Benedict Kelly

• Acoustic Panels
• Bass Traps
• Acoustic Foam Panels
• DIY Acoustic Panels
• Church Acoustics
• Studio Acoustics
• Home Theater Acoustics
• Restaurant Acoustics
• Acoustic Insulation
• Room Acoustic Treatments

When you are building or remodeling a room in which sound is important, the acoustic properties of the room should be taken into account during the planning. This applies not only to auditoriums and music halls, but also to spaces in which intelligible speech needs to be heard by large groups, such as restaurants, churches and other public buildings.

The room acoustic treatments required for different types of buildings may differ greatly. If you own a nightclub or other establishment where there is live music or other loud noise as a regular part of your operation, then your needs are two- fold, you want the sound to be clear on the inside and virtually non-existent for neighboring businesses. Acoustic Insulation is almost certainly required to help contain the music within your establishment. Acoustic insulation, bass traps, or other acoustic panels can also help keep the quality of the music on the inside of your building higher by reducing reverberant echoes that can muddy and destroy the audio clarity.

Restaurant acoustics generally call for preserving the privacy of conversations between patrons as they eat. A calming quiet atmosphere is the goal. This is accomplished with acoustic damping and often by applying a light covering noise such as soft background music.

Other buildings, like churches, need to make a single voice perfectly clear throughout a large space occupied by a large number of people. Proper placement of speakers goes a long way toward the proper design of church acoustics. The goal is to make sure that every seat gets as much direct sound from the speaker and as little reflected or echoed sound as possible. The echoes will be slightly time-delayed with respect to the direct sound so they tend to make it harder to understand human speech. Again the additions and proper placement of acoustic panels to absorb the sound and reduce echoes can help as well.

Other spaces have an even higher standard for room acoustics. A recording studio, for example, strives to control every aspect of the sound that reaches the recording microphones. Often, studio acoustics involve the heavy use of acoustic insulation along the walls to effectively eliminate all echoes within the room. A room designed expressly to test loudspeakers is often made so as to completely isolate the sound of a single speaker transducer from all extraneous noise and from all echoes. This type of room is called an anechoic chamber and often has walls completely composed of heavily angled acoustic insulation that is often a foot or more thick. Such rooms are useful for testing and measurement purposes, but the complete lack of echoes makes the room sound unnatural and strange for ordinary purposes.

In any of these cases, acoustic treatment should be designed into the room when it is being built. Absent that, post-construction room acoustic treatments can be made to correct problems that will inevitably occur in a room that was designed without acoustic considerations.