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Learning center / Acoustics by building type / Café and coffee shop

Acoustic panels for cafés: the complete guide

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

2 minute read · Updated Nov 2026

Room for conversation over the grinder and the milk steamer. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In cafés the main sound sources are machines, conversations and music, and the most common complaints are that the espresso machine dominates the room, laptop workers cannot take calls, and that music has to be turned up to cover chatter.

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 café of 35 × 22 ft with a 11 ft ceiling has a volume of about 8,470 ft³. With hard and bare surfaces (tile, concrete, glass and little soft furniture), its echo time is about 2.98 seconds. The target for cafés is 0.70 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 cafés.

The recommended starting point

For a café like the one above, we suggest about 156 24 × 21 in hexagon baffle, 1 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 0.70 s. That is roughly 32% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for cafés is about 50% on walls and 50% on the ceiling.

Open the designer with this setup loaded, or browse ready-made models on our café and coffee shop 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 cafés.
  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 cafés