This is a before and after test results of a multipurpose room.  The room is a converter steel factory.  The purpose of the room is for multi use including banquets, acoustical and amplified musical performances, teaching and general meetings.  While the room has a fixed sound system, the  room performs equally well regardless of the orientation of the seating or event layout.

From the graph, it shows the before and after.  Before the room had an average of 2.1 seconds of reverberation.  That said, at around 400 Hertz, the reverb time was 2.85 seconds. This made the room unacceptable for all uses.  It was hard to have a simple conversation with someone only 5 feet away.

The acoustical treatment in this case require 3 different acoustical system.  Tube Radiators were used for controlling sound from 200 to 2000 Hertz.  The tube radiators have only a profile depth of 4 and 6 inches and the idea that something so small can control sound down to 200 Hertz is amazing.  The tube radiators only covers 12% of the total wall space of the room.  

The second system was outround diffuser panels.  They covered another 10% of the available wall space.  These panels were used to manage sound from 100 to 500 Hertz.  By combining these two system with the limited wall space, we were able to cut the reverb time at 400 and 800 Hertz 1.8 seconds.  That is a massive amount considering that 400 Hertz is a wave length of about 33 inches long and 800 Hz is about 17 inches.

The third acoustical was a fiber absorber.  The fiber absorber covered 40% of the ceiling and 10% of the side walls.  The fiber panels covered the outrounds on the side walls.  It is rare to need absorption in such projects but when you have a concrete floor with no carpet, you have to replace the carpet with something similar.  Here is the thing about carpet.  Carpet, which is always within 4 to 7 feet of our ears works very efficiently.  The shallow angle of most sounds we hear in a large room event gives a 1/2 inch of carpet the acoustical performance of 2 inches of a typical wall panel absorber.  Since one of the requirements of this room is to include music that can reach 100dB, it was planned to have a reverb time of 1 second, +/- .2 tenths of a second.  That goal was met and the range it was met is typical of our acoustical fixes.  If you look at the before and after, the room now meets that goal from 150Hz to 4,000Hz.  Before, using the same criteria, the room had a average reverb time of 1.8 second with a +/- of 1.1 second variance.

The critical question is, how does the room sound for speech, talking and for music.  For speech, the change was from 14% Alcon’s (rated as poor) to 4% Alcon’s.  At 4%, it means that you can talk to someone from end to end of the 55 ft long room with a slightly raise voice.  When you add a properly equalized sound system, you can better the speech intelligibility to 3.5%.  For talking across a table during banquet or social events is easy in this space.  You can talk to someone 15 ft away while the person next to you is talking to someone across the table without having to raise your voice to compete with other conversations.

As for music, so far, for the high energy high SPL events the room has been well received by musician and audience members.  That has meant fewer events with drum shields, fewer events with IEM (in ear monitors) and very little floor monitor spill that degrades the sound for the audience.

At the other end there have been a few recital type performances where the even was all acoustical.  One person who was a graduate of a royal conservatory of music remarked that the room was similar to recital rooms at a well known royal conservatory school in Toronto, Canada.  One violinist said that while she would have liked a longer reverb time, the quality of the sound of her expensive instrument was amazing.  The last time she heard her violin sound so great was at a high end recording studio that was  acoustical treated.  She was also stunned that it didn’t matter where in the room she performed, the violin sounded great.

There is one down side to the new room.  Since there is no carpet, when the room is empty, you do notice the reflection off the floor. This does make the room a little challenging for those who do rehearsals when the room empty and before any table and chairs are set up.  Once tables and chairs are setup, the room behaves well.

In the real world, there are a lot of rooms that are used as multi purposed spaces but perform poorly.  Most facility owners don’t worry about acoustics because they may have the only place in town that can accommodate such events.  That said, if they were to get 10 to 20% more bookings per year, they would recover the cost of investing in an acoustical fix in less than a year.  Furthermore, it would allow the facility owner to charge a hire fee if the place gets too busy.  There is no down side to having an acoustically friendly community center, convention hall, rental hall or banquet facility.