When you think of movable walls, it might bring to mind university lecture theatres, school auditoriums, or classrooms. It might not be the first thing you think about when you’re confronted with hotel noise problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But, for most hotels, accommodation is only one of several revenue sources for the venue. Most hotels host conferences and meetings. Our client was no different. The hotel had designed flexible meeting rooms to host a range of meetings, from intimate gatherings to fully-fledged conferences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This flexibility was achieved by separating larger spaces using movable walls, also know as acoustic operable\u00a0walls, folding door dividers, accordion walls, or operable partitions. This is not an uncommon scenario for event spaces, where a hotel is used for events of various sizes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unfortunately, the flexibility of having movable walls dissecting the space often comes at the cost of sound transference. In this case, as with many movable walls, speech transmission was the major problem. Guests meeting in one room were distracted by those in the next door space. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This meant that the hotel could not book all three rooms concurrently, losing revenue.\u00a0Finding a solution wasn’t as simple as improving the seals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As you can see from the picture, the high quality fit out needed careful treatment. Often where the ceiling is plasterboard, we would use our cut in transducers. However, adding more elements into the ceiling was not something the client wanted to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n