Sound absorbers

My restaurant, Cheddar Box Too, is really noisy. It's mostly glass windows, carpet on the floor. I really only have one wall. I know the biggest problem is all the glass, but that's what I really love about the space. Have any of you been successful with sound bafflers? Seems to be there are quite a few things on the market but I can't figure out what would be the best. Thanks for your help.

Reach out to John or David at Varanese.

They are very effective if chosen correctly. You're certainly right in saying that the large glass areas are a huge contributor factor to your problems. Obviously you don't want to cover them so the next place to look is either flat walls or your ceiling. Assuming you have sufficient height ceilings are a good place to work with. You can either hang small panels vertically or larger ones horizontally. The objective is to break up the surface into multiple angles. Sometimes even hanging vertical cloth panels every few feet from the ceiling will help significantly. Buying premade acoustic panels can become quite expensive rapidly, heavy curtain type cloth works just as well in most cases.

[Robin Garr]

Other people you could reach out to ... I recall that Harvest had to deal with sound problems and put up some panels. It's still loud, but they might be able to tell you what they've tried. Ditto for La Coop, formerly 732 Social: Apparently being rated LEED Turquoise (or whatever) doesn't guarantee good acoustics, but I know they've tried to deal with that. Clay at Cafe Lou Lou in St Matthews did some work to calm a noise issue, if I recall correctly. And the guys at LouVino told me just this past week that they're looking for a noise solution. In other words, there's a lot of this around, and I expect folks in the business would be willing to share their approaches in hope of learning something.

Come by Coals Artisan Pizza and take a look at our ceiling. The panels we used were inexpensive and very effective.