Stockport Contractor Installs Three-Layer Acoustic Ceiling Over A Live Studio Set

Stockport Suspended Ceilings has completed a three-layer acoustic ceiling for a recording studio in Stockport, working over a standing set and a scaffolding frame carrying the studio's cameras and lighting.
The brief was rain. The room sits directly under a roof that broadcasts every shower into the recording space, and the studio had already been quoted for a conventional acoustic tile ceiling elsewhere.

That is the mistake most acoustic enquiries start with, and it is worth setting out plainly because it costs people money. An acoustic tile absorbs. It soaks up sound already in the room, shortens the reverberation time and makes speech clearer. It does very little to stop sound arriving from somewhere else.

Absorption and isolation are different problems with different answers, and a ceiling sold as "acoustic" will usually only do the first. The useful question at the enquiry stage is not what the ceiling is made of but where the noise is coming from. There are three answers and they lead to three different builds. Noise from above, which is rain, plant or footfall, needs mass at the ceiling plane and absorption in the void. Noise from the next room, which travels over the partition and through the shared ceiling void, needs a barrier in the plenum. Noise inside the room, which is echo and speech clarity, needs absorption only and is much the cheapest of the three. Most enquiries turn out to be the third. This one was the first.

The system installed does three jobs at once. A 100mm acoustic pad sits in the void, absorbing and damping the assembly so it cannot ring. Below it a vinyl faced barrier tile acts as a limp mass membrane, and that is the layer actually doing the blocking. The visible face is a Rockfon mineral tile, absorbing back into the room. Take any one of the three away and a function goes with it.

The finished build is substantially heavier than a standard grid ceiling, so the 24mm grid was carried on additional hangers throughout. The perimeter was then sealed continuously at the wall angle and around every rig leg. Gaps beat mass every time: an unsealed edge will undo a barrier layer on its own, which is why the seal took as long as the tiling.

The complication was access. The whole 80 square metres went in above a scaffolding frame that the studio's cameras and lights are fixed to. That frame could not be moved, the set stayed standing throughout, and every grid line and every hanger had to be set out to miss both. On a clear floor this is a straightforward ceiling. It is a different job when the room stays in use and somebody else's equipment defines where your grid can go.

The ceiling also runs at two levels. A bulkhead had originally been specified between them, framed and boarded in MDF. That was replaced on site with a raked run of tiles bridging the two heights, which is quicker, cheaper and structurally simpler, and it keeps the ceiling as one continuous sealed surface rather than introducing a junction for sound to find.

On the raked row the barrier tile was bonded to the face tile, because loose laid layers slide on a slope. Around half the ceiling is black. Black mineral tile is far less forgiving than white, it marks from a glove or a ladder rail and it does not clean, and under studio lighting every mark is visible. Handling accounted for more of the care on site than the acoustics did.

The acoustic pads arrived on a longer lead time than the grid and tiles, so the ceiling was installed in two stages, with the contractor returning to lay the pad layer once it landed.

Paul Grieveson, who has run Stockport Suspended Ceilings since 2006, said: "Most of this job was deciding where things could go rather than fitting them. The rig was fixed, the set was up and none of it was coming down for us. On an empty floor it is a straightforward ceiling. Around somebody else's kit it is a different piece of work, and that is the part people underestimate when they price it."

The studio reported after completion that heavy rain during a session went unheard.
Stockport Suspended Ceilings installs grid and tile, acoustic, MF and fire rated ceiling systems for commercial premises across Greater Manchester and the North West, and carries a five year written guarantee on installation.

stockportsuspendedceilings.co.uk