A: This answer can be broken down into two sections – isolation and room acoustic treatments.

Isolation acoustic treatments

• Should be accounted for during the design and planning stage of either renovation or new build projects.
• This type of treatment is most often a material or design that will be incorporated into the wall, ceiling or entrance door assemblies that make up the room(s).
• No matter the level of acoustic isolation that is required between adjoining spaces, the materials can easily be designed and built into the assemblies so they will be completely unseen.
• Adding these materials after the walls, ceiling and entrance doors are already built and installed will present a challenge.  It can be done however it is typically more costly and typically will not perform to the same level of efficiency.

Room acoustic treatments

• The limiting factor for this type of acoustic treatment is usually the client’s, Interior Designer’s or space planner’s aesthetic design.  We recommend that the room acoustic design is planned for at the same time as the finish design is being considered.
• The use of all hard-surface materials in a space will greatly impact the room acoustics.
• If the floor is hard, if there is an exterior half-wall of glazing, if there is an interior hallway wall full-height glass partition, if there is a drywall ceiling – these all hard surfaces will result in a considerable amount of reverberation in the room.
• If all the walls are parallel with no or very limited design geometry – this will result in a build-up of reverberation in the room.
• To address the hard surface reflections ‘some amount’ of absorptive material must be installed on these surfaces. The primary goal is to integrate these treatments into the decorative details of the design and room aesthetic without significantly changing the design intent.

A: The amount of space that needs to be treated is difficult to assess without seeing the space. The below factors will dictate the amount and type of treatment to be used.

• How big is the room?
• Does the room have high ceilings?
• What is the rooms cubic volume?
• What is the shape of the room?
• Is it round?
• What materials make up the walls, floor and ceiling surfaces?
• What is the intended use of the room?

A: There are both subjective observations and empirical testing that can be used to judge how ‘correct’ the acoustics are in a space:

1. How we judge the “rightness or fittingness” of a room’s acoustics can be precisely designed and measured.
2. However, most people do not become consciously aware of this room characteristic until the room has been built.

• A simple subjective assessment of the room plans before the room is built will reveal if there will be a future problem.

1. Are the surfaces in the room 50% or more hard surfaces?  If the answer is yes – there will be acoustic problems.
2. If a room sounds even a little like what you experience in a fire-escape stair-well or parking garage – this is a problem.
3. If a room has loud ambient (background) noise – this is a problem.
4. Can you clearly hear when the HVAC system turns on/off?
5. Is external noise – from other rooms, hallways or from the outside world – clearly heard in the room?

• We also offer testing (with instrumentation) of spaces pre-installation of acoustic treatment – to clearly document the existing base-line acoustic problems.  These tests are conducted to ASTM or ISO international standards and so are not subjective but empirical.
• After installation of the specified acoustic treatment(s?), re-testing of the space is also offered to gauge performance and to what extent the problems have been addressed. We recommend that three tests are conducted in most spaces.

1. Background Noise
2. Reverberation Time
3. Speech Transmission Index