes--is there a need to wear hard shoes in your bedroom, which is right above their bedroom? I do think they have a valid complaint there. Either keep the shoes off until you are out of the bedroom or put some sort of carpet/rug down. That should stop that complaint. I do think this is a simple thing you can do--it is miserable to be awakened by noise that can easily be prevented. About the sax--for a year, I lived below a trumpet player. He also played a few other instruments. The most annoying thing was that he'd pick up the trumpet, play one song or some exercises, and stop. Only to pick the trumpet up an hour later and play a little more. Later in the day, he'd play it again. Can your wife pick one time during the day when she will practice? Then you can tell the neighbors, "The sax will be played Monday through Friday from 9 am until 11 am," or whatever will work. Then they will know when the noise will be, and can plan around it. For the rest, I agree they are nit-picking you to death with the complaints. I'm actually on your side about everything else. So what I'd do is just tell them you are through. Once. "We have soundproofed the apartment as much as possible. Please talk to your landlord if you think your unit needs more soundproofing. We will not be responding to any phone calls, texts or letters about the noise we make. We have done all that we can to mitigate that." Then follow through and ignore their complaints. You might also contact their landlord and complain about them and their constant complaining. My building was built in 1900. I have a downstairs neighbor who complains about the creaking floorboards in my bedroom. There is a fix for those, but the landlord needs to pay out the money for that--not me, I'm just a renter. But the downstairs neighbor complains every single time she sees me. I just smile and tell her to call the landlord and then walk away. I'm barefoot or in sock feet in the bedroom all the time. I can't help 100 year old creaking floorboards.

Is your sewer pipe plastic or cast iron? Plastic is definitely noisier - one of our friends has a $1.2M spec home in Old Lyme, CT, and the noise of the toilet (in either upstairs bathrm), an upscale American Std, can be heard in every single room both upstairs and downstairs. Some builders skimp on the insulation between floors and interior walls, too, which makes it worse. Sound then travels and echoes through the walls. I noticed that a friend's house, a standard tract development home, has a much noisier bathroom on the main floor than ours, where I know the walls were insulated. We have the Ultramax, and consider it very slightly noisier than the cheapo it replaced. But the fill is quicker, so overall we consider it quieter.

I am really sensitive to noise, so I feel for you, Florantha. I hope that the solutions you're exploring end up being straightforward and affordable. Noise is a big issue in our entire downstairs, not because of plumbing, but because the main air conditioning panel is in our living room, halfway up the wall where the stairs lead to the second floor. When the blower turns on, we have to turn the tv up 2 or 3 "clicks" in order to continue to hear dialogue. Plus, the washer and dryer are just behind the stairwell, in the hallway between the garage and the living room. DH and DD are constantly forgetting to close the door that insulates the living room from the washer and dryer noise, even when both machines are running. At cooking time, sometimes my DH and my DD get into a "sound war" without being conscious of it. She turns the tv up because he's turned the vent hood on, and then he turns up his radio in the kitchen... rinse, repeat, till he calls her to set the table and she shouts "WHAT?" Meanwhile, I drive them both crazy by turning the tv off, the radio off, and the vent hood down. That's me, the sound-sensitive one! Oh, and they feel slighted when I retreat upstairs or outside with the cordless phone, because I cannot concentrate with the tv or the radio going in the background. One really nice thing about our new kitchen is that our vent hood has four speeds instead of two, so it's not necessary to go to airplane-turbine levels of sound just to boil some water. Another odd thing -- we have an undercabinet radio (with a CD player and an audio in thingy for the iPod). We had a mixup with the undercabinet lights, and at first there were fluorescents installed. They caused tremendous interference with the radio! We had them swapped out for Xenon lights -- no interference. Of course, we got better sound quality, but worse energy efficiency, by making that swap. (The Xenon throw off a lot of heat onto the counters, like halogens.) I'm hoping that since we love the kitchen so much, we'll spend more time in the family room together, and less time in different rooms with noisemakers going!

(1) Nothing would surprise me about the limitations included in warranties; they aren't written to provide any more customer benefit than is needed to support sales. (2) Possible actions causing damage (that I can think of): Trying to force a blower assembly into a hood space it wasn't designed to fit Connecting an incompatible blower motor with a hood's included blower control. Otherwise, lock-in is a likely manufacturer goal, as is also not having to support customers who have problems when they try mix-n-match. For entertainment, review a warranty to see how many sentences provide benefit to the customer, and how many limit the liability of the company. In the case of in-line or roof or wall mounted blowers, no incompatible shape forcing is involved. If the hood has a typical continuous motor control (diac/triac, some more sophisticated control chip with SCR) module, it should work with any single-phase induction motor that is not more powerful than the one it was designed to work with. If, like the OP, there is an intent to change the control anyway, then there can be no issue with compatibility. All then that is left with a blowerless hood to warrant would be weld durability, (in the rare case of actually specifying the stainless steel it was claimed to be made of) resistance to corrosion, and maybe a lamp control circuit under one-year warranty. It would be laughable if a claim of warranty exclusion was asserted for a lamp control because the interior blower was removed. In general, I would suggest that if one is in the middle of a renovation, with all the issues that arise in design and then in execution, from lumber quality to spousal tolerance, it may be more efficient to go with a manufacturer's combination. Otherwise, given understanding by the customer or his sub-contractor of the principles involved, there should be no problem with using a different blower manufacturer than hood manufacturer when the blower is external to the hood. In general 2, I would suggest for those that can afford it that purchase from a hood manufacturer that one can determine from Internet comments stands behind their product is a good idea. This forum has some threads on lack of response or poor response from some brands' manufacturers. I don't expect there are many for Wolf, or ModernAire, inter alia. kas