Comment by smolder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smolder | Hacker News Reader

Reading the comments here seems to indicate to me people don't know a lot about the subject areas surrounding noise like acoustics and building construction, but I think that just reflects society more broadly.

The amount of investment in mitigating noise pollution is pretty underwhelming, partly because it's expensive, I think, but largely from ignorance. I tried to get a former general manager to acoustically treat a big obnoxiously echoey open floor space and their solution was to ignore everything I said and buy some annoying white noise generators, which misunderstands the problem we had with the space. Tons of apartment buildings cheap out on isolation in a really tragic way, where the difference to quality of life could be big with only minor adjustments to plans. The most tragic from my experience: when some builder decided to skip putting a real wall between neighboring apartments' bedrooms. Instead there were closets constructed from a single 3/4" layer. That "wall" couldn't stop a snore.

Restaurants opted for ease of cleaning about 40 years ago and that changeover happened fast enough that some adults here probably never really experienced a restaurant situations where you could have a conversation without raising your voice.

Long ago when Red Robin still had good food, I didn't want to go there because it was loud as all fuck in their restaurants. Now every restaurant is exactly the same.

Wearing earplugs while chewing is a very strange experience.

I’m looking up photos of restaurants 40+ years ago and struggling to find any obvious acoustic differences in their designs (I do notice carpet seems more prominent?) Do you have any examples of what they used to do better?

Booths, designs, and acoustic tile ceilings off the top of my head.

They went with easy to clean floors and took out the acoustic tiles leaving the ceilings and air handling systems bare and echoic.

In fancy buildings you also had a lot of decorative wood and molding breaking up the sound. And those embossed tin tiles, covered with a few layers of paint.

Obviously it varies widely by restaurant and location, but in general I'd agree with the statement that restaurants are a bit louder than they used to be. I'm talking about table service restaurants, rather than fast food. I think the reason is probably that real estate is more expensive now, so restaurants are trying to pack people closer together. Architectural styles are different as well, with spaces being more open, ceilings higher, and more hard surfaces (how many new restaurants have carpet?). There may be differences in people's behavior too, but I can't say that for sure.

For a while during covid, a place I would go to on occasion had full-height plexiglass dividers between each booth. It made such a huge difference in noise, I was sad when they got rid of them.

The people were well mannered, nearly every single one

Red Robin isn't exactly the type of restaurant I would think of when I want a quiet table - it is half a sport's bar after all.

If you go to a nicer restaurant, you will get a quiet table. It's the type of restaurant that matters - not so much acoustic design.

No quite the opposite. It has for a long time been the loudest place I knew of, but other places have narrowed the gap.

To me it is always a crazy feeling to visit some old school restaurant or bar with heavy drapes/carpets/textiles covering the flat surfaces. They have a feeling of almost being haunted/enchanted, but the exact reason isn't necessarily obvious. The sound of people talking around you takes on a peculiar quality and feels simultaneously warm and more distant than it actually is.

I miss the big overstuffed booths. I don't like the person behind me wiggling, but I didn't realize how much sound they ate until they were gone.

Where are you finding these old school restaurants? We need to make lists.

I once paid someone on airtasker to research me ten cafes in Melbourne that have carpet. They only found one, and I already knew it. It has since closed.

How would you objectively measure the sound level in a restaurant? If we could sort that out we could start making lists.

I'm pretty sure you could measure this with a mobile phone app, if such a thing doesn't already exist. I've already many times used such an app to measure acoustics in a room as part of the setup process for multiple brands of home speaker system, they emitted a range of frequencies and presumably measured the result using the microphone.

Wetherspoons (pub chain in the UK, divisive in that it is a hive of villany while simultaneously being one of the few places you can get a well kept real ale) have individual carpets in each of their venues. This has, as you can imagine, become a hobby.

https://www.wetherspoonscarpets.co.uk

Amazing. I can't really wrap my head around the idea of a chain pub.

It'd be great if there were better ways for consumers to understand what they're getting.

A semi recent house hunting trip involved trying to shout between rooms, going outside and banging on pots and pans. Very informal ways of trying to guess.

It's be wonderful if there were some standard ways to assess, that builders could advertise. Figuring out how to make a rating that is both not crazy expensive to assess, and also meaningful enough that consumers place some level of trust in it isnt easy.

But wow, it feels like there has to be visibility into what we get to drive change. And right now there's just so few ways to know what you're getting.

There is a standard, Sound Transmission Class [1]. STC-50 is generally considered to be a good level of sound isolation. I have no idea if houses are commonly constructed with a concern for this rating though.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_transmission_class

The particularly frustrating part is that is usually way cheaper to put sound barriers during construction, than retrofitting later on.

We have been discussing this with my neighbors. We are both committed to eventually pull the trigger to retrofit, but the initial estimate is $70K and one apartment being under heavy construction for months...

Maybe you should arrange to do it at the same time and get temporary rentals somewhere else.

Presumably you're doing a shared wall, but having the plumber or electrician out for two jobs is probably cheaper than having them out twice, right? Especially since there will be similarities in the levels of stupid they find in the walls.

It is a floor/ceiling situation. But the floor as a nice old intricate hardwood floor, and ripping it off would be a shame. Looks like we can do the sound insulation fro the ceiling of the apartment downstairs, but

1. It requires the occupants to vacate

2. It is expensive

3. It is difficult to estimate the change it would actually provide

I’m struggling to understand how something along the lines of ripping out the existing drywall, rebuilding a few walls worth of framing with offset studs, and filling them with rockwool would remotely approach $70k for maybe 40 feet of wall in an apartment / condo. $10k, sure, that’s easy. What is the contractor proposing?

N=1 but in my personal experience most people don't care about loud sound levels anymore. Neither when they produce it nor when they are experiencing it. I blame two things: a) they are already deaf anyway b) I am getting grumpier and have always been more sensible to noise than others.

> ...most people don't care about loud sound levels anymore.

It's probably less this and more (at least in the US) that it's very, very, very hard to find "multi-family" housing that's not soul-crushingly substandard [0], so at some point you just give up and try to do a reasonably good job of balancing "living your damn life" with "not making so much noise as to be enormously obnoxious too often".

[0] It might be true that very few USians have ever lived in a place with actually adequate acoustic insulation... so very few folks even would think to look for it.

I use earplugs :-)

You ever eat while wearing earplugs?

For some reasons I can't use earplugs much :/.

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