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Comment by erdo | Hacker News Reader

This is a pet hate of mine - glad to see it's not just me getting older. A restaurant round the corner from me has acoustic foam on the under-side of all the hard wood chairs and tables, and that helps a little. As soon as I find a bar that's decided to carpet its ceiling, it's going to be my new favourite hang (I understand why places don't want carpet on the floor. Apart from anything else, it's hard to keep clean)

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I hate the trend of minimalist/industrial interior design in restaurants for this reason. There was a new restaurant I went to recently. We got there at 4 in the afternoon, and there were only 3 parties there other than us (out of >20 tables) conversing with reasonable inside voices. The music was calm and played at low background level. Yet my wife and I couldn't hear each other across the table. The floor was polished concrete, the walls tile, the (10') ceiling metal, the tables glass topped, the chairs unpadded. There wasn't a single sound-absorbing material in the entire room. It turned what should have been a quiet murmur into intolerable din.

One of my favorite restaurants (food-wise) crams too many people into one huge room with windows instead of walls: glass everywhere. The sound is deafening. It's also a popular hangout for a group of kids from a local college and they're obnoxiously loud. Great food but I'm a basket case by the time I'm done eating (asd, I don't deal with sound well).

The Met Office in the UK has a canteen, and at one point, they decided that it was too noisy. Their solution was to make a load of person-sized wool "clouds", and hang them from the ceiling. They look cool, and they absorb noise.

A couple of months ago, I went to a conference in San Diego, and went to a restaurant in the evening with colleagues. We could hardly hear the person next to us shouting. I left as soon as I had eaten.

With regard to the restaurant, maybe that's the goal: encourage people to settle up and leave quicker so the restaurant can serve more customers?

Or maybe I'm just getting old and cynical...

If you read blogs like "not always right" you'll find that most food service employees are not on board with the customers sitting around and taking up tables. They take it as a personal attack on their income and are very rude about people who sit there.

Even if the management isn't against it, the employees are.

This is a direct consequence of how food service employees are paid in the U.S. They have an income of next to nothing and depend on tips. Tips do not play such a large part in (most? all?) of Europe and are smaller than in the U.S., so customers that stay longer mean less work without too much pay reduction. At least that is my pet theory. I only visit the U.S. every couple of years and this year I noticed that the "standard" tip crept up to 15%-20% instead of the 10%-15% that I remember. Seems that employers are paying food service workers even less of a wage than before.

That reminds me of the Royal Albert Hall in London - don't know if you've been, but they have things that look like giant mints hanging from the ceiling. (I assume it's to break up any echo from the bowl shaped ceiling)

The flying saucers hanging from the ceiling of the Royal Albert Hall are world famous, and are totally acoustic engineering.

The concept of a quiet bar just seems weird to me.

The problem with most bars isn't actually the volume of the music, but the loudness. The speakers are generally cheap speakers that are undersized and are then cranked so loud they're redlining and sound like shit.

I can stand in the middle of a nightclub with a well set up speaker system and have a conversation with a friend. Yet in most bars and pubs, which are places where I'd actually like to have a conversation, I have to shout at my mates and can barely hear a word they say.

While I agree that cheap speakers used are often an issue when you actually hear the music, more often the places would be super loud even if there would be no music at all.

Some people are just obnoxiously loud, and if you have more of them in 1 group nearby, any experience from that place is ruined for me.