Corporate Event Center Reverberation Control

A construction company in Livonia, Michigan has a large event center. A movable dividing wall lets the room work as one open hall of roughly sixty-eight by eighty feet or as two separate rooms. In every configuration, the space echoed badly enough to make speech hard to follow.

Challenge

Memtech Acoustics measured reverberation time (RT60) in three configurations: the hall fully open, and each side with the dividing wall in place. Fully open, reverberation reached 4.17 seconds, far beyond the 1.5 seconds a room used for speech should hold. With the wall in place, the two sides measured about 2.1 and 3.2 seconds. Tests were repeated at each position to confirm the results. The problem sound sat in the 1.5 to 4.5 kHz range, the band that carries the consonants of speech, which is why listeners heard a hard slap-back on every word. The room's smooth, symmetric surfaces and open ceiling drove the effect.

Solution

Memtech set a 1.5 second target for the open hall and used a parametric model to size the treatment. The first plan called for high-absorption panels across the open ceiling deck and fabric-wrapped panels on the walls, with a reduced-coverage option modeled to hold the room under 2.5 seconds for a lower budget.

The final design was revised to focus on the ceilings. Memtech supplied 3,120 square feet of 2-inch open-cell foam panels for the north and south event space ceilings and the north high-bay soffit, in a custom color the client approved, and coordinated the installation in June 2024.

Results

The ceiling treatment was installed in June 2024. No reverberation measurement was taken after installation, so the improvement has not been confirmed by measurement.