Council offices, clinics and consulting rooms each have acoustic jobs to do — keeping a conversation private, letting people work in an open-plan office, and keeping building services noise out of a quiet room. We advise on new buildings and fit-outs, and measure existing spaces to find out why they are not working and what will fix them.
When a council, health or education building is being designed, fitted out or refurbished; and when staff or clients complain that conversations carry between rooms, that an office is too loud to concentrate in, or that air conditioning or plant intrudes on a quiet space.
Recommended design sound levels and reverberation times for each type of room come from AS/NZS 2107. Privacy between rooms depends on the sound insulation of the partition, the paths around it through ceilings, ducts and doors, and the background noise on the listening side, so all three are designed together.
For new buildings and fit-outs: design advice on partitions, ceilings, doors, absorption and background sound for each room type.
For existing spaces: a measurement report on noise, reverberation and the sound insulation between rooms, with the specific changes that will bring them into range.
Design advice runs alongside the design programme. Measurements in an existing building are usually a single site visit, planned around when the rooms are in normal use or can be closed off.
A fixed fee per building or fit-out, quoted from the floor plans and the number of room types involved.
Partitions that stop below the ceiling, lightweight ceilings with shared plenums, and very low background noise. Privacy usually needs all three addressed together, not just a better wall.
Often. Sealing the door, closing the path through the ceiling void and adding a controlled background sound frequently does more than replacing the wall.
Yes. Measuring an existing room first shows which path is letting sound through, so the fix is targeted rather than guessed.