Project Overview: Central Florida Hospital Sound Study The hospital management team was watching the same metric every acute care administrator watches: HCAHPS scores, and specifically the Quiet at Night question. Patient satisfaction was lagging, complaints about overnight noise were showing up consistently in the survey free-text fields, and CMS reimbursement was on the line. The […]
01
May
May
Project Overview: Luxury Condo Soundproofing Why Luxury Condo Buyers Expect Higher STC Than Code Requires Building code sets the floor for residential acoustic separation. Luxury condo buyers set a higher ceiling. The IBC Section 1207.1 minimum of STC 50 between dwelling units is fine for code compliance, but a code-compliant wall is not the same […]
29
Apr
Apr
Project Overview: Pinellas County Sheriff Interview Rooms The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office was running interview rooms where one suspect could overhear another’s alibi through the wall. The walls themselves looked fine. The investigators could see drywall. What they could not see was the path the sound was actually taking. The ACT ceiling above the walls […]
27
Apr
Apr
Project Overview: Crunch Fitness Multi-Tenant Building Assessment Crunch Fitness opened a second-floor commercial gym in December 2016. Within months, the tenants below and the spa next door were filing complaints. The healthcare provider on the floor below was hearing weight drops during patient sessions. The spa next door felt vibration during deep tissue treatments. The […]
26
Apr
Apr
Overview: A Better Alternative to Acoustic Drywall Acoustically enhanced gypsum boards like QuietRock and SoundBreak XP are marketed as high-performance soundproofing materials for walls and ceilings. These products use a viscoelastic polymer core to dampen vibration between two gypsum sheets. While effective in limited-space conditions, they’re heavy, expensive, and slow to install, especially on large […]
19
Apr
Apr
Project Overview: Residence Inn Highway-Facing Rooms This Residence Inn sat on the wrong side of a major highway. Guests in the highway-facing rooms could hear traffic the entire night and the front desk fielded the complaints every morning. The hotel had never done acoustic testing and the windows had never been treated. The owner needed […]
01
Apr
Apr
Project Overview: Upstate New York Multifamily Property The general contractor managing this Upstate New York multifamily property had a problem most multifamily operators eventually face. Residents were filing noise complaints between units, the construction documents looked clean, the walls measured to spec on paper, and nobody could explain why the field experience kept diverging from […]
23
Mar
Mar
Project Overview: Tampa Custom Home Build The owner wanted the master bedroom downstairs to sound nothing like the upstairs playroom. The playroom would see kids most days. The entertainment room would see a sound system most evenings. The master bedroom would see two adults trying to sleep through all of it. New construction made the […]
15
Feb
Feb
Project Overview: Dallas Luxury Cinema Multi-Auditorium Build This Dallas luxury cinema needed walls that did something most theater drawings ignore. The auditoriums sit shoulder to shoulder, and an action movie running at peak volume next door cannot be audible in the quiet drama starting on the other side. The STC 65 spec was just the […]
05
Feb
Feb
Project Overview: The Fenway Hotel Historic Restoration The Fenway Hotel was reopening after a full historic restoration, and the architect ran into the same wall every historic hospitality project runs into. Modern STC 50 demising wall targets, century-old wood-frame construction, and zero spare inches anywhere in the building. The acoustic spec called for boutique-hotel speech […]