Whistles, balls and crowds without the painful roar. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In gyms the main sound sources are crowds, balls and the PA, and the most common complaints are that the room roars during games, PA announcements are hard to understand, and that teachers cannot be heard over the echo.
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 gym of 100 × 80 ft with a 26 ft ceiling has a volume of about 208,000 ft³. With hard and bare surfaces (tile, concrete, glass and little soft furniture), its echo time is about 8.05 seconds. The target for gyms is 1.50 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 gyms.
The recommended starting point
For a gym like the one above, we suggest about 243 96 × 24 in rectangular baffle, 2 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 1.50 s. That is roughly 42% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for gyms is about 40% on walls and 60% on the ceiling.
Open the designer with this setup loaded, or browse ready-made models on our gymnasium 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 gyms.
- 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.