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One of the first scientific concepts students learn in school is the five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste.
Our initial experience of a space is visual. A lot of time is spent addressing the visual elements to create the right mood and feel. Most people stop actively assessing a room at this step, but our sense of hearing is the only sense that never “turns off”. We must therefore ask ourselves: why was this space built? A meeting room, a concert hall, a restaurant: all are built for people and their shared experience in a space. Organizations spend millions of dollars to construct buildings and make them look great, but by forgetting about the acoustics, these organizations are forgetting that the true purpose of their space is human connection and conversation.
When acoustics are an afterthought, reverberation from unexpected places takes over.
The first reflection is often fine – our brains can easily sort out the disturbance – but the second reflection often arrives after a notable delay, which leads to confusion. If the visual of a person speaking does not match up with the audio, it creates a disassociation and breaks the focus of the listener.
Absorption is the historical method for controlling these reverberations. Horse hair, wool, and ash are just some of the materials that civilizations back as far as Ancient Rome and Greece would employ.
The tiered system of ancient amphitheaters naturally let sound expand, and absorptive materials controlled that resonance to maximize the listening experience.
Absorptive panels work well and are relatively inexpensive, converting sound waves into an incredibly small amount of heat energy. This can, however, lead to a room becoming more “dead” and unresponsive than desired.
So, what other methods can we employ?
Reflection was the initial problem that needed to be solved, and reflection is also the solution to that problem.
In the mid-70s, Manfred R. Schroeder developed the quadratic residue diffusion formula. This formula can be used to create structures with a number of different wells of varying depths that—instead of reflecting a soundwave directly in-tact—break that signal up in a way that between 2-3 feet away from the panel, the sound becomes diffuse.
Quadratic residue diffusers are often made out of wood or fiberglass-reinforced gypsum, which ultimately means they are usually expensive or fragile.
Oeler Industries, Inc. was looking to find an efficient and effective way to apply Schroeder’s equation, and the Oelex Quadratone 2D Lay-In Ceiling Tile is the result of that innovation.
President and Founder Matt Oeler had an idea:
“Why don’t we take this new technology of additive manufacturing and create some standard shapes that the world knows and start to manufacture some pieces and parts to change that industry?”
This additive construction approach allows the QRDs to be manufactured with truly-square air-tight wells and incredibly thin fins with a significant amount of rigidity at a fraction of the cost of other products. The combination of square air-tight wells and thin fins creates a more acoustically efficiency diffuser.
Additionally, the manufacturing process leads to less waste. So far, Oeler Industries, Inc. has achieved waste products that are <0.01% of the input materials. The material used is a vegetable-based plastic with a natural fire resistance that creates no smoke when burned.
“Our goal has been to bring diffusion to the masses,” Oeler said. “I think we’re able to do it with what we have here.”
For more information on how you can implement the Oelex Quadratone 2D Lay-In Ceiling Tile from Oeler Industries, Inc., call 412-884-3000 or email sales@oeler.com.