Improvement and Acoustic Characteristics of the Community Sports Facilities with Lightweight Panel Finishing

Lately, Koreans are drastically getting more interested in sports to improve their health as the quality of their life is improving. Following this trend, government agencies and local organizations have been continuously building community sport facilities near residential areas. These facilities are required to be equipped with a good level of acoustic performance for music and speech delivery: communication and / or music between sports-players while games, leisure sports, and training are carried out. However, excessive reverberation occurs at most of old community sports facilities built with lightweight panels as finishing materials so the facilities users have been continuously complained about this. With respect to this, the research has attempted to suggest the optimum acoustic performance of six community sports facilities that lightweight panels were used for finishing materials. After acoustic performance surveys of these facilities were carried out and found out the problems using acoustic simulations. The results of the surveys revealed that excessive reverberation occurred at the facilities with lightweight panels and this caused difficulties of communication. Acoustic performance of the community sports facilities was evaluated to be suitable after adjustments of the room constant according to their appropriate Reverberation Time (RT). This result is thought be useful for design and refurbishment of similar community sport facilities in the future.