When you swap a panel in a working theatre, you don’t get to guess whether the room still sounds the same. You measure it.
| Client Montevior Contracts | Location Marina Bay Sands, Singapore |
| Service Acoustic Verification Testing | Completed 2018 |
| Scope Reverberation Time Verification, Projection Window Panel Replacement | |
0.74s → 0.77s
Measured reverberation time, original panel versus new panel installation, confirming consistent performance
36 Individual measurements
Taken across both test areas, six points per zone with three repeats each
1.0
Simulated NRC for both the original and replacement panel, confirming the new material matched the old
The Situation
The Mastercard Theatre at Marina Bay Sands needed a new acoustic fabric panel installed at a projection window, replacing an existing panel that had been part of the room’s original acoustic treatment. Montevior Contracts, the contractor responsible for the replacement, engaged Soundzipper to confirm that the new panel had not changed the room’s acoustic character. A theatre’s reverberation time is tuned precisely for the kind of performances it hosts, and swapping even a single panel carries the risk of shifting that balance if the new material’s absorption characteristics differ from the original.
What We Tested
Soundzipper measured reverberation time at two locations within the theatre: the area with the original acoustic panel installation, and the area where the new panel had been fitted. At each location, six evenly spread test points were selected, with pink noise played in burst mode and RT60 measured at one-third octave resolution across the full frequency range from 100Hz to 5000Hz, each point tested three times for reliability. In parallel, an acoustic simulation was run comparing the two panel builds layer by layer: the original panel used 100mm of fibreglass absorber, while the new panel used 75mm of fibreglass with an added 25mm air gap behind it, a different construction reaching for the same acoustic outcome.
What We Confirmed
The original panel area measured an average RT60 of 0.74 seconds. The new panel area measured 0.77 seconds, a difference small enough to sit within normal measurement variation rather than representing a meaningful shift in the room’s character. The simulation results supported the field measurements: both panel builds returned a simulated NRC of 1.0, and the frequency-by-frequency absorption coefficients tracked closely across the full range tested, with both panels converging to near-identical absorption above 500Hz. Soundzipper’s conclusion was direct, because the data supported nothing more elaborate: no additional changes were required. For a working theatre where every performance depends on the room sounding the way it’s meant to, that confirmation, backed by measured data rather than assumption, was exactly what the job called for.