Solid Hardwood, Engineered and Laminate Flooring - wood or carpet flooring - which provides better sound proofing?

Without adding any special soundproofing materials does wood or carpet flooring provide better sound proofing to the level below it? Obviously walking on wood or dropping an object on it will cause a louder noise than on carpet. But given equivalent sound sources; ie a radio playing music; would the sound be dampened more by carpet or by wood?
Thanks.

My experience says carpet with padding provides a good sound dampening between floors. It still isn't great, but it provides a non-solid surface to trap the sound.

The best thing you can do on a multi story house to reduce sound transmission is to separate the floor and the ceiling. Modular homes are done this way where they have separate floor joists and ceiling joists so there's no physical contact between the floors except for the edges.

The also have fabric ceiling products that can be installed that would absorb sounds the same way carpet does. I know that's not part of your questions but you would have a lot of sound absorbing material with carpet and/or that ceiling material.

If you separate the floor and ceiling and place insulation between them I imagine you'd have almost no sound transmission at all between the floors. I doubt from your question that you're looking to do that though.

Carpet absorbs more sound. Wood will have some resonance and echo effect.

Here's an answer from the perspective of acoustic engineering and the physics of sound transmission.

Let's define some terms. When sound waves hit a wall or floor, three physical phenomena occur: some sound energy is REFLECTED back into the room; some sound energy is ABSORBED by the material, and the remaining sound energy is TRANSMITTED into the room below.

Case #1: Carpeted floor. When sound waves hit a carpeted floor, very little sound energy is reflected, and a relatively high percentage of the sound energy is absorbed. All of the remaining sound energy is transmitted through the subfloor & through the ceiling of the room below, into the room below.

Case #2: Wood floor. When sound waves hit the wood floor, much of the sound energy is reflected, some is absorbed. All of the remaining sound energy is transmitted through the subfloor & ceiling, into the room below.

To reduce sound transmission in either case, you can stuff fiberglass insulation between the subfloor and the ceiling below -- this provides additional sound-energy ABSORPTION. Also, you can make the ceiling below out of HEAVY material, and SEAL all of the cracks and gaps (exactly the same way you would to eliminate air infiltration in a super-insulated house) -- this reduces sound-energy TRANSMISSION.

Case #3: Low-frequency sound is a special case. If you have a home-theater sound system with a sub-woofer, the sub-woofer sound energy -- explosions, earthquakes, dinosaur footsteps, etc -- will disturb everyone in the house.

The only way to prevent the transmission of sub-woofer sound energy into an adjacent room, is to make the floor (and walls and ceiling) very RIGID: Concrete slab floor or walls; 1" thick plywood walls and ceiling; 2" thick solid-core doors. And there must be NO air leaks -- around edges of doors for example.

In all cases, if you wish to achieve even more sound isolation, the use of separate floor joists and ceiling joists, as suggested by chandltp, is an excellent design approach. This is how recording studios are designed -- to acoustically isolate the control room from the performace space.