Our History

While working for a telecommunications consulting firm, Ken Barron investigates complaints about the noisy gas-fired ovens at Dino’s Pizza on Broadway in Vancouver. Drawing insights from reading Leo Beranek, Barron designs a 10 foot by 4 foot cylindrical muffler, which helps mitigate oven noise and appease Dino’s neighbours.

Among Barron Strachan’s early equipment are General Radio manual octave band analyzers.

As the company grows, it acquires a plethora of Brüel & Kjær meters, microphones and accessories. But if the necessary equipment doesn’t exist, the firm develops it in-house.

“We made our own community noise analyzers,” explains Ken Barron, “by placing a sound meter in a metal box and strapping it to a telephone pole, so the kids couldn’t reach it. We’d check back every couple of days to change batteries and tape.” These early community noise monitors are connected to a standard tape recorder and controlled with a timer developed in-house, programmed to sample every 30 secs.

Barron Strachan provides acoustical consulting on the award-winning Qube (then known as the Westcoast Transmission Building) in Vancouver.

Barron & Strachan is retained to assess the potential for noise and vibration impacts at a proposed 120-unit co-operative residential housing development on the 15 acre Glen Robin site in Burnaby. The site is adjacent to a CN Rail mainline and the newly realigned Highway 1 and is exposed to very high noise levels. This landmark environmental noise assessment and building noise control project forms the basis for how Lower Mainland municipalities address the potential effects of noise on proposed residential developments.

During renovations to convert Vancouver’s historic Orpheum Theatre into a symphony space, Barron & Associates is hired to assess building acoustics and collaborates with theatre acoustician Theodore Schultz. Doug Whicker recalls Shultz carrying “about ten different pieces of equipment, all strung together with cables and everything and all kinds of messy stuff. He came in with an array of electrostatic speakers and he was using this to focus his ceiling clouds. And Marcel Rivard had a look at it and says, ‘I can do a better job than that.’”

The result is the Sound Beam acoustic flashlight—four electrostatic speakers and a filtered high-frequency noise source connected to an automotive headlight. The headlight illuminates where the sound from the speakers is aimed. BKL uses the acoustic flashlight for the next three decades to align reflecting panels in theatres.

Barron & Associates acoustician John Walsh, along with Norman Dadoun, a member of UBC’s computer sciences department, develops software that simulates room acoustics. Walsh describes the acoustics modelling system, dubbed Godot after the Samuel Beckett play Waiting for Godot, in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and again in a technical session with Marcel Rivard at the Audio Engineering Society Conference in Anaheim in 1982. Godot becomes a precursor to modern ray-tracing room acoustics software.

Company acoustician Claudio Bulfone designs an interface to communicate between a Larson Davis 700 dosimeter and a Radio Shack TRS-80. The setup allows the team to analyze noise measurements on site.

Doug Whicker helps organize the 12th meeting of the International Congress of Acoustics, the Vancouver Symposium on Acoustics and Theatre Planning for the Performing Arts. The symposium’s technical convener is John Walsh. Delegates include top experts in theatre acoustics from across the globe (Schultz, Meyer, Schroeder, Ando and Peutz, to name a few) and the event spotlights the capabilities of Vancouver-area theatre acousticians.

Barron & Associates and HKL merge to form Barron Kennedy Lyzun and Associates Ltd.

Sharpe Sound Studios in North Vancouver adds a new Foley studio. Since a Foley studio records subtle sound effects like twigs snapping and leaves falling, this new studio must be “intensely quiet.” Sharpe asks BKL to achieve an isolation level of NC 0—yet the lowest official NC rating available is NC 10. So BKL develops theoretical curves to properly assess the design to mitigate the studio’s noisy rooftop ventilation unit, nearby toilet and other noise sources.

After the work is complete, the team sits in the studio and turns on the mechanical system. The isolation is so effective that the studio mics can’t pick up the noise.

BKL conducts an environmental noise assessment for Canada’s first diamond mine, Ekati, which lies over 300 kilometres northeast of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. In 1998, the firm provides an environmental assessment for Diavik.

During construction of the $1.2-billion Millennium Line, BKL predicts operational noise levels. Follow-up measurements later confirm the impressive accuracy of these predictions.

BKL also assesses construction-related vibration, which becomes a dicey process at times. For one measurement, the team places its equipment in a tunnel, leaves the tunnel and waits while drivers pound 10-foot diameter piles into the ground, shaking nearby buildings and communication cable runs. Fortunately vibration levels aren’t high enough to cause damage, and the team retrieves its equipment without having to employ shovels.

BKL takes the stand in a murder trial, State of Nebraska versus Castor. Doug Whicker flies to Buffalo County, Nebraska, to investigate the claims of witnesses who said they heard gunshot noise outdoors. Whicker’s investigation refutes their claims, finding that any shots fired from the location where the body was found could not have been heard at the witnesses’ home.

BKL begins to invest in Brüel & Kjær Type 2250 sound analyzers. The new analyzers provide a slew of advantages, including the ability to quickly compare sound pressure levels with audio files at any point during a measurement’s time history. Confirming the source of a noise event in absentia has never been easier!

The $3.3-billion Port Mann / Highway 1 Design-Build Project becomes the largest highway infrastructure project in Canada. BKL carries out noise impact and mitigation assessments, predicting and assessing construction noise and vibration, analyzing the design of noise walls, and quantifying how noise from both future and current traffic volumes affect residences.

Accounting for the impacts that environmental noise can have on birds, marine mammals and fish, wildlife noise assessments become commonplace in the environmental assessment process.

BKL provides acoustical consulting on the new Teck Acute Care Centre at BC Children’s and BC Women’s hospitals, designing the acoustics for all interior spaces and, during construction, monitoring noise and vibration in occupied spaces (with automatic alerts). This project sees BKL return to the Oak Street site where, in the early 1980s, Barron & Associates consulted on the design of Grace Hospital when it relocated from Heather Street.