Thread: Ceiling Tiles

Hello Everybody,

I was hoping some of you have experience with sound deadening ceiling tiles.
The application is for an office that is having noise problems and an option being considered is; Ceiling Tile Noise Barrier Composite from Pinta Acoustic.
These are designed to lay on top of the existing ceiling tiles.

Is anyone familiar with this, or similar products?

Other ideas welcome. Cost of course is a concern and no dough to hire consultants.

(This is unrelated to HI or CI work).

Thanks,

Corey

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Corey,

I don't know anything about that stuff, but is the noise air borne or transmitted through the structure? I would think that a good, rated, acoustical insulation laid on top of the tile would reduce air borne noise, however, laying anything on top of the tiles tends to make the tiles sag and quite difficult to remove/replace (which may be needed for a variety of reasons, one of which could be access).

Originally Posted by Jerry Peck

Corey,

I don't know anything about that stuff, but is the noise air borne or transmitted through the structure? I would think that a good, rated, acoustical insulation laid on top of the tile would reduce air borne noise, however, laying anything on top of the tiles tends to make the tiles sag and quite difficult to remove/replace (which may be needed for a variety of reasons, one of which could be access).

Hi Jerry,
Thanks for the reply. You raise some good questions. The noise transmission is a little of both. The back area has a handful of offices in a straight line and just outside of them are cubical type partitions (oops, my bad…cubical is old school, the new trendy term is “open office”).

In this area, the folks in the offices get a lot of noise from conversations from the folks in the cubicals.

At the cubicals it is like a fish bowl and normal conversation or even phone conversation makes is very distracting for others. The noise just amplifies in this area.

The front section gets both. It is kind of a straight line 3 station open counter set up. The acoustics are also bad and normal conversation between people makes it very noisy. This area also suffers from having the world’s loudest copier nearby. The copier is in a small room off to the side and there is a door separating the two spaces. With the door closed it is annoying but seems to be somewhat tolerable.

You bring up a good point about the ceiling tile access. Some sections are just tight with pipes and ducts above it. There are also a couple of VAV’s that require access for adjustment and maintenance. This is consideration. I appreciate you bringing up the issue of access, I hadn’t thought of that.

Corey

Corey,

Are the currently installed ceiling tiles the type which lay square edge on the grid system, or the type which lay recessed edge on the grid system?

The recessed edge allows the tiles to hang down below the grid system and break up sound waves better than simply reflecting the sound waves across a 'flat' ceiling system.

Also may be able to make use of the wall hung acoustical tiles which break up the sound being reflected around the smooth walls.

Structural transmitted sound takes more to address as the walls were likely not constructed with resilient channels to isolate the drywall, not double stud (another method to isolate sound transmission), and likely does not have any acoustical insulation in the wall, along with no acoustical sealant applied to where the walls meet the ceilings, floors, and other walls.

There are many sound attenuation construction technique which are used in various areas for various types of sound transmission, which is basically either air borne or structurally transmitted.

Sometimes simply hanging wavy drapes made of soft material and or textured surface material (fuzzy) will break the sound waves up on the wavy ridges and valleys and the material will further break up and/or absorb much of the remaining sound waves.

Sounds like a case for an acoustical engineer - trying my suggestions in a 'let's try this first, then this if that doesn't work' can get costly and time consuming. I've even seen acoustical tiles specially made to be hung from the ceiling grid system in random fashion (actually, not random, but it looks random, the engineers are specific in what goes where) - those panels reflect the sound waves back toward where they were generated, keeping the sound waves from bouncing around the room and back and magnifying their intensity.

My suggestion: acoustical engineer.

The simplest change would likely be the recessed edge ceiling tiles.