Acoustic Coffered Ceiling

Retain the ambiance of hubbub, enhance the clarity of table top conversation and quiet intrusions from across the room. Perfect retrofit for restaurants and coffee shops, fellowship and activity halls, meeting and conference rooms and specialty rooms such as home theaters, museums, art galleries and the great room at home.

Turn plain sheetrock into cost-effective architectural acoustic ceilings

Create a sociable sonic landscape. Convert any room with a gypboard, wood or plaster ceiling into a class act, a room that looks beautiful and sounds even better, and yet, it’s all so naturally comfortable, no one even notices.

The ASC Coffered Ceiling system was developed to help rooms support multiple simultaneous conversations without over damping the ambiance.

It’s busy, busy, busy all around you and yet, it stays clear and calm where you are, no matter where you are. Every table is a good table. You are waiting tables and as you move from table to table, it’s always busy out there, but the calm seems to follow where ever you go.

Open spaces are louder than you realize, and our system helps retain the ambiance but also create intimacy.

Acoustic Coffered Beam Ceiling – Crosstalk Control

Two Different Kinds of Sound Reflection

Sound bounces around a hard surfaced room in all directions. Add multiple groups of people all trying to talk to each other, and the noise floor quickly rises to deafening levels. As each party has to talk louder to be heard, the noise rises. This is called, in acoustical terms, the “Cocktail Party Effect”. For the purposes of noise control and speech intelligibility, sound reflection is either vertical or horizontal.


As each separate conversation takes place in the room, sound reflects horizontally, jumping across the room. This is what we define as crosstalk. In some circumstances, it’s actually easier to hear the conversation from across the room, instead of the one right in front of you.

Any large, flat ceiling will reflect sound horizontally, including T-bar ceilings. Add polished hard floors and large areas of glass, and the reflection is magnified exponentially. Slow down the horizontal sound reflections through ceiling-mounted, distributed absorption and diffusion.


This is the reflection we want to retain, as this creates a bright ambiance. Even though each party hears a good amount of direct sound, without the vertical room reflection, it would sound hushed and two dimensional. This is not desirable in most venues except perhaps libraries

The ideal acoustic approach seeks to retain as much vertical reflection of vocal frequency sound as possible.

ASC Acoustic Coffered Ceiling

Applied to the ceiling in a grid pattern, the acoustic effect is a calmer, yet locally lively sound within the room.

Description

Before the acoustic coffered ceiling was installed, you’d hear someone laughing loudly from somewhere in the room, and you would look up and see them folding over in good humor. Now, you still might notice someone folding over with laughter… but you actually can’t even hear them laughing. You just hear a low-level hubbub of activity and of course, the people immediately around you.

When you look up you see raised ceiling panels, but the sound reflects back down to your group, keeping the communication bright and lively. When you look into the distance, the view changes. You no longer see the raised ceiling panels, you only see the sides of the coffered beams. And then next time you sit at a different table, and the same perspective comes into view. Even when you walk around, the bright ceiling just follows you around, like an umbrella. And off in the distance in any direction, the ceiling disappears into the color and character of the coffered beam pattern. And so it is with the sound in the space.

Directional Acoustics

The ASC Acoustic Coffered Ceiling is a grid of sound-absorbing panels which create the architectural effect of a coffered beam ceiling. The Coffered Ceiling system acts two completely different ways on sound, depending on which direction the sound is traveling in the room. Sound traveling across the room runs into the sides of the acoustic panels and is absorbed. Sound traveling vertically in the room runs into the coffer part of the system, the untreated ceiling surface between the acoustic panels and is reflected back down without any attenuation.

The depth of the acoustic beam and size of the grid size determine the horizontal absorption coefficient and the vertical reflection coefficient. Deep acoustical beams absorb more horizontal sound than shallow beams. Small grids also absorb more horizontal sound than large-sized grids. The depth of the acoustic beam has little impact on the vertical reflectivity of the ceiling, but the smaller the coffer beam grid size, the quieter the vertical reflectivity becomes.

Coffered beam patterns are often but not necessarily square. A square pattern offers the same horizontal absorption in either direction. However, a rectangular coffer beam pattern provides more absorption to sound traveling in the direction of the short beam and less absorption in the direction of the longer beam.

When rooms are too noisy, because of too many people all talking at one time, many designers recommend adding sound panels to the upper portion of the walls. What this type of solution accomplishes it to not attenuate the horizontal sound as it travels along the room, but only when it hits a wall. Unfortunately, when sound travels the length of the room it only hits a wall after a long time compared to how often sound hits the wall in the narrow direction of the room. This means horizontal sound, end to end is lightly attenuated and side to side is strongly attenuated.

However, with the acoustic coffered ceiling, end to end sound is highly attenuated while side to side is lightly attenuated. Along the width of the room, everyone is neighboring and hearing each other is expected. But sounds from the opposite end of the room are far from the immediate neighborhood and are not welcomed, and may seem intrusive.

Sometimes the acoustic beam grid might be in a rectangular form, with wide beam spacing in one direction and less-wide beam spacing in the other. This rectangular coffered beam pattern produces an acoustic ceiling that is strongly absorptive of horizontal sound that travels in the direction parallel to the short beam and less absorptive of sound traveling parallel to the long beams. Not only does the acoustic coffered ceiling provide directional acoustics, separating horizontal from vertical sounds, but it can also adjust the absorption rate, Sabines per foot, in different directions.

Most acoustic coffered beam patterns are parallel with the walls, however, a very interesting effect is developed when the square pattern is set along a 45 degree diagonal. Now instead of rectilinear, we see a wicker basketweave that is very light and fun.

Distributed Acoustics for Large Room Noise Reduction

The ASC Coffered Beam Ceiling is engineered to provide evenly distributed noise control for large rooms. By using a grid pattern that extends across the entire ceiling, less overall acoustic absorption still maintains effective noise control.

Other Key Features:

  • Class A Fire Rated Components
  • Covered With 100% Recycled Fabric
  • Easy to Install Using Acoustic Tile Adhesive
  • Magnetic Version for T-Bar Grids
  • Fully Encapsulated 6 lb. pcf Fiberglass Core
  • Easy On-site Cutting for Perfect Fit and Finish
  • Easy Backventing for In-wall Bass Absorption

Easy to Install:

  • The ASC Coffered Beam Ceiling is made up of “K” Beams
  • and “X” Beams, each with an assortment of common sizes
  • The “K” Beams can be field cut to perfectly fit your ceiling

Custom Fabric Colors

Any product using our Guilford Stock Fabrics can have one of our custom fabrics ordered.

Custom Fabric Pricing is 10% additional, minimum $175/order 

  

Order Cost Custom Fabric Cost    Total
$2,500.00 $250.00 $2,750.00
$218.00 $175.00 $393.00

NOTE: Some lighter-colored fabrics can incur additional sub-charges for hue matching.

Custom fabric does not impact shipping costs or product weight.

We carry many custom colors in our factory, but this is not guaranteed.  Orders requesting custom fabric will require 1-4 weeks lead time based on availability.  Contact us for details and availability.


TubeTrap Endcaps

These are painted gloss black with texture lacquer.

 

 

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