If you are a person that attends the gym on the regular, then you must be familiar with the loud music as well as the echo that follows. It can make songs become all kinds of noisy and annoying because they tend to sound unnatural due to the prolonged echo. There are a multitude of ways to fix this issue, and the cost can range from moderate to extremely expensive. However, there are affordable sound treatment solutions that help reduce gym noise.
Some school gymnasiums can also require acoustic treatment depending on how they’re built. Some schools gyms are fairly small and even carpeted, but others are the size of a basketball court with 20′-30′ ceilings, and these are the ones that will require acoustic treatment.
Ceiling Baffles for Gym Acoustics
In many school gyms, or the open court areas of commercial gyms, the ceilings are really high, and this contributes to the echo issues in many gyms. Typically the larger a room, the more reverb there will be, especially if it’s full of reflective finished such as wood or rubber floors, drywall, and exposed metal deck ceilings.
Ceiling Baffles are a new way of absorbing sound without getting in the way of your gym aesthetics, and without having to worry about regular cleaning or maintenance! Baffles are ideal in spaces with high ceilings, such as gymnasiums, because they hang down about 1′-2′ from the actual ceiling. If you were to install baffles in an office space with 9′ ceilings, you’d have some people walking around very close to bumping their heads on acoustical baffles.
Baffles for gyms can either be traditional, using 2 inch thick fiberglass at the core, or they can be more aesthetic, using recycled and dyed polyester. Polyester baffles are more decorative than fiberglass baffles, but they don’t absorb quite as much sound, so you would end up needing a larger quantity for the same results.
Acoustic Wall Panels and Ceiling Panels for Gymnasiums
Although people don’t necessarily go to the gym to converse with one another, you should still be able to have some acoustic comfort in the gym. No one wants to hear the echo from squeaky shoes or someone yelling at a lost game while trying to focus on a workout.
Acoustic wall panels and ceiling panels are easily installed into the walls or ceiling of the gymnasium. Just like baffles, acoustic wall panels should be placed up higher in a gym, especially if they’ll be installed above the basketball courts, or anywhere else they could be hit by objects.
Wall panels can also be used in school gyms, and they often are because of the amount of echo they can produce. If you think back to your gymnasium in grade school or high school, you might recall the echo created from someone’s shoe squeaking on the wood floor during a basketball game. The combination of wood floors, metal ceilings, wall-to-wall bleachers, and the room size were the perfect recipe for unwanted echo.
Gymnasium Echo Eliminators
Echo eliminators work a little bit differently. As well as being Class A fire retardant and water resistant, they are made from recycled panels. The panels are constructed from 85% recyclable cotton and the rest is just fire proof materials. Light weight and cost effective, these panels are considered to be of the most high performance acoustic absorption panels on the market. They come in all kinds of colors as well as sizes up to 4 x 8 feet and after installation they are also mildew and mold resistant.
The difference between echo eliminators and sound silencers is that, typically, echo eliminators focus more on the attractiveness, or the look, of the product. They are only two inches thick whereas silencers are five inches thick.
Gymnasium Acoustic Panels – How to Acoustically Treat a Gym
All of these products can be used for not only gymnasiums, but classrooms, community centers, churches, restaurants, gun ranges, recording studios, offices, or even cafeterias.
