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If you’re near Berkeley, CA, one of the owners of the restaurant Comal also owns a sound company that builds that kind of system, and they use Comal as a showplace. The effect is astounding - it’s an industrial-style design, and it’s got auditory “ambiance”, but you can have a full conversation at normal speaking volumes with everyone at the table. It’s the kind of thing where once you experience it, you’ll judge the hell out of any other “fancy” restaurant you go to that doesn’t have it.

Been to Comal a few times, need to go again and pay closer attention

Comal is one of the subjects of that podcast episode

Should've guessed! I'd really love to find more places with similar systems & investments in acoustics. It makes such a huge difference in the experience.

Oh neat: https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-08/restaurant...

Meyer Sound which did the sound install for the space is a long-time well-known innovator in sound tech- for example, establishing vertical line arrays. Years ago the son of the founder was doing advanced space modelling for the best sound (basically, entering the room geometry and simulating with helmholtz equations).

I will go there just for the experience.

Yep, that's the place. When you go there, two things to look for - one is the ring of speakers around 10ft up on the walls, and the other is the forest of small capsule-shaped microphones hanging from the ceiling. It's a really impressive system, although AIUI it's ludicrously expensive - it's there for marketing, Comal did not pay full price for the system.

I'd hate those stools though. Great to have a non overwhelming auditory experience but if my back is killing me that's not much of an improvement.

They've got chairs elsewhere, just stools at the bar. It's a pretty big restaurant with a large outdoor area, too.

Ah ok. I don't know the place, I have never even visited the US in my life :)

And there was only that one picture.

> Loud restaurants are damaging for the waitstaff's health. You can work for hours in an environment so loud that OSHA would demand hearing protection.

I should preface by saying that I have some existing tinnitus that developed from playing drums in rock bands in my 20's without proper ear protection. It's manageable and quiet enough that it can be largely ignored.

Recently I visited Las Vegas, and I ate at the well known restaurant Tao. It was so incredibly loud, for a sustained period of time, that it triggered the tinnitus in my left ear to such an extent that I was essentially deaf in my left ear the next morning. It gradually receded to loud ringing, and then was back to my "normal" level of tinnitus after a couple of weeks.

I guess I'll have to bring my own hearing protection to restaurants now. Kind of a sad state of affairs.

Aren't there some cheap ways to muffle sound?

Wood floors, rugs, curtains, artwork, acoustic panels, etc.

There definitely are but, perhaps by definition, items soft enough to dampen sound are often easily damaged so they aren’t great fits for most commercial locations.

They are also out of vogue as was mentioned, unless you’re a coffee shop then these “cozy” items just aren’t as common right now.

yes, really any soft surfaces will damp[0] (not "dampen") sound, but the techniques and materials can get very advanced (and expensive, and effective)

0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damping

Whoa! Thanks for the clarification. As a word aficionado, I did not realize the correct form of this one.

as a fellow pedant, i also really appreciated this clarification. i love it when i learn i've been saying something wrong!

Why can't "dampen" be applied to oscillators? It means "To lessen; to dull; to make less intense" in this case.

i think the point is that it's one of those words misused so widely that dictionaries updated the definition to include the incorrect use.

dampen means to make something wet, or at least originally that's what it meant

According to https://www.etymonline.com/word/dampen it's meant "to dull or deaden, make weak" from 1630s and "to moisten, make humid" from 1827.

Sound dampening artwork actually seems really interesting.

Yeah, by integrating art with sound-absorbing materials, it's possible to enhance the acoustic environment and the interior design. I wonder if there is a place where foam art is on display?

Stuff that works well in homes often is a lot more complicated to implement in restaurants, where you're: a) constantly fighting grease buildup and hard-to-remove dust that clings to greasy or damp surfaces, b) often have a profit margin of like 2% if you're one of the successful ones, c) aside from looking clean, you have to worry about pest control, fire codes, health codes (you can't have built-up dust falling in people's food, d) etc etc etc etc. Also, how restaurants look is as, or in some cases more important than the quality of the food. A good, attractive, practical restaurant design is one of the things that can steer you towards success or failure. Much to many chefs chagrin, hip and attractive restaurants with shitty boring food are often more profitable than ones that only focus on the food. Marketing is annoyingly important.

With, floors hardwood is a hard surface (so only mildly sound damping) so they're not too bad for cleaning and health stuff, but are expensive to install and take a lot to maintain if the worn-in look doesn't fit the aesthetic. Low-pile carpets can be shampood inexpensively for medium-term maintenance and replaced comparatively cheaply in the long run, but take a lot more effort to keep clean when someone drops a catering tray full of crème caramel and something with a port wine reduction.

Artwork: anything that you'd want hanging on your walls is either going to need to be a print or covered with glass or plastic because it will get ruined otherwise.

Acoustic panels are usually pretty ugly, difficult to clean, not resistant to pests, are a fire liability if coated in grease, etc.

Curtains definitely are definitely viable, but if you've got enough of them to really impact the sound level, they probably need to be expensive ones, and expensive curtains can't just be tossed in the wash and pressed on an ironing board.

It's not like they aren't effective, they're just not nearly as easy to deploy or maintain as they are in homes or offices.

Unrelated blathering because a lot of folks in tech don't have much exposure to this stuff and I always enjoy seeing a slice of someone else's life: In general a lot of people are understandably perplexed by seemingly simple, avoidable problems that they encounter in restaurants-- you can chalk almost all of them up to misinformation, or deliberately obfuscated factors. Firstly, there's a ton of inaccurate folk knowledge about the way restaurants work... (most infuriatingly to me is the food safety stuff. Look up the incubation time for most foodborne illnesses and consider how many people blame some lower GI symptoms the meal that met their stomach lining 3 hours earlier.) Also, a big part of the restaurant mystique is making it all seem sort of easy, uncomplicated, and fun, even for regulars and the 'friends and family' crowd; underneath that thin veneer, it's absolute insanity. I've worked in tech and the restaurant business extensively. Most days, the pressure level is "we just discovered a possible active intruder in our production systems" for at least a few hours. It's exhausting, and one of the reasons drug and alcohol addiction is so prevalent. Knowing that an entire staff is breaking their back so you can have a fun cozy bite to eat makes the experience palpably worse, but it's true. That's why you'll usually find people who've worked in the service industry are serious over-tippers. You have to give up a lot of your humanity to do that work, and a lot of people you encounter respect you less instead of more for having made that sacrifice.

I've proudly convinced so many people to not go into that business, though I've also convinced a few people to give it a shot. It's not a good choice for most people, but some people can't really do much else and be happy. In many ways, its especially tolerant to neurodivergent folks with different skillsets being downright useful in different roles. It's hard as hell though. There's a good reason that CIA (the school, not the spies) requires 6 months of full-time back-of-the-house restaurant work to get admitted to their degree program.

Honestly the cheapest way to muffle sound is to not create it in the first place. Guests make noise to hear themselves over other guests and the din of the room, the quieter the room, the quieter the guests, etc.

Essentially, the louder the noise floor, the louder the signal has to get to be intelligible at every table, which raises the noise floor, creating a feedback loop. Good acoustic design in a space accounts for this by minimizing how much acoustic energy is present in the room - both by removing it (with acoustic treatment), spreading it away from sources (by isolating tables/booths, using hard surfaces to reflect sound away, etc), and preventing it from being created in the first place. For example, keeping bus stations behind galley doors and training staff not to clink silverware/glasses/dishes when filling bus bins and avoid playing loud music, etc.

In my experience, most restaurants fail at this because all the people who do it well are in the high-end restaurant business, which most restaurants are not. If the key to a space that isn't too loud is to limit the number of patrons, have dining room space allocated to treatment between tables, have highly trained staff with consistent management, and a big enough kitchen space with heavy enough doors to isolate the sound within - your only option is to be a high end restaurant.

But the high end places fail at it because they don't care and want to maximize the guest throughput because their margins still suck.

High-end places not only still have bad margins, they're quite often worse!

Low-end places are often even more carefully designed, though, but they're designed for different things: high turnover and low staff wages, meaning simple, flat, easy-to-clean (and sanitize), nearly-zero-maintenance surfaces like bare laminated tabletops and quarry tiles. Especially once you start moving into fast casual, they want their diners comfortable enough to enjoy their meal, but not comfortable enough to linger, which is often a tough balance to strike.

The look of high-end places is like putting your sales people in nice suits. I don't think most places are trying to maximize throughput-- if they're not completely booked at least a few nights per week they're probably not staying open-- I think they're trying to maximize check averages. Nothing inspires "maybe I'll get the dry aged wagyu app and flip to the expensive page in the wine list tonight" thoughts like a luxe dining room.

When i studied architecture we had a course that included a sound design aspect - learned some formulas, did some real world testing in various environments (theater, studio, restaurant, bedroom) using microphones to analyze sources of unwanted noise, sound reflection and distortion. The assignment for that class included proposing various fixes some of which we tested.

It was really interesting but sometimes large scale interventions have potential tradeoffs with other desirable project criteria and goals. At the end of the day the client and the budget make a lot of decisions that seem careless but are just tradeoffs.

As you say - upscale and boutique businesses often have the desire and budget to differentiate themselves on sound design - having professionals consult is not inexpensive and often implementing their recommendations has a significant effect on budget.

> restaurants can have good sound design, but it doesn't come cheap.

Carpet the ceiling and the walls. Super cheap, super effective.

Ideally carpet the floor too - and if you use carpet tiles then when a customer spills something uncleanable on a tile it's a 5 minute non-expert job to pull up a tile and put in a new one.

> Carpet the ceiling and the walls. Super cheap, super effective.

Super dangerous and illegal, too.

The reason that professionals don't do this is because no one will permit it, not because there's some scam on acoustic foam and diffusers... well there is but it's not the acousticians' fault. It's a massive fire hazard.

source? Seems like with this logic, wood, wallpapers etc. would be illegal as well. Doesn't make sense to me

My source is the IBC section 803 (1), which I only know about because I've had the misfortune of needing to know about getting building permits for acoustically treating an office space in my career (which itself is a long and boring story about a failed startup).

The way the building code is written doesn't explicitly ban any material from walls/ceilings, but rather sets the constraints on the performance of the material when exposed to heat. There are higher limits for walls/ceilings than for floors because flames climb. Wall coverings (including wall paper and its glue) have to be flame retardant to meet code. There have been some infamous fires in the past, which is why this code exists (building codes are written in blood, as they say).

Most carpet doesn't go on walls, so it doesn't meet code, unlike wallpaper. And building inspectors are conservative people that are unlikely to permit you to do anything weird, even if you can prove by the letter of the IBC that some material is up to snuff.

(1) https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IBC2021P2/chapter-8-interi...

Scroll down to see the details on wall textiles, specifically.

Does one hundred dead bodies count as a source?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Station_nightclub_fire

>It's a massive fire hazard.

You mean we haven't figured out a material that both dampens sound and is fire resistant?

Being as how the former quality is pretty easy, I find this hard to believe.

No we have this, it just isn't as cheap as floor carpeting.

In fact, if you ever DIY some acoustic gobos or panels, rockwool insulation is about the best material you can find at the hardware store. But like another comment mentioned there are other concerns in commercial spaces, like cleaning/dusting.

> illegal, too.

This is jurisdiction-dependent. Not all jurisdictions in the US, for example, have adopted the IBC, and it's not uncommon to find carpeted walls in movie theaters.

Maintaining cleanliness can be a challenge

Peace and quiet in our increasingly noisy and busy world is indeed a luxury to have