The city's new 600-seat concert hall was designed by a committee that included exactly zero acousticians. They knew reverb was bad (they'd read an article), so they treated every surface. Ceiling: 4-inch acoustic panels. Walls: fabric-wrapped fiberglass. Floor: thick carpet. Seats: heavily upholstered. Even the stage floor had damping underlayment.

The RT60 was 0.4 seconds. For a speech venue, this would be excellent. For a symphonic concert hall, it was acoustic death. The 600-seat room had the reverberation of a recording studio vocal booth. Musicians on stage couldn't hear each other because there were no reflections to blend their sound. The audience heard dry, disconnected notes with no spatial richness. The violins sounded like they were being played in a closet. The conductor described the experience as "playing into a pillow."

Classical music performance spaces need RT60 between 1.6 and 2.2 seconds. The early reflections from walls and ceiling create the sense of envelopment that makes live orchestral music transcendent. Remove those reflections, and you remove the room's contribution to the music. The hall had been designed for minimum reverb when it needed maximum control.

The hall eventually installed variable acoustic elements — retractable curtains and rotating wall panels — at a cost exceeding the original treatment.

The Moral: Too little reverb is as bad as too much. Measure your target RT60 with SonaVyx RT60 and match it to the room's purpose — concert halls, worship spaces, and music venues need reverberation to work.