# Translucent curtains with ~0.65 noise absorption - too good to be true?



## kaon (Apr 2, 2014)

Hi all,
I have a large living room that has full height sliding glass panels on one and a half sides, marble floor, plaster ceiling. It has very bad reverberation, very poor speech intelligibility even if it's just 2 persons trying to have a normal conversation.

I plan to cover some walls with noise absorbing panels such as this but I cannot use these for the large areas of glass.

I have come across these translucent curtains (drapes in the USA) which are specified to have alpha_w of 0.65! (weight is 125 g/m² or 0.4 oz / sq foot)

Is it just me or is this too good to be true?


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## bpape (Sep 14, 2006)

It's pretty much too good to be true. Remember a single number like that is an average. Probably 1.0 or more from 1kHz up and little to nothing in the voice range. Not sure how they even come up with a number like that when it appears they're just specifying fabric. I have no idea how they turned that fabric into a finished product and what that product tested looked like, how thick, how full, etc.


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