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Only if the apartment has very strict noise and smoking rules that are actually enforced.
Noise separation is pretty easy to design into a building. Air separation is possible but would require design that no one bothers with, as far as I know.
Noise separation is pretty easy to design into a building.
I wonder why more don't do it then.
I would be very interested (and I assume I'm not the only one) in a condo + association which advertises strong noise controls. HOA's always seem to concentrate on the wrong things IMO.
It's slightly more expensive, and most developers are trying to build the cheapest thing they can sell. A good number of places have put in noise separation into their building code though, so depending on where you live any new place will be dead quiet.
In a wood-frame building, for example, you increase the thickness of the unit-to-unit walls by a few inches and leave a small air-gap between two layers of insulation. The hard-soft-air-soft-hard boundary makes for a very difficult path for sound to travel through. You have to purpose-build the walls if you want maximum noise isolation, because the studs have to be staggered so they don't bridge the gap and transmit the sound through your defenses.