Monday, November 22, 2010

soundBites - The Official Blog of Acoustical Design Group, Inc.

January 27, 2011

Welcome to the NEW (well, perhaps INAUGURAL is the better word) ADG BLOG!!!

Hopefully, you found your way to this BLOG via our new website, which is intended.  Our hope is to provide some current, and perhaps more human, illumination to Acoustical Design Group.  The website will tell you who we are, what we do, how we do what we do, etc. – the kinds of things that websites for professional service firms do.  The BLOG will try to tell you a bit more about us, beyond the usual connection we have with our clients via the range of projects we work on.  We would like to show you a bit more of who we are away from ADG; what we do when we’re not thinking about sound and audio visual systems; what’s going on with sound issues in the news (it happens more often than most people notice).

To start the ball rolling, we should mention the name of our company, Acoustical Design Group, Inc. We are consultants in acoustics, which, as I often say to people who give me that quizzical, “What’s THAT?” look after I tell them what we are, is “…sort of an architect or engineer of sound...”

We have been in business since 1986, operating out of our home base of Mission, Kansas (a suburb of the Kansas City Metro area).  We have worked all over the nation and throughout most of the world, with projects at one time or another in most of the world’s continents (we haven’t yet cracked that tough Antarctic market!).

Our credentials – why we know what we tell people to do with sound on their projects – can be found formally addressed in our website, but in brief, we come from backgrounds in architecture, engineering, electronics, and technology commonly linked in the areas of acoustics, noise control, vibration control, sound systems and audio visual systems.
  

So…what does that mean…what are the key deliverables? Well, more on that will follow in days/months ahead, but basically we work with the architect and engineer “looking over their shoulders” as the design documents are developed with an eye (or more apropos perhaps, ‘an ear’) toward the control of noise between spaces, the acoustics within a particular space, or the ambient noise levels caused by building services or outside noise sources (you know - planes, trains, and automobiles with an occasional emergency generator thrown in for good measure).

The sound and AV (sometimes referred to as the “electronic”) side of our business works with the architects and building owners in defining what sound and audio visual systems’ needs they have and how that is married to the budget they have available for the project (think of coordinating your eyes with the size of your plate when you hit the buffet line at lunch – it’s tough sometimes!). 

Once those answers are found, we design those systems, preparing contract documents and interpreting bids from qualified sound and audio visual contractors.  We also make sure we are on-site after these systems are installed and commissioning of the technical systems is undertaken by our staff, making sure that the systems are in working order for their first major use.

As somebody wiser than I once opined, it’s better than breaking rocks (come to think of it…ballistic demolition IS something I always wondered about as an alternative career…).  But that is who we are and what we do.  With this BLOG, we look forward to bringing you a little closer to the world of sound and what it all means.

Check back often and let us know what you think or what you want to read. This should be FUN!

(And how about that NEW website!)