Arena gets acoustical treatment...

In December of 1997, Furman University athletics entered a new and exciting era with the opening of Timmons Arena, the school’s new on-campus, multipurpose facility.

By January, the word was out as to how bad the acoustics were in the arena. Headlines such as "New Furman Arena Suffers from Design Flaw, Bad Sound" (Greenville News Jan 19, 1998-Associated Press)began to run in local papers. The 100,000 square-foot arena, which seats 5,000 people for basketball, 6,000 for concerts and other school and community activities and cost a reported $11 million was now having to deal with terrible acoustics. People would complain about the "muffled, fuzzy announcements" caused by the reverberation of the building.

Furman University now knew that something had to be done about the acoustics in Timmons Arena. They needed an effective and versatile solution that would help control the reverberation. Moreover, the solution would have to be something which could be applied to an existing structure without interference to the arena’s schedule.

An audio consultant, after meeting with the Board of Regents at Furman University in April of 1998, recommended International Cellulose Corporation’s K-13 be spray-applied to the entire ceiling to control the reverberation problem. The versatility of K-13 to conform to any surface configuration eliminates voids, gaps and compressions that can occur with prefabricated insulation. This monolithic coating results in the outstanding field performance of K-13. Because it is spray-applied, the application would not interfere with the arena’s schedule.

K-13 White was spray-applied at 2" to 100,000 square feet of the arena’s ceiling. The results of the application were very impressive. By controlling the reverberation time both speech intelligibility and background noise were effectively controlled. The reverberation time (RT60) in the arena went from 4.7 seconds to a low 2.5 seconds, allowing for just the right amount of reverberation for crowd noise and enough absorption for intelligibility of the sound speakers. The following graph depicts the results of the tests:.