TRIO Tavern and Grill

TRIO Tavern and Grill in Goodrich, Michigan runs a dining room and an adjoining bar, both finished in the hard, reflective surfaces that give a restaurant its look and work against its sound. Patrons and servers struggled to hear one another over the built-up noise of conversation, dishes, and the room itself.

Challenge

Memtech Acoustics measured reverberation time (RT60) in both rooms. The dining room reached 1.3 seconds and the bar 1.25 seconds, above the 0.7 to 1.1 second range that keeps a restaurant lively without becoming loud. The cause was the space itself: hardwood floors, pressed-metal ceilings, gypsum walls, and large front windows, nearly all of it smooth and reflective, with a symmetric shape that reinforces reverberation. At those levels a single sound lingers long enough to blur speech and amplify the general din.

Solution

Memtech set a target and used a parametric model to size the coverage needed to reach it, so the panels went where they earn their keep rather than being scattered around the room. The design turned an existing decorative crosshatch wall into part of the treatment, filling its diamonds with custom fabric-wrapped acoustic panels so the absorption reads as part of the decor, and added matching panels on the remaining walls of each room. Memtech coordinated the installation.

Results

After installation, Memtech returned and measured both rooms under similar conditions. Reverberation had dropped from 1.25 seconds to 0.7 seconds in the bar and from 1.3 seconds to 0.74 seconds in the dining room, meeting the design target and confirming the result by measurement. Conversation carries clearly again, and the background din that once filled both rooms is under control.