Acoustics First BLOG

Yocumtown Church of God had a bit of an issue with their multipurpose room – They couldn’t understand anything anyone was saying.

While the space was designed well with a full court, dampers on the HVAC, a stage, movie screen and a good speaker system – they couldn’t overcome the poor acoustics of the space.  A great deal of work had gone into the design and they wanted an unobtrusive way to treat the acoustic problems… enter Acoustics First.

We started the work of gathering information about the space; dimensions, some pictures and a few balloon pops.

Here’s what we got.

Big Gym – perfect example of a common problem space.

Wow! This room is big, all the surfaces are parallel and hard, there’s very little to break up the sound… You can almost imagine what it sounds like.

You actually don’t need to imagine. Here’s a balloon pop. CLICK HERE!
What you’re hearing is about 3.5 seconds of reverberation after the balloon pop. (Not good.)

So, whatever shall we do? How will we tame this space?!?!?! Will they ever be able to have movies for youth groups!?

Sure they will! We have Joe. You remember Joe from the Sabot School Big Room Big Boom Post?

Well, I would say that Joe has a 6th sense for hearing, but since that’s one of the 5 standard ones anyway, we’ll just say Joe has great ears – and they should be.  Joe’s been using his ears as his primary tools for the past 40+ years; from Studio Engineer to Acoustic Engineer. His ears are tuned instruments, and we rely on his expertise with them to get the job done right – time and time again. (He also makes a mean spreadsheet.)

So after listening to the room, looking at the data, and running some numbers – Joe magically answers the question of what do they need?  (Ok it isn’t magic – Joe’s just really good at this… did I mention his spreadsheet skills?)

When he says, “this is what you need,” he also shows you what you have and what it will do.

So Joe says, “You put 280 – 4’x1′ Cloudscape®baffles up on that ceiling and you’ll bring that room down from about 3.5 seconds to about 1.5 seconds.”

Joe knows.

So, Yocumtown goes from a 3.5 second balloon pop (Here) to a 1.5 second balloon pop (Here).

Not only does it look great…

NICE!

… But now they say that they can watch movies and it sounds just like you’re in a movie theater.

That’s about the best compliment you can give us.

(And the best compliment I can give Joe is, his calculation for RT60 time was about 1.5 seconds.  When I ran the measurement of the “treated balloon pop” – I got 1.501 seconds.  This is why we have Joe – he can tell you what you will get, before you even start!)