How does one treat a gym?

Hi guys, I'm hesitant to ask, but figured you guys are fairly friendly, and that this isn't highly off topic. Aside from building my home studio, i've been charged with acoustically treating several spaces for my church. We aren't really a typical church... so we have two spaces that relate to this forum ;) One is a small(ish) band room, the other is a gym/theater. (In the studio world, I would presume that both of these spaces are big, even for pro studios.) Background: As iv'e been studying the acoustical treatments here, I feel that I "sort of" can apply what I've learned. My Main Goal is to attain a quasi-dampened room for the small room for the band, and to attain speach intelligibility in the gym? The bright side of this ordeal is that I'm not worried about Isolation or building control or iso rooms, I'm only trying to control the noise/verb inside the rooms. Rooms: This is a brand new building, both rooms have steel studs, gypsum walls, concrete floors, open rafter ceilings (no drop ceiling). The first room is a 31' x 45' x 14'. It is used by high school kids for their rock band. (drums, elec guitrs etc...) for both practice and shows... The second room is a gym. approx 95' by 75' x (31'?). The gym is used for sports of course, but is intended to function as a kids theater. I've already installed the PA system... now we just need to treat the room! Obviously, there are some reverb and echo's to contend with! No live bands, but canned music, lots of vocals and actors on a variety of mics. (lapels, jawlines, hh. etc...) Acoustical Treatments: all of it will prob be diy :) I plan on using a mixture of 3 and 6lb OC703 mounted on walls, covered in some nice fabric (prob guilford of maine)(fire-rated of coures ;) I haven't figured out what to do with the lowest wall section of the gym (ie... lots of fingers/bodies/flying objects to contend with) (I will prob look for a commercial product for these areas). I also intend on building some clouds of some form or another for the gym and hanging bass traps for the other room. (easy since they are open rafter ceilings). thats as far as i've gotten. Questions... A: Short of covering every square foot of wall space, I'm not sure how much to treat. Or is this a "put up some treatment until it sounds good"...type of senario? Is there a recommended percentage of wall/ceiling space that should be covered by treatment? B: Would you recommend treating say %50 of the walls and then 25% of the ceiling? Or If I only cover the walls (say 75%), and not treat the ceiling, would that be a problem. C: Is there anything obvious that I should be made aware of? D: Can anyone recommend a commercial acoustical treatment that can be abused... (ie... for the lower 10'-14' of wall space in the gym) i've attached a sketchup snapshot of the rooms... (yes they are side by side, but again, no worries about isolation) any help would be greatly appreciated as always. :D (oh.. and umm... this is also part of the reason there are no updates for my studio :( :cry: :evil: kevin Mods - if you feel this post is out of context, feel free to PM me and delete it ;)

sounds like some fun projects :-) one thing to consider is: to get the sound from the stage/presidium to the back of the gym, you need energy - which in turn means not damping it solely through mass absorption. so given that, you probably need to look at diffusion (using judicious amounts of absorption) as the primary means of getting the RT60 down enough to keep things intelligible all the way to the back and also with enough energy so people can hear whats going on... hanging clouds to break up the floor-ceiling echos, and staggering opposite wall absorbers to create diffusion - I'd start with less than you currently estimate - maybe 35-40% on the walls (esp the back wall) and 20-25% on the ceiling (i'd definitely use the ceiling). i'd construct the ceiling and wall treatment hanging to be expandable and strong enough in case i were to add heavier treatments like polys, diffusers, space coupling, etc. the walls are tough - generally mount the absorbers high on the wall and consider the possibility of needing to install polys or some other fairly hard treatment on the walls. wrestling mats are also tough and may help in this regard... some places to get ideas: http://www.rpginc.com/commercial/design_assistance/ http://www.gand.com/store/home.php?cat=68 the smaller room is nice sized live room and you can probably start in a similar fashion of treatments - i'd also measure it to see what modes (if any) you have and think about panel/slats/corner traps to get it flatter.

glen, thanks for the input... glad you chimed in, because i was not thinking of diffusion in such a large area. I figured hitting the ceiling with some treatments would be necessary, as it is the shortest parallel distance, however the roof is corrugated, so that probably provides a slight amount of high end diffusion. I will read over the links you gave, this is goign to take quite a bit of research! Thanks again. kevin

actually the corregated roof mostly appears "flat" acoustically _but_ might have a tiny amount of diffusion. the diffusion suggested comes from the staggered absorbers causing the sound to diffract/refract/impede and otherwise alter velocity and pressure - resulting in a diffuse sound field - and hopefully without draining all the energy from it...

ok, didn't think it would impact that much anyways... just to bounce an idea off of you... i'm thinking of constructing convex diffusers out of 1/4" ply, I can bend them to a fairly decent radius, then glue on a second 1/4"sheet to give it strength and keep its form, filling the back of it with pink fiberglass... repeat... Inbetween I can create these 2' by 12-18" deep OC absorbers, which will give the convex diffuser a 'border' or basically something that will close off the sides... i made a rough sketch, hopefully it makes more sense... k

One material you should look into is Tectum. It is a mashup of fibers and is very sturdy. It is used institutionaly for acoustic treatment and I have also used it in studios with great results. Use it to front your 703 absorbers instead of the fabric. It will add some more absorption at lower freqs that you will need and could end up being a more econimical way to go. http://www.tectum.com/ -ashley

yea, the tectum folks make clouds which could be useful: http://www.tectum.com/products/Cloud%20Panels.pdf

gullfo wrote:

http://www.gand.com/store/home.php?cat=68

Hey Glenn, the above link resolved to http://www.gand.com/store/home.php on my side? Is there some specific product or information that Gand has that you are linking to for sandledfoots' project ? Thanks boss.

weird, then i click on it, it goes directly to the cloud PDF file @ tectum... not even using the "URL" tag - its just text... maybe your browser has smart tags enabled and part of the URL is being picked up as a tag w/ an ad link?

... several years later... so just fyi, we did end up going with tectum panels, and had volunteers install them... they turned out great. the acoustics went to from a gym with no intelligibilty to a gym where you could here normal conversations... wasn't completely dead, but it's a gym... so.. .yep. would recommend.