Rob Stott: All right, we are back on the Connected Design Podcast. Acoustics, to me, is something you have to think about when you are recording podcasts. You have to have great acoustics, so that is probably the most important reason why I reached out to you, Mr. Jason Ehrlich, to learn a little bit about this space. I know that I sound great when people listen to me, but I appreciate you jumping on with us today and diving into it. There is so much to talk about. You are the business development manager of room acoustics in the home market at Kinetics Noise Control, which is a mouthful. I appreciate you jumping on with us. How are you doing? Before we get too deep into this conversation about this really unique segment of the channel, tell us a little bit about yourself for those who do not know you, how you got your start in this industry, and your path to where you are today at Kinetics.
Jason Ehrlich: It is a lot, actually, yes. I am doing well on a Friday afternoon. Thanks for asking. It is kind of a crazy thing when you take what I do for a living plus my background, because I have had a home theater since the VCR/Pro Logic days. It has actually always been an interest to me, even way back then. Little did I know, when I got my degree in operations and was hired at Kinetics as our production scheduler, that it was a job I would have for a whole three months before they moved me into purchasing. So you could throw that degree away. Later on, I moved into our commercial noise control side and did that for 15 years or so, and then moved more on the marketing side, believe it or not, with our commercial room acoustics, the home market, and the commercial noise control side. It has been almost 27 years now. Yes, I am that rare guy. I have had one interview since college, literally just one, and I have been at Kinetics ever since.
Rob Stott: Wow. That is awesome. That is pretty cool, right? It feels like that term people use: lifer. That is pretty cool to be able to say. Was it always the acoustics industry that you thought you would land in? What was the dream job as you were getting your degree?
Jason Ehrlich: What appealed to me about operations is that I have a mindset toward efficiency and making things better. The acoustics thing was an accident. I stumbled into it. Like I said, I started with three months in production scheduling, which was my foot-in-the-door job here. Then, literally three months later, the guy in purchasing left, and they said, I would think you would be good at purchasing. I knew nothing about purchasing. I did that for about two years, and then I gravitated toward the sales side because it was more puzzle solving, at least here at Kinetics. When we say sales, it is really supporting contractors, consultants, and architects, and making sure the design is implemented right. It is really support, and I really enjoyed that aspect of it. In fact, you probably could not ask for a better acoustics education because I was privy to hundreds of different acoustical consultant designs and different situations, and I got to experience that. At the same time, the acoustics world was changing. Building code in 2005 actually put in standards for noise control in condos. Literally, the world went from a $5 million market to a $50 million market overnight with very few people. We are still learning new rules in this book of acoustics. I got to learn when it was 100 pages. Now it is 700 pages, and the second set of rules undo the first rules situationally. It has been fun.
Rob Stott: My goodness. Talk about drinking from the fire hose early on in a career. It is cool that you got to see the channel itself evolve over time and introduce, to your point, the standards and everything like that. As someone who was new and not really seeking out this industry, what did you do early on to make yourself knowledgeable about the space you were diving into?
Jason Ehrlich: It was kind of forced, right? When I interviewed at Kinetics, it was a black website with our logo on it. I came in here with that one single digital asset and really had to build it from scratch. A lot of it was based on the questions we were asked that we could not support, and then having to do the research, because a lot of this was not out there to be found. We had to put our heads together, talk to some experts, and figure it out. That was fun back in those wild, wild west days, when you could look at some of the testing and theories, apply those theories, rent out lab space, do testing, and prove things.
Rob Stott: That is the science of it, right? I know that is something we are definitely going to get into, but the timing of us talking is really cool because it is right on the heels of CEDIA announcing the first-ever North American training for the RP32 standard at CEDIA Expo. It is a whole-day course they have planned, and there is lots of information about it on our site. I believe that class has been run at ISE over in Europe, and this is its introduction to the North American market. They have a lot going on with RP32 and RP22 being incorporated into it. You talk about the standards and the growth of that book of knowledge you need to know about the acoustic space. Half of our audience here is that design-build community, where those letters and numbers are just mumbo jumbo to them. What does RP32 mean to a designer or architect? How would you explain it to them?
Jason Ehrlich: If you come from the commercial side, it is not the same as what you would consider ASTM standards, where it is literally, this is exactly how you do it and how you measure things. I would call these guidelines, and they are the first official guidelines we have for home theaters, other than the reverb time we have all kind of shaken hands on traditionally. This outlines not only reverb time, but also what your speaker power levels need to be and what the noise control aspects inside the floors, walls, and ceilings need to be. It is great because we have really needed this. A lot of us have been preaching this and sometimes maybe accused of overdoing it, but it is the first time we can say, hey, do not take our word for it. This is what they are saying, and this is why they are saying it. I also do not think some of the technology existed to meet these things before, especially on the absorption side. We just did not have the right products to meet some of these guidelines in any kind of efficient manner. The timing is about right, and we are really excited about it. If you look at what Kinetics can do really well, it is almost like we would have written that standard, and I promise I was not on the committee. But I would like to be involved in some kind of way.
Rob Stott: I appreciate that. To your point, it gives the partners in the channel, the home builders, designers, and architects, a set of guidelines they can use to validate the work of the integrator who comes in. For the integrator, it is like, hey, here is proof that I delivered on what I promised.
Jason Ehrlich: For sure. Again, do not take my word for it. We are not doing this because I say so. We are doing this because there are some rules, they apply, and there are reasons for them. In the acoustics world, when a customer walks into a showroom, they know they need speakers, a TV or screen, and some of them even understand lighting and seats. But very few are saying, I need acoustics. They think, throw a few panels on the wall. I am like, well, no, not really. Here is why. They feel like if they are spending all this money on a speaker, it is going to sound good. It is going to sound good, but your room is going to cover up the details that you should get out of that speaker. This guideline helps you unleash those details in the sound.
Rob Stott: To dive into that a little bit, to your point about people not considering acoustics, especially on the client side, designers, architects, maybe builders, there are areas where people do not realize that everything in a room impacts the way sound travels. Take a listening room, for example. You have chairs in there, and everything in that room impacts the performance of the equipment. I know I am preaching to the expert here, but I want to give you the chance to explain what that really means without getting too deep into waves, science, and frequency.
Jason Ehrlich: You can get lost really quickly. Even the room materials, how drywall behaves, and how your stud spacing is spaced, all of these little tiny things can affect it, depending on what level you want to take things to. The shape of the room matters. Is it square versus rectangular? Do you have weird angles because of the shape of the room? The way your seats are situated affects it. Leather versus fabric, which is going to be more absorptive, is going to change things. How thick your carpeting is changes things. The layout of your speakers and how your speakers project changes things. There is much more that goes into this than most people expect to hear about when they walk into that store.
Rob Stott: One funny example, and I am not sure if you are a Big Bang Theory fan, is Sheldon finding the sweet spot in the theater when they go to see a movie. He literally bounces around the room making loud noises and screaming to see how things sound where he is, so he can find the sweet spot. From a media standpoint, when you go listen to different rooms, there is always the one chair people tell you is the sweet spot where you want to sit and listen to the experience they are trying to provide. It is a real thing. Where you sit in a room can change how you are hearing things versus being in that sweet spot. I could be wrong, but acoustics is part of why you apply these products in these types of projects, to expand that sweet spot. Is there ever a way to make the entire room a sweet spot, or is it more complicated than that?
Jason Ehrlich: I would be remiss if I did not say that when you say acoustics to 99 percent of the population, they are going to think panels in a room. But it technically means noise control and a lot of other things, too. To get back to the room acoustics side, you are trying to remove the reflections of the room from the room. I always start the conversation with, imagine what is ideal. People say all kinds of fun things about a rectangular room, and I say, well, the actual best environment would be you floating in space with things producing sound that have no area or mass to reflect that sound back, so all that sound bounces past you. We cannot do that. What is the next best thing? A listening room is going to be very different than a theater. In a theater, theoretically, you want no reflections.
Rob Stott: You cannot make my room a vacuum? Is that what you are saying?
Jason Ehrlich: Right. If there is a scene in a cathedral, the sound designer is going to add reverb to the space. You do not want the room to add reverb to the space. Unfortunately, as humans have evolved, when we see a wall, we expect to have a little bit of reverb. We get very uncomfortable. That is why the new standards have driven that reverb time from a half-second down lower and lower. But we cannot go to zero. If you go to zero, people get dizzy and upset.
Rob Stott: I think I have experienced that. You may or may not be familiar, but I toured the Klipsch HQ not too long ago. They have a room that is sort of the baseline for when they test or create a speaker. It has floor-to-ceiling foam tiles that you expect to see, and the door is like a hyperbaric chamber-type door that seals and everything. They are trying to create that no-noise environment. I have heard that people who spend time in those rooms can get really freaked out because you lose a sense of where you are and what is going on.
Jason Ehrlich: It is even more interesting because, when we see a barrier, we expect a barrier. About half the people who go into that space can hear the blood rushing in their ears, or they get dizzy. Of the half who get dizzy, if you have them close their eyes, half of those people are fine. Our brain hears things. It is why it is very hard for us to do audio demos online, because even with headphones on, if you are in a small space versus a big space, your brain makes all these weird adjustments. Everyone is like, demo it, demo it. I am like, I really cannot. I know you want me to. I can do fake ones, but I cannot really do real ones.
Rob Stott: When I think about the training that is going on, one of the pictures CEDIA sent showed microphones in the middle of the room. Talk about what is going on there. How do you fine tune and adjust the room? What are some of the tricks of the trade you use when designing a system to meet acoustic requirements or standards?
Jason Ehrlich: That is a really good thing to talk about because a lot of people go into it and say, my AV receiver has all this room correction software built into it, and I put these mics out and it corrects it. What that is really doing is looking at levels and where the different seats are. You can move it around, and it is trying its best to balance it out. At best, I describe it like this: the acoustics are the cake and the frosting. You want your room correction software to be a decoration or a candle. You really want it to do the least amount of adjustment because, when it makes an adjustment, it is taking that soundtrack and making it different than what it is supposed to be. You want to save that for the last little bit and rely on the room design, the shape of the room, and the room acoustics to do the bulk of the fix by removing reverb and reflections from the space. If you build a room where you are two inches away from your rears and 10 feet from your fronts, the room correction software has to do what it has to do. But you really want that adjustment to be as small as possible and let the reverb time controlled by acoustics do the bulk of the work.
Rob Stott: Just hearing you talk about it helps, whether someone is a potential customer or on the design-build side. The intricacies of this space and the work that needs to be done show why it is so important to have a brand like Kinetics, or the partners who use you guys or others in the space, come in and do that analysis of a room. Not to simplify it to just panels, but to figure out how the room needs to be designed acoustically to meet the needs, standards, or client expectations.
Jason Ehrlich: Literally, we want to get in before the drywall goes up if we can help it because there are things we can do inside the drywall. But even inside what you just mentioned, Kinetics is first and foremost a manufacturer. That is what we want to be. We do offer reverb calculations. We do not model a space. There is a whole group of other people who do that, and there are obviously various levels of performance you can get out of that. At the very least, we will give you insight into what it looks like. If you give us your dimensions and room materials, we can say, here is where your reverb levels are, here is where they should be, and here is where our products can get you. But as a reminder, it is literally just a calculation. Our calculations are a little bit limited because the data we have for building materials, such as drywall and carpet, does not go below 125 Hertz. We can only really do from 125 and up. We know what our absorbers do; we just do not know where your room is starting. That is why you have levels of consultants who get into room shape and room materials. We are doing calculations, and they are good calculations that work very well, but they are still calculations based on volume, room material, and square footage of those room materials.
Rob Stott: It is important to hear that. When people think about acoustics, someone may walk into an integrator’s showroom and say, I am realizing my audio experience is not right, so I figure I need a couple of acoustic panels to fix things and make it right. They may have looked online or gone on Amazon and found foam pads they could put up for $50. But probably not. The range of what a project can look like, and the work that has to go into making it right or making it optimal for what you are trying to experience, makes it difficult to guesstimate what an acoustical project could look like.
Jason Ehrlich: It really is one of the frustrating things I get, especially on LinkedIn and even on the commercial side. If you look at the product behind me, it is a one-inch-thick, six-pound-per-cubic-foot density fiberglass board. What that really means is, if you go online and look up a fiberglass panel, that is what you are going to get. It is our number one seller, and it is really good in high frequencies and really bad in mids and lows. Is this good for a noisy restaurant? Absolutely. Is this the product you want to use where you have got music? No, because you can actually make it worse. If you go out and watch some of these YouTube videos, and unfortunately even some new YouTube videos, they will say, you are doing a home theater, just put down carpet and two of these panels. They are not wrong in the sense that if you put more than two of these in there, you have completely destroyed the highs. It is as flat as it can be. Unfortunately, you have not treated the mids or lows, so they are actually overpowering it. Congratulations, you made it worse. Good job.
Rob Stott: It is like that Animal House line: zero point zero.
Jason Ehrlich: Honestly, if you are talking to anybody and their first question is not, tell me about your room, you are probably not talking to the right people. That is really where it starts. Carpeting versus wood floor is a massive difference in the treatment you want to start with. In our philosophy, the longer we have done it, we have tried to develop products that absorb across the frequency range and actually absorb less, believe it or not, which is harder to do. This product behind me will remove almost all the highs out of a room. We want to treat more square footage so there are fewer reflective spots without ever overabsorbing. That is our first rule: thou shalt not overabsorb. It is really easy to do. Inexpensive products are going to be really good at high-frequency absorption, and getting those larger wavelengths absorbed is the expensive part.
Rob Stott: I am glad you brought up that panel, because people think acoustic treatments and they think foam boards. For whatever reason, that is what comes to mind. Maybe podcasters have those boards that are usually very visible around them, so people visually correlate that with acoustic treatment. But that is shortsighted. When you talk about different ranges of audio, the highs, mids, and lows, what should designers understand about the materials that go into an acoustic system? I do not think they come into this conversation expecting us to talk about fiberglass, foam, and the different materials that are out there. What does the improvement in the technology around this space look like now?
Jason Ehrlich: There are a couple of different approaches. Generally speaking, I am not aware of any foam that is a composite that does anything but high-frequency absorption. Some people may be aware of NRC as the main absorptive standard. It is extremely problematic. If you look at the frequency ranges, it is only the vocal range, and that is what it is for. One of my struggles with architects is that they think higher NRC is better, but the first question should always be, what are we doing in the space? For a podcast where you are only doing vocals, you can put foam up. It is fine because you are not worrying about below 125, or even below 250 Hertz. Unless you have Johnny Cash talking with that really, really low voice, you are probably going to be fine. However, if you are playing music or recording, that is a very different approach. In the old days, we would just make the panels thicker and thicker because that gets the longer wavelengths. What I think Kinetics has been a pioneer on is that not only can we buy the materials, but we can mold glass to different densities and build different composites. If you look at some of our profiles, we have a panel, for example, our VTLF, that is only two-and-a-half inches thick. I hate to use the word perfect; I am cheating a little bit. But I say 85 percent absorption at 80 Hertz. I know people may say, I do not know what that means. Understand, even five years ago, to do 80 Hertz, you needed a 10-inch-thick panel with wood on the front that weighed 100 pounds easily. Now we can do it in just a fiberglass composite. The idea is that we try to balance that across all the different frequencies and literally tune these panels to the space exactly as it needs to be. That is the new key. I do not think the new guidelines would have been able to be written without products like that.
Rob Stott: It is awesome to see that. I know this is an oversimplification, but it almost feels like the way TVs have gone from huge tubes to how thin and large they are now. In your space, you are realizing a thinner material or product that can still perform better than what had been expected in the past. That is awesome to see. The intricacies of this space prove how much you cannot overlook it or oversimplify it. There really is a reason for integrators to go in and do this work, ensuring that the experience is what they intend, what the customer intends, and ultimately what the builder, architect, and designer intend in that space. I was going to ask about how to have these conversations, and I am glad you basically already addressed it. It almost feels cliche in this channel, but it is leading with the experience and asking what they intend to do in that room. Any other advice you would offer on how an integrator can have these conversations around acoustics with a client or partner?
Jason Ehrlich: It does get tough, and we are actually trying to be a little bit tougher on these integrators. I tell them, look, there are some big-box stores that sell pretty nice high-end things these days, so where is your value? Where are you showing value beyond that? There are a handful of conversations you need to have. Do $50,000 worth of amplifiers and speakers sound good? They do. A Mercedes has an excellent sound system, but if you put in even modest headphones, you are going to hear details you cannot hear when you are driving down the road. That is what I do not think people understand. When we properly treat a room and go full in to do it the best we can, we can remove up to 8 decibels of reflected sound that you should not be hearing. Everybody says, 8 dB does not seem like much. Well, 10 is half; it is a logarithmic scale. Eight is a ton.
Jason Ehrlich: That is all stuff the sound designer did not intend for you to hear. We have a fun little chamber here that is the opposite of the anechoic chamber you were talking about. It is for reflections, so we can test these things for product development. We have some quite expensive JBL Synthesis speakers in there. I bring people in and play them songs they know, songs where they are missing some details, and it sounds horrible. It is supposed to; it is an awful room. Then I take them out into our factory floor, where we have storage. We have just a handful of panels. We did not even tune the room, and I play the same thing on two-dollar laptop speakers. It sounds 10 times better. That is the point. To go back, yes, those speakers sound good in your room. I get it. People spent a lot of money on them, and they sound great. But you are also hearing up to 8 decibels of reflected sound you are not supposed to hear. Where it gets really interesting is with the two-channel guys. They want a little bit of that, and they are fun to talk to because they usually know what they want. If I say, I can have a panel that will take out 250, they say, that is exactly what I want. But in the home theater environment, we really want to get rid of as much of it as we possibly can and drive that thing almost to the point of getting dizzy when we walk in the room.
Jason Ehrlich: That is what we are trying to do. At the end of the day, when you are watching a heavy English-accent movie by Guy Ritchie, are you worn out after two hours? Or do you at least have a fighting chance in that room to hear those reflections as little as possible and tune in? Maybe you do not need to turn the subtitles on. Maybe you can get through that space and not have a headache because you were concentrating so hard on trying to hear exactly what they are saying. That is what we are doing here. People say these things sound great to me, and I say, it is what you are not hearing. It is the details. It is all those subtle things we bring out by putting the acoustics in.
Rob Stott: That is a reason to attend Expo, for integrators and for the other side of the channel, designers and architects, because this is one of those things we could talk about for an hour and still not fully explain. You have to experience it. It is hard to explain the difference between what a treated room and an untreated room can do to that auditory experience. It is impactful to go into a showroom and hear what you guys are able to do, even with a couple of products. It does not have to be massive, but it can show what that experience could be and what you are missing by not thinking about acoustics.
Jason Ehrlich: It is a bit of a curse. You can tell anybody who has worked at an acoustics company because, when you walk into any lobby, you start looking around and listening. I go to CEDIA a lot of times and see half a million dollars worth of audio equipment in a room with no treatment. I could make $20,000 worth of audio equipment sound better than that room if someone would give me the opportunity.
Rob Stott: We have talked so much about rooms and the residential side, but we are missing a giant chunk of the conversation, which is noise control. We talked about it before we jumped into this, but Kinetics Noise Control really is about the commercial side and everything going on there. At the risk of extending this too far, I want to give you the chance to talk about that. How different are those conversations or what you are doing from a product standpoint on the commercial side?
Jason Ehrlich: They are massively different. When we bring in a lot of our reps for training, one of the questions I always get when I am going over the standard for movie theaters and the standard for home theaters is about reverb time. The reverb time alone is much, much lower on the home theater side, and people are like, I do not understand. I am like, you do know home theaters sound way better than a movie theater, right? They say, they do? I am like, yes, they do. Why is that? Well, there is expense involved. That is what people in the home theater space are going to do. They are passionate about it, and they want the best they can possibly do. The nice thing about Kinetics is that we are famous because we probably make more different acoustic products than anybody else on the planet. In fact, our number one division, if you are ever at a hotel and you look down and see a bunch of air conditioning units on a roof sitting on a blue curb with springs, that is probably ours. That is what we do more than anybody else out there. You can make arguments that a home theater that is isolated will actually sound better in that space and have the benefits of not hearing outside noise. On the home side, we would never survive with the overhead of products we have if we did not have the commercial market. We did a theater that had a train 80 feet away putting a 17 hertz frequency into the space. You cannot hear that; you can just feel it. We literally put springs down, poured concrete around it, jacked that concrete slab off the slab, built the walls and the ceilings on top of that, then did our acoustic treatment inside of it.
Rob Stott: Wow. It almost feels like, on the commercial side, it is as much about keeping noise out, while on the residential side, it is more about optimizing the noise within a space. Commercially, is it more about keeping out all the external noises?
Jason Ehrlich: Out and, generally speaking, most of the standards that are out there, I mentioned NRC, but there are other ones for noise control, are still built around voices. There is what you do as best practice in buildings versus, hey, this is a performing arts center, and we need to go a few levels up. That is really what it is about.
Rob Stott: I know integrators, whether commercial or residential, are always looking for ways to connect with or build inroads with builders and designers. One of the ways we talk about at CEDIA is creating opportunities to provide education or work with those partners on a lunch and learn, something like that. They are always looking for CEUs, and you guys have a unique set of those through AIA, the American Institute of Architects. Am I right that you have a couple programs you offer?
Jason Ehrlich: Quite a few. We have a room acoustics one, a noise control one, and a joint one that is as fast as I can talk for an hour when I give it. We have a vibration isolation one. I do have one that is oriented toward the home market, though I might have let it expire. We need to tweak that one a little bit, and these new CEDIA standards will help with that. Generally speaking, if you cannot get your foot in the door with an architect, that is what we will lead with. Although it is purely educational, and unfortunately you cannot mention products by name, it is there, and you can talk at least generically about approaches and things like that.
Rob Stott: At the end of the day, that is the foot in the door. It helps you get close to them. The education side is important, of course, because you are helping them learn about the space and its impacts, but it is also about building trust and showing that you have that expertise. They may not want to be the ones who go in and do that work, so who are the partners they can turn to? If you are that integrator, or if you have a list of integrators, that shows them they have at least one person in front of them they can turn to. It is cool stuff that you guys have going on. Even 35 or 40 minutes into talking about this, I feel like we have just hit the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you do. There are more conversations to be had. Jason, this was a lot of fun. As a podcaster, as I mentioned at the top, acoustics are something I think about.
Rob Stott: Being able to pick your brain and dive into this has been a lot of fun. I hope everyone learns a little bit about why there is such a gap in the conversation and, ultimately, in the cost. I hate to say cost because it sounds negative, but when you are trying to map out these systems for a client or partner, it is more intricate than just slapping a few panels on the wall.
Jason Ehrlich: It is, it is. The nice thing about it, though, and I know no one walks into that showroom not knowing they have to do acoustics and wants to suddenly get this bill, is that once you treat the room, it does not matter if you are using the modest pieces of equipment up to the most expensive. The needs of the room do not change. If you do that right from the beginning, you can grow with it. I always say, take from your equipment budget if that is what you have to do, because it will sound better than if you try to go up to that next level of speaker or amplifier.
Rob Stott: It is certainly worth it because the last thing you want is an unhappy client coming back after the fact and saying, I do not like this. Think about it earlier and more often. We appreciate it. This was a lot of fun, and I look forward to catching up down the line because there is plenty still to be learned in this space.
Jason Ehrlich: For sure. Sounds great.
