“We make a window that’s designed specifically for the purpose of stopping noise and vibration," states Jeff Zola, an independent representative for the Southeast with Reno, Nevada-based Soundproof Windows Inc.
Architects, consultants, and other designers—and their church clients—are clearly in the market for a product like this.
Church.Design sat down with Zola, who'll be attending the Capture Summit 2022 church filmmaking conference in metro Atlanta on July 25-27, 2022, at The John C. Maxwell Leadership Center at 12Stone Church, to learn more.
Church.Design: Tell us more about what Soundproof Windows offers, and what makes it right for churches.
Zola: Churches have a number of different applications. Cry rooms are a request that we get, for example, so that families can still stay active in the experience and the sermon and not have to miss it, but still keep their children quiet.
Other [applications are] stained glass windows, which don’t normally stop vibration and noise very well. We completed a project for a church that had been at its location for 75 years, and now there's an off ramp nearby. And the noise had become a problem for the church, so they came to us.
Church.Design: How does your product work with stained glass windows, where the integrity of the original window is so critically important?
Zola: Our product is designed to be a secondary layer, we don’t attach or replace. We put another soundproof layer over the top of what is already there.
Image: Soundproof Windows Inc.
Church.Design: What kinds of requests are you getting today, with churches now reaching out to their attendees and people all over the world with hybrid in-person and online services?
Zola: We're doing church recording studios now. One of these was a large project for a Catholic diocese in New York. Smaller churches and their radio stations have used our products, as well, like a Lutheran ministry with a broadcast studio that needed to keep it quiet, up to and including a full-blown church commercial recording studio.
We've worked on everything from one small window to as big as you can go.
Church.Design: Churches obviously have a strong need to prevent noise bleed both internally and externally. Was your product developed with them in mind, or were you looking at multiple industries and needs at conception?
Zola: I like our story as far as how we got here. We celebrated our 25th anniversary last month. Randy Brown, our founder, CEO, and chief engineer, invented all the products we manufacture and sell. He lived in the San Francisco Bay area, and he wanted to quiet the noise in his bedroom. So he made one window, it worked, and he told a friend who said, "Make me one." And the rest is history.
We didn’t set out to help churches and so many different types of industries, but we found so many applications for what we do.
Church.Design: What’s the most impressive characteristic of your windows—something that makes them stand out from competitors’ options, in your mind?
Zola: No. 1 is that Randy [Brown] has engineering degrees and he worked in Silicon Valley before it was what it is now. He’s a smart guy, and he grew this industry.
One thing we do that’s unusual is independent third-party testing. We have all of that. We are always looking for ways to improve what we do.
Sound transmission class (STC), that’s how the effectiveness of a barrier is determined in the sound and acoustics industries. And the higher the rating, the better. Any company that claims to be able to stop noise should be able to show independent laboratory testing.
Most recently we worked with a customer in New York who owns a glass company, and this customer has a customer that rehabs large buildings in NYC. They have weird requirements, for example, some of these are national registry buildings, and they want to get soundproofing without hurting the aesthetics of the buildings. We came up with ways to do what they [needed].
Randy [Brown] said we needed to make a custom extrusion for them (an extrusion being the framework of any window, sashes or frames). For this particular NYC project, Randy designed special extrusions for all the windows for this job. We have this versatility, we can do something nobody else can.
Church.Design: What else should designers and their church clients know about Soundproof Windows and your work?
Zola: We customize–everything we make is a custom order made specifically for the job at hand. Made in America. Privately owned. We’ve got a pioneer spirit: bring us a problem so we can figure out how to fix it. And we've never found something we couldn’t create a solution for.
As an example, on a project for a TV station, they wanted a sliding glass door [for a soundproof room]–a 10-foot-tall, 22-foot-wide sliding glass door that they could open and close. Our sales person said yes and had our engineers make it for them. We’ve done quite a bit of this. And we are well known for customizing sliding glass doors.
