Meetings everyone can hear, in the room and on the call. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In conference rooms the main sound sources are voices and the conference system, and the most common complaints are that remote attendees hear echo, glass walls make the room ring, and that conversations can be overheard in the hallway.
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 conference room of 20 × 14 ft with a 9 ft ceiling has a volume of about 2,520 ft³. With hard and bare surfaces (tile, concrete, glass and little soft furniture), its echo time is about 2.11 seconds. The target for conference 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 conference rooms.
The recommended starting point
For a conference room like the one above, we suggest about 77 24 × 21 in hexagon panel, 2 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 0.50 s. That is roughly 33% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for conference rooms is about 75% on walls and 25% on the ceiling.
Open the designer with this setup loaded, or browse ready-made models on our conference room solutions page.
Plan it in five steps
- Measure the room and note what the floor, walls and ceiling are made of.
- Work out how many panels you need with the room calculator or the worked example for conference rooms.
- Decide where they go, starting with the placement guide.
- Choose thickness, fabric and color to suit the room and its cleaning needs.
- Check the fire and code requirements before you order.
Guides for conference rooms
- How many acoustic panels does a conference rooms need?
- Where to put acoustic panels in a conference rooms
- Wall acoustics for conference rooms
- Ceiling acoustics for conference rooms
- Choosing panel thickness for a conference rooms
- What acoustic treatment costs for a conference rooms
- Installing acoustic panels in a conference rooms
- Common acoustic mistakes in conference rooms