4 Signs A Location Has Acoustical Engineering Issues

When a space has acoustical problems, it can make the experience people have there uncomfortable and unpleasant. It's one thing to know the acoustics in a location are bad, but how do you pick up the specific signs of trouble? Folks in the acoustical engineering consulting world pay attention to these four indicators.

Echoes

There are very few applications where echoes are desirable. If you can hear the sound of your voice come back to you, it's a problem with the location. People often associate echoes with big and open spaces, but they can also occur under the right conditions in smaller ones.

An acoustical consulting firm may recommend deadening the space with several tricks. Padding along the walls and ceilings often works, but it's not great for high-traffic zones. You also can add architectural features to bare walls and ceilings to create odd angles that will help to kill the echoes. Even a bit of stippled texture can often tone down echoes in a space.

Dead Zones

One of the trickier acoustical problems is the dead zone. These are usually spots where the collision of sound waves cancels out. Oddly, this is sometimes triggered by echoes that converge and cancel. You may end up using the same solutions, consequently.

Dead zones also occur in locations where sound doesn't travel. If the shape of a space focuses the sound away from particular spots, you may have to redo the room to account for the acoustics.

Interference

Most acoustical consulting clients need top-quality sound for musical events, speeches, or other functions. If you aren't hearing the quality you expect, there may be noise within sound waves. For example, particularly shapes in a space may cause interference that doesn't cancel out. An acoustical engineering consulting professional typically has to run a computer model of the room to track down and remedy the problem.

Quietness or Amplification

This may sound like the dead zone problem, but it's not. In this case, the whole space is dead because there isn't sufficient amplification. Fortunately, this is a well-understood problem. An engineer can design a shape for a stage to direct the sound toward the audience.

Some locations have the opposite requirement. They may need quietness for privacy or safety reasons. Once more, this is a well-understood issue. Engineers typically do the reverse of what they'd do on amplification projects. They can reduce ideal acoustics to make a space quieter.

To learn more, contact a company like D.L. ADAMS ASSOCIATES.