When you have a client who is planning offices in the flight path of an airbase, you might imagine that there are concerns about sound isolation.  After all, military jets aren’t usually conducive to conference calls.

Ryan Knox and Andrew Mitchell set up the demonstration for our client.  The measurements and recordings of aircraft flyovers we took onsite were played back through a speaker and aimed at an office window.  A subjective listening test was then performed with about 10 listeners who marked various levels of predicted transmission loss as acceptable or unacceptable for typical business.  Many hours of calculation and prep went into the development of a few 10 second wav files to get everything just right.  (And a last minute run to find a louder loudspeaker.  The venerable KF850 answered the call and was able to produce adequate levels at the window assembly).

As hoped, there was good correlation in the listeners answers.

Our Dallas office has two small conference rooms—which we informally call “Thing 1” and “Thing 2”.  (We are pretty sure Jason Foster began that terminology when he scribbled the Dr. Seuss labels on the drawings to clarify our conversations with our architect, and it stuck.)  The rooms which seat 2-3 are most often used for conference calls when a bit of sound isolation is desired in our open office plan.  We wanted to control the sound energy in the room, so had always planned to put in acoustic panels.

Jeff Otero in our office conceived creating acoustic panels that would also be art.  The large panels are made up of hundreds of images—gathered with help from Erin Brady—of either “one thing” or “two things” printed onto fabric and stretched across a wooden frame backed with  2” of fiberglass insulation. He and Trey Cucco brought their hammers and drills and constructed them onsite.

Not only is the artwork visually interesting with iconic images—but there are also some inside jokes hidden.  Look, we found Waldo!

Acoustic Dimensions is hosting meetings of the Global Design Alliance this week.  The topic and focus for this session is enabling collaboration through metrics, systems and business processes.  Conversations have explored technology infrastructure, new approaches to project delivery and enabling the “people” side of collaboration.

The new Livestrong Sporting Park opens today in Kansas City, KS. The park is the new home stadium for Major League Soccer team Sporting Kansas City.  The park was named in conjunction with former cyclist Lance Armstrong's Livestrong Foundation—which works to improve quality of life for cancer survivors.  Regular contributions will be made to Livestrong by the team.

The more than $200 million soccer-specific stadium is considered one of the most technologically advanced soccer stadiums in the world with a a capacity of 18,467 for soccer and 25,000 for concerts.  The video board is currently the largest in Major League Soccer and there are 36 suites and 5 clubs.

Acoustic Dimensions worked with architect, Populous, on the project providing design of audio, IPTV, cabling infrastructure, video displays, scoreboards, timing/scoring, production control and acoustics consulting.

This week, Acoustic Dimensions drove up to Ford Audio Video’s lab in Oklahoma City to test drive new speaker technology for the new 3,500 seat chapel for Southwestern Theological Seminary.  Ford Audio Video—who will be installing the design—hosted AD for a ‘mythbusters’ level exercise so that the team could optimize the angles between the cabinets, test array curvature/spacing  and examine rigging options.  

As a side benefit, our team was able to hang out and eat hamburgers with the Ford team since it was a cookout day.   Grilled meats enjoyed with friends, playing with gear and listening to really loud music make for a great work day. We appreciated the hospitality.