The Taoist Tai Chi Society is a volunteer organization headquartered in Dunedin, FL. After building a new large fitness studio, they noticed how much echo they were experiencing with even the slightest sounds. If you’ve ever done Tai Chi or know what it is, then you know that it’s supposed to be a peaceful and relaxing experience so, excess echo doesn’t belong in that environment.
Gym Designs that Contribute to Echo
In this world-class 20,000 square foot fitness facility, Tai Chi practitioners traveled from around the globe to practice and enhance their techniques with expert professors. With a reinforced speech system, including amplified speakers, the noise in the room made it difficult to hear fitness, martial arts or technique instructions.
As you can see below, the gym space is quite large with all polished concrete floors. The approximate size was 150 ft by 150 ft, with 20 ft high exposed metal deck ceilings. In addition to the concrete floor, neither the metal deck nor the exterior gypsum walls had NRCs (Noise Reduction Coefficient) values above 0.2, meaning they reflected far more sound than they absorbed!
This is a perfect scenario for a significant amount of echo and reverberation depending on what’s taking place in a space. Far more than what would be typically acceptable in a gym or fitness studio application. While some workout spaces and free-weight gyms may be OK with a reverb time over 2 seconds, and even up to 3 seconds, that would not be appropriate for a group fitness space such as this. Group fitness locations, where speaking instruction is critical, require a reverberation time at or below 1.5 seconds.
To better understand how we use NRCs and Room Dimensions to calculate reverb times, try out our Acoustic Calculator here.
Acoustic Treatment to Lower Fitness Studio Reverb – Ceiling Clouds Suspended from Exposed Ceiling Above
As mentioned, the ceiling was approximately 20 feet high, with corrugated metal and the walls were drywall. Our team custom-fabricated 4’x4′ acoustic ceiling clouds, and hung them between the parallel joists with airline wire. These acoustic panels, 2″ thick, achieved an NRC rating of 1.05, and reduced the reverberation time in the room by more than 50%. The client selected an acoustic fabric that matched with the sprayed ceiling so that the clouds blended into the space.
By adding over 960 Sabins of acoustic treatment to the gym (60 panels at 16 sf each), we greatly improved the amount of acoustical absorptive area in the space, giving the sound waves from instructors and speaker systems a material to absorb into.
Acoustical wall panels are also used along the perimeter to supplement the treatment in the center, and to ensure no localized echo or excess noise builds up in the smaller fitness team areas.
