ProSoundWeb: Drop ceiling tiles are commonly found in commercial buildings, so it’s likely that in a professional audio career you will encounter them. They look decent, are cheap to install and maintain, and can cover lots of ugly utility such as wires, HVAC ducts, and sprinkler system piping.
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I find architectural acoustics highly fascinating, because the math behind most of the phenomenon is the same math that dictates so many other fields in engineering. In particular, frequency response is a critical aspect of analog signal processing in electrical engineering, or vibration dampening in mechanical systems design. Here, my mind immediately gets drawn to an acoustical low-pass filter, since the author draws the conclusion that the drop ceiling tiles allow for sub 500Hz frequencies to pass right through it, while blocking higher frequencies. This makes me start to think of drop ceiling tiles as acoustic inductors, with increasing impedance as frequencies increase. Albeit a weak and simple analogy, I think it can help us make real decisions in our design process. It's like structures: we may not bust out the textbook to calculate beams and columns for every show or even once a year, but the fundamental understanding of how structures behave informs our decisions.
I find tuning a sound system to be fascinating. I’ve been in multiple theatre or performance spaces where it's clear this step hasn’t been taken, and it greatly affects the sound. Whether its an issue with buzzing from poor gain staging, or a certain frequency that peaks in every input, its frustrating to see how easily these could be fixed with tuning.
It was great to learn about “Critical Frequency” and the “RT60.” From my understanding, the Critical Frequency is the frequency at which the sound enters the omnidirectional acoustic field- the “diffuse” field, where the wave reflects off the room to come back in all directions at the listener. The reverb time is the time it takes to decay 60dB.
The graphs were great visual explanations of the effect a drop ceiling has on the sound of a room. It seems like the SPL is greatly affected after about 400, but extremely low frequencies are not hindered by the tiles.
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