If you want to keep outside noise from entering or exiting a building, you need expensive construction and highly specialized materials. This is called soundproofing. If you want to reduce noise, decrease reverberation, and delays to better understand speech or listen to music inside a building, we have solutions that may be used with or without specialized construction. We generically call this acoustic treatment.
Often, rooms are chosen for unintended purposes and must now be modified to achieve good speech intelligibility and musical fidelity. As building costs rise, repurposing spaces previously designed for drastically different purposes is increasingly common. There is a local advertising agency at the old downtown airport in Kansas City. Numerous church bands are playing loudly in decommissioned Catholic cathedrals. Acoustic treatment is required to make these rooms usable.
The best kinds of treatment are invisible, matching the aesthetic. Digital images can be printed onto surfaces and fabrics. We have printed restaurant and club logos on the treatment. Images of flags, stained glass, and spin class bikes have been printed and look fantastic. Duvaltex offers Guilford of Maine's acoustic fabrics to most acoustic treatment manufacturers. If you have been to a nice, quiet office building, hotel, restaurant, or theatre, you have seen their fabrics covering walls, wall panels, ceilings, furniture, etc. They have a variety of colors to match almost any environment. Treatments can be odd-shaped art or economical squares and rectangles.
The majority of small to mid-sized churches do not have the money for construction. They don’t have the money to eliminate the acoustic treatment entirely. So, having a wide choice of fabrics and wood finishes is very helpful. Oftentimes, churches will provide installation labor to save money. We provide the layout and demonstrate the installation process. They take it from there.
Layouts are created in modeling software. Software is used to build rooms, select acoustic treatment, and listen to the results virtually. We have done so many similarly shaped spaces that we don’t need to charge for the design time. We have existing models and data. But when we do need the models, we are ready. We can offer DIY plans for those with time to spare and a shop full of tools.