Why School Cafeterias Are So Loud Cafeterias are built to be easy to clean: tile or sealed concrete floors, block walls, hard ceilings and stainless serving lines. Every one of those surfaces reflects sound. Put two or three hundred people in the room at lunch and the noise keeps bouncing between the floor and ceiling…
Library Acoustics vs Library Soundproofing A noisy library usually has two separate problems. The first is echo: hard floors, glass and high ceilings keep sound bouncing, so a conversation at one table carries across the room. That is fixed with acoustics, meaning soft absorbing panels and baffles. The second is sound passing through walls, doors…
Are Hotel Rooms Soundproof? Not fully. Hotel rooms are built to cut noise down to a level most guests can sleep through, not to block it completely. Building codes set a minimum for the walls and floors between guest rooms, and most hotel brands set a higher standard of their own. A room built to…
Can Clients Hear Through a Therapy Office Wall? Often, yes. Most therapy offices are ordinary office rooms: a hollow door with a gap underneath, light walls shared with the waiting room or the next office, and walls that stop at the ceiling tiles. A calm speaking voice is quiet, but in a silent waiting room…
Soundproofing your home theater can help reduce outside noise, improve the overall sound quality, and create a more immersive experience.
Using products like sound absorbing panels, sound blocking materials and soundproofing curtains will help you achieve this.
Sound diffusers are devices used to scatter or disperse sound waves in a space. They are designed to improve the acoustics of a room by reducing echoes and other sound distortions that can affect the quality and clarity of sound.
Soundproofing Materials vs Sound Absorbing Materials There is no single best soundproofing material, because “soundproofing” covers two different jobs. Blocking stops sound passing through a wall, floor or ceiling, and takes heavy, airtight materials like mass loaded vinyl and drywall. Absorbing stops sound echoing inside a room, and takes soft, porous materials like acoustic panels.…
Where Neighbor Noise Gets In Neighbor noise reaches you in two forms. Airborne noise (voices, TV, music, a barking dog) travels through the air and through gaps, light walls and windows. Impact noise (footsteps, dropped objects, a slammed door) shakes the building itself and travels through floors and framing. Each one needs a different fix,…
How Much Does Mass Loaded Vinyl Weigh? If you’ve ever worked with mass loaded vinyl in a wall soundproofing project, you’ve probably noticed that it’s a pretty heavy material. As the name states, mass loaded vinyl is used to add mass to walls and improve the amount of sound they can block, which is measured…
What Is an STC Rating? The STC rating, or Sound Transmission Class rating, of a material correlates to the amount of sound that a material is able to block. Some low STC rated products include glass windows and hollow-core doors, while some high STC rated products include mass loaded vinyl and solid-core doors. The higher…