Sound Design on Tap

A Dallas brewery, Community Beer Co., tackled a common problem in big, open spaces with concrete floors and steel beams: noise that bounces around and makes conversation and live music hard to hear. Rather than guessing at a fix, the owner had Owens Corning engineers measure sound levels throughout the 70,000-square-foot building first, tracking background noise, operational sound, and reverberation (how long sound lingers after it's made) in each area.

The measurements showed the real issue wasn't just crowd noise, it was the building itself amplifying everything through reflected sound. The fix was Owens Corning SelectSound FF-Black Acoustic Boards, installed across the ceiling and wrapped around beams, with a black covering that blends into the industrial look rather than standing out like typical foam panels or drapes. According to Owens Corning's internal testing, the boards cut reverberation time in half, cut background noise in half, reduced normal operating noise by 25 percent, and made the main taproom 6 decibels quieter.

For a homeowner, the takeaway isn't about beer or brewing, it's about how hard surfaces (concrete, tile, exposed ceilings, big glass windows) can make any large open room sound harsher than it needs to, and how targeted sound-absorbing material, placed after actually measuring where noise problems occur, can fix that without requiring a full remodel or losing the design you want.