Tech Tuesday: Acoustic Panels
When you’re trying to improve the audio experience in your spaces, there are a lot of high-tech, fancy upgrades you can make—everything from AI-powered microphones to speakers with variable coverage patterns. However, there’s one easy way to improve sound quality for both speakers and microphones—acoustic treatment! Using absorption and diffusion panels and baffles, you can make sure your space sounds great without compromising aesthetics.
First, we’ll start with a kind of obvious question: why would you use acoustic treatment? Acoustic treatment is important for any space where sound quality or speech intelligibility is important. Larger rooms or rooms with hard surfaces like glass walls or tile flooring can usually benefit from adding acoustic treatment, and here’s why:
Just like walls, flooring and furniture reflect light, almost all surfaces reflect sound. For common spaces where world-class acoustics aren’t the most important thing, the reflectivity of the surfaces in the room can be measured as the Noise Reduction Coefficient, or NRC. This measures how much sound an object absorbs: an NRC of 0 means that an object perfectly reflects sound, while an object with an NRC of 1 absorbs all of the sound waves that hit it. Most common building materials, like drywall, lineoleum, wood, and even some carpets have a noise reduction coefficient of 0.05 to 0.3, meaning they reflect 70 to 95 percent of the sound that hits them. Acoustic panels, depending on thickness, have a noise reduction coefficient of 0.8 or higher, which means they’ll soak up just about all of the sound you throw at them.
The NRC test uses a limited range of frequencies that most commonly occurs in the human voice, (primarily weighted from 250 Hz to 4000 Hz) so it’s not the most applicable for things like recording studios or concert halls. However, for these spaces, thicker acoustic panels can provide dampening of those lower frequencies.
Design and Functionality
Acoustic treatment comes in a lot of different flavors, and it can be as design-oriented as you want. Basic acoustic treatment usually takes the form of 1 inch to 3 inch thick panels, covered in an acoustic fabric and filled with dampening insulation. These come in a wide variety of color options and sizes, so they can easily match your brand or room aesthetics, either through a single color of panels or multiple panels matching your color scheme. For making more of a statement with your acoustic treatment, some companies like our partners at MPS Acoustics make more decorative wall and ceiling panels. These include options like faux-wood coverings or geometric patterns.
Do I Need Acoustic Treatment?
How do you know if acoustic treatment is right for you? The easiest way is the ol’ ear test. Does the room sound echoey? Is there a weird robot sound if you clap your hands? Acoustic treatment is probably a good option for you. Any space that is primarily finished with hard surfaces like tile and glass is likely a good candidate for acoustic treatment as well. If you’re not sure or can’t tell, there’s always measurement. Using specialized testing software, we can check the RT60 of a room—which is how long it takes for a sound to be quiet after the sound source stops. This helps us calculate the required noise reduction coefficient for a given space and specify the right acoustic treatment.
Acoustic Treatment vs Sound Masking vs Sound Dampening
One of the questions we get most frequently asked about is sound transferring between rooms, or carrying through walls. While acoustic treatment can help reduce the overall volume of voices by reducing reverberation, it does not prevent sound transfer through walls. The best way to reduce sound transfer is heavier, more dense materials and isolating rooms from each other—building techniques like party walls and using thicker or double-layered drywall can help prevent noise transfer from one room to the next.
This same principal applies to sound masking—while acoustic treatment and sound masking may sound similar when first hearing the terms, they serve two different but still-important functions. Sound masking primarily serves to reduce the intelligibility of voices, but does not reduce the actual volume or control the echoes of sound in a space. Acoustic treatment, on the other hand, can actually increase the intelligibility of voices if the amount of echo is making the space louder overall. For an ideal workplace environment, you can combine acoustic treatment and sound masking to provide great privacy alongside great sound quality.
Want to know if acoustic treatment is right for you? We can help. Our team of expert AV designers can ensure your space sounds as good—or better than it looks.