Acoustic Treatment - From bath towels to glass wool
As a kid we moved around a lot.
My parents liked the change and my father was often looking for a new challenge with his work in IT. One of the things I have always remembered whenever we moved into a new home was how the house felt so hollow with no furniture, justblank walls and floors. It was even more noticeable in an empty bathroom. I remember my brothers and I standing in an empty bathroom hollering at the top of our lungs, listening to the echo. Although I had very little interest in sound or audio at 12 years old, I understood something about acoustics. When the shower curtain and bath towels were hung, the bathroom quickly went from being a cavern to a small room.
The principals haven't really changed much over the years. The fact is, some rooms, for numerous reasons, have acoustic characteristics that make them much more reverberant than others. Sometimes it's the hard uncovered surfaces. Or it could be a tin-pan ceiling. More often than not it's the physical dimensions of the room, allowing for some frequencies to reflect for a long period of time before diminishing.
One way to determine and quantify the "issue frequencies" is to play a frequency sweep within the space and then record the playback with a microphone in the room. What this does is provide us the ability to "hear" and analyse how the different frequencies are responding in the space. Using a measurement referred to as the
RT60 we are able to determine which frequencies and to what extent each frequency is a problem.
From there, we're able to take that information and determine how much acoustic treatment is required to bring the RT60 reverberation time down to a reasonable level.
RT60 is the time required for reflections of a direct sound to decay by 60 dB below the level of the direct sound.
Wikipedia.org
Prime Acoustic Broadway Scatter Blocks.
This is where I should make it clear that not every classroom, theatre, church or office should sound like a dead recording studio space. In fact, very few of them should. Like with any of the design work we do at Horizon Solutions, we take the time to look at and consider the application of the space when determining the final recommendation. The differences in construction materials, thickness, spacing from the hard surfaces, quantity of the treatment and of course cost, all play into how the treatments are selected.
Over the year we've made all kinds of recommendations for acoustic treatment in various different spaces; brand new church facilities , a livestock arena close to Chatham, church basements, community theatres, movie theatres, home recording spaces and many others.
Each room is completely different and each one has acoustic issues, and of course each treatment has it's differences based upon the findings and facility use.
Whether you have a gymnasium, classroom, auditorium, home studio, home theatre or church sanctuary, we can help you determine what acoustic treatments will best help you to "take control of your room".
For more information, contact Horizon Solutions and we'd be happy to discuss your room and a solution to your acoustic issues.
