Advent Lutheran Church Acoustics

Advent Lutheran Church of Arlington, Virginia enjoys using its worship assembly room for a plethora of purposes, due to the improvement in the acoustics. Unfortunately, the room’s reverberation time was at 1.5 seconds. As a result, speech intelligibility was poor, in particular for older members with impaired hearing. We were able to correct this and make it look great, all within budget.

This shared space had a couple of challenges. There were many hard surfaces on walls, floor, and ceiling, and some AC and traffic noise through the windows. The reverberation time coupled with the extraneous sound altogether made for a poor space for acoustics. The budget was not unlimited though, so changing out the air conditioning unit and soundproofing windows was not possible. Our approach was to add absorption to the room, such that the reverberation time would be low enough that the background noise would not be an issue anymore.

Calculating the reverberation time of the space required the use of an Impulse Response meter, as well as using the room dimensions and empirical testing. This and the Sabine equation helped us to determine the necessary amount of acoustical material. Two-inch thick AlphaSorb® Fabric Wrapped Acoustic Panels were the best fit in the calculation. From the results of the calculations, we made a panel layout to follow the length of the walls to have even reveals at the end of runs. The acoustic panels followed the line of the ceiling around the room. White Sustainable acoustic panels on the ceiling reduce and absorb the floor-to-ceiling echo. All material was put in place by our qualified Acoustical Solutions installation team.The AlphaSorb® Fabric Wrapped Acoustic Panels were the perfect product for this space with 50+ colors to choose from, the product being Class 1 Fire rated, and having an absorption rating (NRC .85)