Located in the Spinningfields area of Manchester City Centre, the Alchemist is a popular bar-restaurant. When it opened in 2011 it was the first bar in the recently created business district, and quickly became the catalyst for one of the City’s most popular commercial destinations.
In what was essentially one of the standard business units, the bar made use of the high ceilings and industrial features to create a simple, stylish venue. In addition to the bar there is an L-shaped dining area.

Working for the landlord, Sandy Brown provided acoustic design advice and specifications in relation to:

• sound insulation for loud, amplified music
• environmental noise ingress
• reverberation time
• speech intelligibility.

The bar was the latest addition to an existing retail unit shell, in which the neighbouring units were already occupied. To control amplified music noise transfer to neighbouring businesses specialist acoustic enhancements were needed on the retail unit side. The enhancements we provided included floated floors, resiliently hung ceilings and independent wall linings.
Amplified music zones were specified to minimise the amount of enhancement needed throughout the entire development and hence, cost savings were achieved for our client.
The existing constructions were tested to determine the levels of sound insulation already provided and this was used to help predict the enhancements required.
Detailed inspections were carried out throughout the construction stage to ensure that the targeted specification values were achieved on site.