Take your favorite local night spot, bar, pub or libation station and fill it with a gathering crowd at happy hour.   As the drinks are poured, the voices get louder, and the space is soon filled with excessive noise.   People strain to hold conversations, the regulars continue to shuffle in, but the long term success of the bar is directly tied to the owners ability to control the excessive noise.

What the human ear experiences is a combination of original sound and reflected sound.   The reflected sound is the result of the echoes of the sound waves reflecting off all the hard surfaces found in a bar, including glass, brick, tile, marble, wood, steel, and tin.  These surfaces look great and are easy to keep clean, but they are terrible for sound quality within the space.  As a result, bar owners are left trying to figure out how to lower the noise levels and protect their repeat business.

The answer?  A set of sound panels can be introduced into the space, wall or ceiling mounted, to effectively absorb the echoes before they have a chance to spike the noise levels any further.   Sound panels do not make people less loud, but they do combine to make the room less loud by lowering the level of ambient echo.   For years, bar owners would balk at the concept of slapping sound panels on perimeter walls or ceilings, but today’s acoustic panel options are great.

Ceiling Clouds are panels that can “float” from the ceiling like clouds, in rows and columns stretched across the expanse of the ceiling.   This is a popular option for bar owners who have carefully designed the look of their perimeter wall surfaces and do not want to corrupt that design.   Clouds come in a variety of colors, and can also be custom paint matched the camouflage into the ceiling.

PicturePanels are the upgrade to any sound panel treatment.   Thanks to a process called Dye Sublimation, today’s sound panels can be printed with graphics, logos, images, custom colors, wallpapers, vintage pictures and more.   Here, bar owners use the sound panels as a design mechanism for their space, producing a visual WOW factor as well as curbing the noise.

A bar with no sound panels will reflect up to 97% of the noise in the room, with echoes that take up to 10 seconds to die off on their own.  A properly treated bar with a set of sound panels will reflect less than 20% of the noise in the room, forcing the collapse of the echoes within 1.5-2.0 seconds.   Sound panels work, they are a great investment into the long term life of the bar, they are class A fire rated, and their design options in today’s market are limitless.

For more information on sound panels for your favorite bar or restaurant, call the help desk at NetWell Noise Control at 1-800-638-9355 or visit them online at www.controlnoise.com.