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Learning center / Acoustics by building type / Bar and brewpub

Acoustic panels for bars: the complete guide

What makes bars noisy, which panels fix it, and how to plan treatment from start to finish.

2 minute read · Updated Nov 2026

Lively but comfortable, even on the busiest night. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In bars the main sound sources are crowds, live music and the sound system, and the most common complaints are that the Lombard effect: everyone raises their voice in turn, live music overwhelms the room, and that neighbors complain.

What is going wrong in the room

Every hard surface reflects sound. When a room has a lot of them, each sound keeps bouncing for a long time and overlaps the next one. That build-up is called reverberation, and it is measured as RT60: the time it takes a sound to fade by 60 decibels. A typical bar of 45 × 25 ft with a 13 ft ceiling has a volume of about 14,625 ft³. With hard and bare surfaces (tile, concrete, glass and little soft furniture), its echo time is about 3.53 seconds. The target for bars is 0.80 seconds.

What panels can and cannot do

  • Panels can shorten reverberation, remove flutter echo, make speech clearer and lower the overall noise level that builds up in the room.
  • Panels cannot stop sound passing through walls, floors or doors. That is soundproofing, which needs mass, airtightness and isolation. See soundproofing and STC for bars.

The recommended starting point

For a bar like the one above, we suggest about 27 48 × 48 in rectangular ceiling cloud, 4 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 0.78 s. That is roughly 24% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for bars is about 50% on walls and 50% on the ceiling.

Open the designer with this setup loaded, or browse ready-made models on our bar and brewpub solutions page.

Plan it in five steps

  1. Measure the room and note what the floor, walls and ceiling are made of.
  2. Work out how many panels you need with the room calculator or the worked example for bars.
  3. Decide where they go, starting with the placement guide.
  4. Choose thickness, fabric and color to suit the room and its cleaning needs.
  5. Check the fire and code requirements before you order.

Guides for bars