Your Content Deserves to Sound Better
Posted by Auralex on 4th May 2022
Carwash Magnates Find ‘Professional Polish’ with Acoustical Treatment.
Let’s face it: the sound quality of the content created in your non-acoustically-treated office sounds washed.
Your talented team works hard to tell your story and build your brand through videos, webinars, interactive social and more, only to have the finished product sound echoey, sloppy, unprofessional. Your content creators can only “fix it in post” so much before it’s time to consider the space they’re using. Fortunately, you have help.
Crew Carwash, a carwash chain with more than three dozen locations, faced this conundrum when they moved into a gorgeous new headquarters. The company contacted Auralex to combat the subpar sound of their new multimedia editing suite shortly after move-in.
“The sound was always the one thing that people would bring up and say ‘yeah, it’s just… you guys need to work on the sound. It sounds a little canny, it sounds a little amateurish,’” said Crew Carwash Director of Human Resources Joe Rice. “So, I think that this work that was done in this room – with the acoustics – has taken that professional polish to kind of the next level.”
Hear Joe Rice's testimonial about the process and the results...
Crew Carwash currently employs close to 900 full- and part-timers and the video and voiceover work completed in-house feeds a truckload of internal and external communications channels, including company-wide video messaging, social media posts, greenscreen-reliant video shoots and employee training content.
Begin with the Needs
The room isn’t big, but it’s situated in a roomy office space that called for some special consideration. Crew Carwash reached out to the Auralex room design team and they got to work on a free (for you, too!) Personalized Room Analysis.
To clean up the room reverb and echo, Auralex shot for a multi-pronged approach that focused first on the ceiling, then on the side walls, then on the wall behind the edit bench.
Auralex Director of Sales and Marketing Kevin Booth described some initial findings about the space:
“We discovered the reverb time in the room was .72 (seconds)... Typically, pretty good for a classroom or something,” he said. “But with digital recording, it can really capture a lot of ambient (sound) in the room.”
Trust the Process
The pre-installation consultation and information gathering helped set the stage for a very streamlined installation process:
- The team decided on two-inch Mineral Fiber Insulation to backfill the drop ceiling, creating an absorptive barrier that reduces some noise from exiting and some from entering the room through the ceiling tiles.
- Auralex room engineers determined the acoustic needs on the side walls and behind the editing computer called for two-inch-thick, four-foot-tall and two-foot-wide fiberglass ProPanels to tame the room’s significant reflections and reverb.
- One key design and functionality decision was made by Auralex for the side walls: offsetting the ProPanels. Placing each panel across from negative space on the opposite wall helped in two ways… It reduces side-to-side reflections and eases some of the project’s budget by using slightly fewer panels, while still achieving the desired outcome.
- ProPanels were positioned horizontally behind the editing desk (as opposed to vertically on the side walls) due to speaker and monitor location.
The result? “We discovered – by installing the treatment that we have,” Booth said. “We could get (the space) down to a .40 (second) reverb time,” creating a much more fitting environment for the content creation needs of Crew.
ProPanels Really Tie the Room Together
“The aesthetics of the solution were really important,” Rice said. “This solution, these panels and the other solutions involved just makes it, aesthetically… it’s a room you like to bring people in. It’s a little more impressive. It’s a little nicer-looking than our old solution, so we’ve been very happy with it.”
For more on ProPanels, Mineral Fiber Insulation and Auralex’s Free Personalized Room Analysis, explore Auralex.com.
See if Auralex Mineral Fiber could be the answer for a variety of uses in your space...