Photo: IMDA Boardroom
Soundzipper Acoustic Consultants: Adrian Lo | Julian Martinez | Johnny Lee
The Challenge
Soundzipper was employed by D’Perception Pte Ltd to provide acoustic consultant services and testing on board rooms, meeting rooms and the Dolby screening room within the IMDA (Infocomm Media Development Authority) office building. D’Perception Pte Ltd who designed and built the offices, wanted to ensure that the IMDA offices would be an acoustically conducive work environment.
The Analysis
The end user had questions about how the acoustical specifications related to real life experiences, such as how private or noisy a space would be. To demonstrate this, we created a mock-up showing an onsite A/B test comparison between an acoustically isolated and treated space versus one that was not acoustically isolated and treated. After experiencing the two mock-up spaces, the end user was able to appreciate the value of the acoustical specifications. This in turn facilitated agreement by all parties on how to proceed from an acoustics perspective.
The Design
The screening room at the new IMDA office had to be moved from the old office, and our team ensured that the new screening room maintained similar or better acoustic specifications compared to the old screening room. Due to the use of lightweight drywall construction in the new space, low frequency sound isolation of the screening room subwoofers was a concern. We advised the AV subcontractor on subwoofer digital equalization and designed low frequency vibration isolation to mitigate these issues.
The timber door was designed with a thickness of 45mm with an acoustic rating of STC 35, which allowed the overall Noise Isolation Class (NIC) of the directors’ room to achieve a highly satisfactory value of 40. The acoustic panels with absorption infill achieved a Noise Reduction Coefficient (NRC) of 0.85.
The Noise Criteria (NC) rating of all meeting rooms was rated well above the design criteria ofNC 30, achieving a rating of NC 32-34. The Reverberation Time of the larger meeting rooms was rated at 0.5, attaining the perfect conditions in a private room for speech conversation without sounding too dead.
D’Perception was very impressed with the project and continued to engage Soundzipper for other projects.
Bonus: Have a 3D VR experience of this space brought you by our brand new Matterport camera!
