Case Study

Improve Board Room Acoustics with Stretched Fabric Wall & Acoustic Curtain

Posted on by Rachel
stretched fabric wall and acoustic curtain
20
Jan

TECO Board Room Acoustics

The acoustics in a board room or conference room are critical to ensure meetings run smoothly and efficiently. In the board room at Tampa Electric Company’s office, meetings were constantly held up by requests to “repeat that” and “can you say that again”. These constant interruptions were a result of poor acoustics along with a too loud HVAC system.

Some fabric wall systems have unique edge and corner conditions. For example, a special “fish” track is needed for fabric walls that go around an outside corner, whereas the standard edge track can be used for inside corners.

In order to improve the acoustics of this board rooms, Commercial Acoustics was contracted by TECO to install a full-coverage fabric wall and a velvet acoustic curtain. Prior to the addition of the fabric walls and curtains, the room was just finished with tile floors and drywall. With only reflective surfaces in the board room, there wasn’t anything there to help absorb sound and reduce echo. Because of this, sound continued to bounce off the walls, floors and ceilings, resulting in a reverb time that was too high for the room.

Read More: Target Reverb Times

Out team installed 1″ thick fabric wall around the entire room, where wall spaces was available. The fabric wall system was made up of 1″ thick acoustical fiberglass core and wrapped in acoustically transparent fabric. To help aid the fabric wall, our team also installed thick, velvet acoustic curtains, similar to the kind you would find in a theater. Along with being decorative, these curtains worked to absorb sound in addition to the fabric wall.

Sound absorbing curtains were also installed in the board room to supplement the sound absorption of the stretched fabric wall. Although they look like standard drapes, they’re made form a heavy, velvet fabric and are both decorative and functional.

The next step to effectively treat the noise problems the board room was to treat the noisy HVAC system. A different company switched the HVAC to a variable control unit, which helps to make HVAC systems quieter. In this case, the variable control unit helped to reduce the ambient noise in the space to 45 dba.

Benefits of Stretched Fabric Wall & Acoustic Curtains in a Board Room

With the stretched fabric wall and sound absorbing curtains installed, the reverb time in the board room was greatly reduced. With the improved acoustics, the board could now hold meetings and telecoms without interruptions from attendees not being able to understand what’s going on.

f you have acoustical issues in your conference rooms, contact Commercial Acoustics for more information. Our firm specializes in furnishing and installing stretched fabric wall and other acoustical room components.

Rachel