scope:

This standard applies to rooms with a volume up to about 5 000 m3, as well as to sports halls and indoor swimming pools up to 30 000 m3. It specifies room acoustic requirements, recommendations and design guidelines to ensure audibility, primarily of speech communication, including the methods required to achieve this.

This standard differentiates between the acoustic quality over

- medium and large distances (rooms in group A), such as in classrooms in schools, group rooms in child day-care centres, conference rooms, courtrooms and council chambers, seminar rooms, lecture theatres, conference rooms, rooms in senior day-care centres, sports halls and indoor swimming pools,

and

- small distances (rooms in group B), such as in circulation areas where people might spend a short period, dining spaces, canteens, play hallways and changing areas in schools and child day-care centres, exhibition rooms, entrance halls, halls with service counter areas, or offices.

Group A deals with rooms in which the acoustic quality over medium and long distances is ensured by suitably adapting the reverberation time and sound deflection. In group B rooms, the acoustic quality over smaller distances is achieved by sound absorption and noise reduction.

NOTE In group A rooms, the acoustic quality over smaller distances is understood to be included. However, in group B rooms, the acoustic quality over large distances is greatly limited.

The standard does not cover the acoustic quality of rooms with special requirements, such as theatres, concert halls, cinemas, sacred spaces, or in rooms for high-quality recording of music and speech (e.g. studios, central control rooms for radio, film, television and sound storage media productions). However, this standard can be applied by analogy to rooms for general musical presentations, multi-purpose rooms (e.g. town halls) and all rooms of a large volume up to approximately 30 000 m3. This standard does not concern dwellings or living spaces.

This standard outlines the acoustic conditions of accessibility. To ensure inclusion in building construction, the needs of people with impaired hearing are to be considered from the very start of the design process. Communication not only takes place in the typical "function rooms", but in all spaces where people meet, e.g. in hallways, foyers, recreation areas etc. This standard takes the current knowledge with regards to acoustic quality and inclusion into consideration. A fully scientific basis for the exact numerical specification values cannot currently be given. However, it is known that appropriately chosen sound absorption is beneficial to general acoustic quality.