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Learning center / Acoustics by building type / Medical and dental clinic

Acoustic panels for exam rooms: the complete guide

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

2 minute read · Updated Nov 2026

Private conversations and calmer waiting rooms. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In exam rooms the main sound sources are voices and equipment, and the most common complaints are that patients can hear the next room, dental equipment noise causes anxiety, and that the waiting room is loud.

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 exam room of 12 × 10 ft with a 9 ft ceiling has a volume of about 1,080 ft³. With hard and bare surfaces (tile, concrete, glass and little soft furniture), its echo time is about 1.67 seconds. The target for exam rooms is 0.50 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 exam rooms.

The recommended starting point

For a exam room like the one above, we suggest about 13 24 × 48 in rectangular panel, 1 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 0.48 s. That is roughly 26% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for exam rooms is about 60% on walls and 40% on the ceiling.

Open the designer with this setup loaded, or browse ready-made models on our medical and dental clinic 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 exam rooms.
  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 exam rooms