Skip to main content

Noisy restaurants

Have you ever gone out to eat and found yourself shouting to be heard? Did you ever have your "night out for dinner" ruined because it was so noisy you couldn't hear everyone at your table?

A lot of these problems could be solved if restaurant owners would add sound panels to their ceilings. It's not that expensive and it's not that hard. But most of them don't do it.

Maybe some restaurant owners think it seems more "lively" if it's deafeningly loud. And maybe others want to turn the tables over faster – because their customers often say "let's get out of here and go someplace where we can hear each other." But I've seen many people pass on a restaurant that's unbearably loud. Noise is actually bad for business.

Let's take a look at one restauranteur who did "the right thing." Thanks to Acoustical Solutions for posting it!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Combining QuietRock and Green Glue together

Two great products work great together. As I've mentioned before, I'm experimenting around with ways to reduce some of the noise problems in my apartment on a tight budget. I think I've found the best combination to date: adding a layer of QuietRock 510 over an existing layer of gypsum drywall with a layer of Green Glue inbetween. This was sort of the best of both worlds: taking a pre-made, sound-dampened drywall and then adding it over a powerful, viscous layer of glue....onto drywall that was already on the wall studs. No demo needed. In this project, I basically added two sound-dampening layers to the original 1950s drywall (one layer in the QuietRock and the other layer created by the Green Glue) to address " flanking noise ": feet, furniture, and shoes pounding on the bare floor of my downstairs neighbors' apartment. The amount of banging, bashing, and foot-stomping sounds coming from their very "wooden" apartment has been severe, and I...
10 comments
Read more

How to measure decibels and frequency with the Decibel Meter app

 Frequency matters When you're dealing with a noise issue, the frequency of that noise is just as important as the decibel level. A decibel is the loudness of the sound, and measuring decibels can alert you when a sound is more than just a nuisance, but dangerous to your health. However, decibel levels on their own don't tell the whole story. The frequency of the sound is also very important. The frequency is a measure of how many sound waves per second are produced by a sound, and determines its pitch. A low-frequency sound might be really annoying, but it might not be that loud. The lower frequencies are typically below 150 Hz, and often sound like a deep bass sound that's not necessarily loud, but the vibrations from that sound can travel through the entire frame of a building and disrupt sleep or cause stress. Knowing both the decibel level and the frequency of an unwanted sound can help you determine the right soundproofing solution. For example, a low-frequency nois...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to measure decibels with the NIOSH sound level meter app

For a quick lesson on how to use the NIOSH (National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health) app to measure decibels and noise, check out my latest Soundproofist  video. This handy app is free, although only available for iOS devices right now. It's a great app to use if you want to measure average and maximum noise levels with either A-weighted or C-weighted decibels. You can save each measurement as a report. Learn more about measuring noise and about soundproofing from  Soundproofist . Download the free NIOSH app from the App Store and learn more about it from this CDC documentation .
Post a Comment
Read more