Akomo

Akomo and room acoustics

What are good or bad room acoustics

It is taken for granted that a concert hall or recording studio has been optimised for the function in question. Right from the start of the design phase, these types of rooms have been carefully engineered to create the optimal acoustics for their given purpose. From the start a lot of thought and research has been put into choosing the right materials and configuration.
In contrast to the concert halls and studio’s, a lot less thought is put into the importance of acoustic comfort in offices, hotels, restaurants, meeting rooms and in fact all areas where people meet and come together.
Apart from the mandatory regulations there is often little thought given to acoustics.
The problems become apparent when the room is in use. Think of a restaurant where people need to speak louder to be heard. This will add to the problem and lead to further increases in the noise level.

Reverberation
The cause of poor acoustics is, more often than not, sound waves being reflected around the room with the sound remaining audible longer than normal.
This reflection of sound waves is called reverberation.
Longer reverberation times cause poor speech intelligibility and lead to an increase in the sound level (noise).
Reverberation time can be measured and is indicated in seconds.

A room with long reverberation times can lead to stress and tiredness but, in the most cases it is first noticed as an uncomfortable, sometimes annoying, place to meet.

Cause
In general a long reverberation time is caused by the use of hard materials is large areas. The larger the area the longer the reverberation time.
Glass, concrete stone and steel are all hard materials and they reflect almost all the sound waves. Absorption is almost nil.

Solution
To reduce the reverberation time we need introduce softer materials to the room. These absorb more of the sound waves and reflect less.
Softer materials are carpets, curtains, soft furniture, special absorption panels and objects.

All Akomo products are made from Basotect sound absorption foam.
Basotect is a soft open structured foam that absorbs 90% of the sound waves in the speech frequencies.

By using Akomo products you are introducing soft absorbing materials to the room and therefore reducing the reverberation time and in turn improving the room acoustics.
How many products and in which configuration you place them differs from room to room.

We can give advice how to improve your room acoustics, we do this using reverberation time calculations, where necessary reverberation time measurements and also product advice.

To find out more please feel free to contact us, we are always glad to be of assistance.