We're finishing our basement ourselves and have come to the point where we have to decide what to do w/ the ceiling. We'd like to preserve as much space as possible, and even considered leaving it open and painting the joists/pipes, etc., but want to have a bit more soundproofing than that would provide. We'll have a spiral staircase so there will be an open hole to our living room, but right now even without the hole we can hear everything between the two floors, and would like to dampen that, even though we will have the spiral stairs.

We've looked at several options and are a little confused about what would save the most height and also not be too complicated. We don't want to just put drywall up on the joists because they aren't straight. We also were planning on using recessed lighting. It's a 1920 house.

1- Use furring strips and drywall.

2- Using resilient channel/drywall. This seems good for the soundproofing, but I don't know if it saves us any space over the furring strips, and we can't quite understand how to use recessed lighting w/ the channels- seems like you have to build a box around the cans?

3- use ceiling tiles mounted on a grid directly on the joists. We don't want the suspended ceiling look, but I think there are options nowadays that don't look like that? This seems easier w/ the recessed cans, but not sure of total cost. And some tiles provide more soundproofing than others, but I really don't want it to look like a tacky basement ceiling.

Any options we haven't thought of yet? We were going to do laminate flooring, but that loses space too, so any other thoughts about saving room that way are welcome as well.