Soundproofing a Restaurant
Acoustic Challenge
As restaurants fill with patrons, conversations grow louder as original speech begins to compete with the background noise caused by extended echoes spreading throughout a loud restaurant. Our goal in soundproofing a restaurant is to clean out the background noise by lowering the reverberation time. In turn, original speech can return to normal conversational tones as the decibel levels in the room fall. Patrons are more comfortable and more likely to become repeat clients.
Soundproofing Treatment
By placing a series of sound panels or Ceiling Clouds around the upper perimeter of the walls or ceiling, acoustic reflections within a noisy restaurant are captured and converted to kinetic energy. This restaurant sound system cleans out the background noise in the room, allowing conversations to return to normal levels which in turn drops the decibel level exposure in the room. Because most retaurants have invested in a design theme on their walls, owners are reluctant to mount sound panels to existing rooms. Instead, the Ceiling Clouds allow for a less conspicous treatment, where the sound panels float mechanically from the ceiling in nice, even site lines, to abate the noise, while the walls are left alone. For help in calculating quantities for your restaurant, call NetWell's help desk at 1-800-638-9355.
Acoustic Results
With less background noise to compete with, normal conversational tones return as the decibel levels in the room subside. This helps build a repeat customer base and generate long term success for what used to be a noisy restaurant. Simulated results for soundproofing a restaurant and restaurant design are broadcast in the Sound Chamber.
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Start Smart: Good Decision Making Will Save You Money
Making good decisions will save you time and money. Nothing is more costly or pocketbook-draining than to discover that the wrong product, the wrong treatment, or the mis-installation of your order forces you to start over, accept inferior results, or suffer from buyer's remorse.
To help avoid missteps and protect your investment, NetWell Noise Control
offers its famous, safe, and secure email course called StartSmart. It is filled with valuable insider tips on saving money with your soundproofing treatment. This popular teaching tool is your guide to a successful
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Sign up today and check your email for StartSmart!
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Restaurant noise is background noise. If you can absorb more voice reflections in the room, you clean out the background interference and deliver a more favorable dining environment for your guests. Rather than raising their voices above the level of the background noise, customers can converse across a table in normal, private conversational tones.
Most restaurants call us after the fact. Architects spec in hard, reflective, cleanable surfaces on the floors, walls and other surfaces in the room. What is often left alone is the ceiling, which becomes the focal point of our treatment. Target the use of our Ceiling Clouds, which can suspend horizontally from the ceiling and float out over the room. Panels can be custom cut to size and color. Leave your walls alone, you have probably already invested in a certain decor, why mess with it.
Treating your ceilings will work just as effectively as will treating your walls with sound panels or wallcoveirngs. Pick a color for your Ceiling Clouds that either disguises the pieces against the backdrop of the ceiling, or matches a color fleck in your scheme down below.
If you already have a grid system in place, consider our Theater Tiles or DIME Tiles. These are 1.5 times as effective as standard drop in ceiling tiles for absorbing echoes in your room. Available in 42 sprays, these tiles will add a touch of elegance to your room as well as great acoustics.
Do not be concerned with placement. The reverberations in the restaurant travel like a pebble wave in a pond at more than 770 miles per hour. What will trigger your result is the quantities placed into the room, not the location. Simply spread them throughout the room in even site lines as best you can and you will be satisfied with the results.
If your ceiling is unavailable to you for your sound treatment, our most popular architectural wall treatments include our Fabric Panels and our Whisperib Wallcovering. Both come in a variety of color options, are simple to install, and are durable to traffic patterns.
As we define in the Academy and simulate in our Sound Chamber, our goal is to collapse your reverb time down to under 2 seconds. We are after better acoustic control, not a cure. Our treatments will deliver the results you seek, with a decorative ness and a class A fire rating that are both a must.
The products for this treatment are listed in the Product Bin for soundproofing a Restaurant, and be sure to sign up for the complimentary course on avoiding the 8 biggest mistakes in soundproofing!
Myth:
Gluing foam to the under side of your tables will absorb echoes and produce good acoustics inside your restaurant. False.
We hear from clients continually who have been fed this information, primarily by foam-only suppliers. Yes, we too offer a full compliment of foam panels, but no, do not put them in a restaurant....for several reasons. The majority of foam panels, first of all, are not class A fire rated. And for those who install melamine foam (which IS class A fire rated and approved for use in public buildings), you also have the issue of the foam flaking and dusting out. Foam does not belong in a room where people are consuming food because foam decomposes over time, emitting dust particles out into the air. OK for an industrial plant, or a recording studio, but not where people are eating. Third, there are appropriate ratios between your coverage and the size of your restaurant. Placing this material beneath your tables will not produce enough coverage to trigger enough of the affect you are seeking. And finally, your sound panels need to be exposed to the noise in the room. All you get with treating the underside of your tables is partial absorption of noise reflection off your floor. You are better to treat the perimeter walls or ceiling, where you pick more first-wave reflections out of the room. For these reasons, do not follow this myth and treat the underside of your tables with foam!
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