No difference...I don't find opening and closing draperies to be a noisy activity.

I would consider using a traverse rod so you open and close them by the pulley.

One of my clients had curtains on rings that she pulled closed by the leading edge every night and they were wrinkled and dirty in that area all the time. As well as being lopsided and unevenly spaced which drove everyone crazy. (Ok, mostly me.)

Our heavy LR drapes are on a metal rod with metal rings that are lined with nylon for smoother, quieter operation. And... now I get to use my favourite term in decorating: we open and close them using "fling rods" :-) to protect the curtains from what Palimpsest describes.

At least we mostly use the fling rods to close them; I push them open with the back of my hand sometimes.

We also have several draperies through the house that have non-lined metal rings on a metal rod, and they are noisier. They're also on thicker rods and seem all the noisier to me from that... maybe the surface area contact between rod and ring is larger. In the LR, the rod is thinner although the rings everywhere are about the same size.

Plus the curtains themselves are lighter so maybe the rings can clatter more - actually, now that I look at the LR drapes again, I realize these rings don't contact each other when I open the drapes because the fabric is so thick that the folds keep the rings apart, where the lighter fabric folds more readily and allows the rings to bang into each other as the curtains are opened. That's really the main source of noise, now that I think about it further.

In aggregate I think that fabric weight is the key difference, and if your fabric is thin, that wood would be quieter.

KarinL

Karin took the words right out of my mouth. Okay, she really didn't. I had no clue what these things were called. I was going to say similar to the directional turny thingies that are on mini blinds. Check the link below for more information.

Thanks Karin for knowing the name! I learned something new today! Yipee!

Here is a link that might be useful: Fling Rods.

Thanks all. Fling rods that is a new term for me also.
It is something I have seen in hotels but never in the stores but then again I have not really looked.

I've seen them as replacements for mini blinds, but never have they mentioned draperies. But then I may not have looked far enough to see if they did or not. I hope you can find some. If not a wooden dowel stained with an eye screw in one end would work. You could paint it to blend with the drapes.

"Fling Rods" love it...only heard them called Curtain Wands. I used to have wooden rods with wooden rings and never found them very noisy...but agree with KarinL...depends on the weight of the fabric. You can find Fling Rods in the curtain hardware section at most drapery/fabric shops.

Sorry I can't speak to the metal vs. wood noise debate, but I definitely agree that you should use fling rods. (New phrase for me, too.) I think they look neater when they're tucked in behind the first drapery fold, as opposed to hanging loose, in the opening, like you see at most hotels. Ours our connected to the second ring. Also, the taller the drape, the longer the fling rod.

Well I'm glad others enjoy that phrase as much as I do... though "curtain wand" is pretty evocative too.

But I do just want to address the length of the fling rod... maybe just to clarify what meg said, we discovered the hard way that it is not just a function of the length of the drapes, but specifically of the height of the curtain rod relative to you. Let my try to explain... we initially bought short (18") fling rods, but the store only had them in white and they don't really look good with our gold-toned drapes. So when the drapery store later had them in gold tone, I snapped them up even though they were at least double the length (and $50 for the set - ulp!). They looked beyond fabulous, but... they were too long. The short white rods end at about our shoulder height, and for closing and opening the drapes they are ergonomically perfect. The longer gold rods ended somewhere around our waist height and were awkward to use. In addition, they had a heavy metal finial on the end, and that additional length meant that if they were set swinging, they could have smashed the window. So with a heavy heart I returned them, and we re-installed the short tacky white ones. I think I'm going to paint them someday.

Sorry for the detour into fling rods, Lyban. To expand on my answer to your actual question, I took a picture of my heavy LR drapes completely open (pardon the unfinished wall behind them - old plaster, layers of wallpaper removed and ready for new paper - could happen any time in the next year or two!). These are the nylon-lined rings, and this is as close together as they can get due to the thickness of the fabric, so you can see why they wouldn't clatter as they're opened.

The fling rod had the good taste to tuck itself away for the photo - it's attached to the first ring, but it mostly stays inside.

KarinL