If you want to piss off a liberal tell them the truth.

Also, despite your opinion of JL Gassee, he is, and always has been, a decent fellow who enjoys his Apple gear, and who tries to write objectively about his Apple gear. And far from being a “French frog,” he actually lives in Palo Alto not far from the store.

A passive design approach is vastly more preferable. The architectural firm screwed up big time and should be held liable for fixing the problem. Apple stresses form, but not form over function (except in rare cases).

Yea, that’s why they call it a prototype.

These typical of the ones that I often use and they are certainly not cheap, but they are effective.
http://www.studiospares.com/acoustic-tiles/acoustic-control-100mm-pyramid-tile-grey/invt/465030/?htxt=%2FUvRjc0xAaKk26JwgsxcsV6E2gjpK53ITJCPcypNRrR6jhjYX3SDlEUFWaOdTpLU0xVcTayKYYOcw4t9gBa9qg%3D%3D

That’s why I visited Best Buy yesterday when I went shopping for a new iPod Touch. Also, their extended warranty is better than Applecare. It covers accidents. When I dropped a camera once, the warranty got me a good-as-new refurbished model.

Obviously prevention is better than cure and that’s why custom built recording studios and cinemas generally employ non-parallel walls with carefully controlled amounts of absorption and diffusion, but in this case the structure has already been built and what is needed is a way of controlling the reflections retrospectively.

It’s not FUD.

It’s a little hillbilly but it works and it’s cheap. They still use it in country and western music studios.

So it might be better to update the walls with sound absorbing/dispersing materials.

First of all, forget about an active phase-cancellation system. It sounds like a great hi-tech idea and we know the technique works well with headphones, but the results can be very disappointing when it comes to large open spaces. In simple terms, you can only cancel out the noise at one given point.

As there are so many highly reflective surfaces ( in an acoustic sense ), the answer is to add absorbency. Bass traps can look attractive when installed on walls and can fit in well with Apple’s minimalist look. The front material could be screen printed with Apple logos if desired.

The glass ceiling is a bigger challenge – particularly if the floor is not carpeted. One solution would be to break up the reflections by using diffusors. To get an idea, look at pictures of the Royal Albert Hall in London. It used to have dreadful acoustics, but when the ‘mushrooms’ were suspended within the roof space, the acoustics improved to a huge extent. You don’t need suspended mushrooms, but areas of diffusing surfaces would make a huge difference.

However, my first reaction was the same as many others here. It’s no bad thing to have a store that is alive and exciting. As problems go, having a store that is filled with noisy customers is the sort of problem that other companies can only dream about.

Ref: http://goo.gl/JDVeM