This is an article written by an idiot.
- I used to think acoustics were an overlooked feature of restaurant design in America. So I was surprised to learn that they’re among the first thing restaurateurs think about when planning a new restaurant.
LOL every professional conversation I had with a restaurant owner as an acoustical consultant:
Them: "Yeah so it's really loud what can we doooooooooooo"
Me: "You know that acoustical tile ceiling this place had before you decided exposed ductwork was so voguey? Put it back."
Them: "Nooooooooooooooooo"
Me: "K so you know that carpet and pad that was here before you decided to badly polish this cracked, shitty looking concrete? Put it back."
Them: "Nooooooooooooooooo"
Me: "K well we can spray the ceiling with Pyrok. It's gonna look kinda like a parking garage and cost you around $30/sf."
Them: "...can't we put noise cancelling speakers up in the corner somewhere? That worked really well that one time I was on a helicopter tour in hawaii."
Me: "Were they headphones?"
...
Me: "Was the noise a helicopter, not a bunch of diner conversation reverberating around a naked hole of your own creation?"
Them: "Why don't you have any solutions that work within my budget?"
- “The [church] was designed for many to hear one,” Stuart added. “Now it’s been inverted so that many will hear the one across from them as opposed to the singular person addressing the room.”
I've murdered the acoustics of any number of misappropriated worship spaces. All it takes is dampening.
- A final point about why restaurants are so loud. This has nothing to do with restaurateurs or designers or acoustic engineers. It has to do with Americans — who I believe are a slightly louder people, on average.
...and this is straight bullshit. Somewhere I have octave-band sound power levels for a beer garden in Hamburg and they gave me exactly the results of every crowd everywhere. Americans aren't louder, drunk people are louder and most restaurants want you drunk. But sure. Reference Tyler Cowen you simp.
- Decibel-reading apps have also proliferated.
None of them are accurate. Your phone has an AGC on the microphone (Automatic Gain Control) and shaping on the inputs. Unless you can calibrate your phone with a variable-level noise source it's like a yardstick that doesn't start at zero, doesn't stop at 36 and has no defined length of "inch." Besides which, sound levels are measured at three different scales and noise contours (dBA, the rarely-seen dBB and dBC) as well as slow and fast quantification but I love the "HRRRRRRRNNNNNNNG I GOT AN 81 WHAT DOES IT MEAAAAAAAAAAAN."
The way you fight back is by not eating there.
I've noticed bars being loud, I've almost never found a restaurant to be overwhelmingly loud. This might be because I don't like to let fussiness get in the way of having a good time. I suppose if you are a fussy bastard there are all kinds of things that could ruin your evening. People with hearing aids have a hard time with background music. If someone complains about music at a reasonable volume I generally apologize touch the nob without moving it (fussy people are going to be unhappy no matter what). If a person with hearing aids or who is elderly asks me I lower it until they give me the nod or until it's a the lowest audible volume that I can still hear it. I had an argument with someone about phone dB apps the other day. I said they were shit and the person I was talking too said they were gospel truth. It was annoying. I'm sure someday they will be reliable but today isn't that day. $50k is a shit load of apps and desserts. No first time restaurant that has a chance of making it would ever do it.
The Vox article links to a 2012 NYT article where they posted some pretty amazing numbers. Workers at these places said the sound levels, which were recorded over periods as long as an hour and a half, were typical when they were working. One spin class at a Crunch gym on the Upper West Side averaged 100 decibels over 40 minutes and hit 105 in its loudest 5. At a Crunch gym in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the noise level averaged 91 decibels. At the Fifth Avenue flagship store of Abercrombie & Fitch, which has designed many of its stores to resemble nightclubs, pulsating music hit 88 decibels, just shy of the limit at which workers are required to wear protection if exposed to that volume for eight hours. Worthy of note - I told A&F in 2006 that if their staff worked 8-hour shifts they were safe pushing it to 85. Apparently the intervening years actually had them look up the OSHA regs (no noise mitigation if noise dose is 85dBA for 8). 100dB is "give employees muffs or face fines." Granted, that's a Spin class not a restaurant but still. It's hard to converse over 70dB. People with hearing aids lose Haas effect localization, probably because of the processing delay. If a fast hearing aid is 10ms and localization lives in the band between 5 and 20ms, you're going to have a hard time localizing. And localization is what allows us to pick a voice from a crowd. You're a good man to accommodate them. It's entirely possible to get a good sound level meter out of a phone. You have to be able to calibrate it, though, and you have to use an external A/D. Both of those things can be done for a few hundred dollars but there will never be a time where phone manufacturers will be interested in offering it as an option.At Beaumarchais, a nightclub-like brasserie on West 13th Street, the music averaged 99 decibels over 20 minutes and reached 102 in its loudest 5 minutes. “It definitely takes a toll,” a waiter said.
People with hearing aids have a hard time with background music.
boy oh boy ref 11 minutes was a long time to leave that one up
my senses are several shades of fucked so somewhere between the noise levels of "moderately loud TV playing in the background" and "room full of people" i lose my ability to understand what people say without focusing on them/straining to hear, which is inconvenient when i'm with people i want to hear and interact with without skincrawling noise what's really beautiful is that i learned i can just leave situations that are unpleasant for me instead of having to bear it and my life has improved so much now that i can slap the fuck it button i freely admit that i'm a fussy little bitch but i wouldn't be if i could, i swear to god and thank christ for earplugs
I don't know oyster. That seems kind of dismissive of your grandparents. Maybe those old ass boomers are the only ones left who value conversation. Maybe they are the only ones left who care enough about their companion's thoughts to want to hear what he or she has to say. Maybe their hearing is already compromised from all the rock concerts they went to from 1965-1995.
It seems like the hearing in most situations. The thing is when it comes to customer service it’s never actually what the boomers are asking... it’s that they’re being such pretentious entitled pieces of shit about it. It’s not that they want the music turned down even, it’s that they act like it’s a personal insult to themselves that we had the audacity to think the music should be at a volume too loud for them in the first place. Which then makes the employee wonder why the hell they think they are in control of the restaurant that they made a choice to go to. I’m not going to go to a sushi place and act like is a insult to me they don’t serve chicken fingers. People look at me like I ruined Christmas when I tell them we don’t have fries. If a bar wants to have a certain atmosphere I’m not going to ask them to change it, I’m going to eat somewhere that matches better with what I want if I don’t like it. Plenty of middle aged people do this too but more of that generation googles reataurants before hand to make sure it’s something they’ll like. I don’t really know a millennial who doesn’t know exactly what a restaurant is about before even deciding when to eat there.