Michigan Association of Conservation Districts

The Michigan Association of Conservation Districts runs board meetings and workshops out of an open meeting room at its Allegan office. The room seats a small board of ten to fifteen and opens up for workshops of forty, and in a space that size, being able to hear across the table matters.

Challenge

Memtech Acoustics measured reverberation time (RT60) in the room. It reached 4.0 seconds, four times the one-second maximum a meeting room should hold. The space works against clear conversation on every surface: a ceiling nearly eighteen feet high, a hard vinyl-plank floor, gypsum walls, and a wall of street-facing plate glass, with a wide opening to an adjoining room that couples the two volumes together. At four seconds, several people speaking at once turns into an overlapping wall of sound, and background noise from the HVAC only adds to it.

Solution

Memtech set a target under one second and used a parametric model to size the coverage needed to reach it. The engineered layout distributes acoustic panels across the ceiling and all four walls, placed where they absorb the most reflected energy rather than scattered around the room. The design also anticipates the group's interest in adding teleconferencing in the future, since a room that is clear in person is the same room a remote caller can follow.

Results

The engineered design is modeled to bring the room from 4.0 seconds down to under one second, a reduction of roughly three quarters, so a full workshop or a board discussion stays intelligible. Memtech verifies reverberation on site after installation and adjusts the treatment until the room meets the target.