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Learning center / Acoustics by building type / Home recording studio

Acoustic panels for home studios: the complete guide

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

2 minute read · Updated Nov 2026

Accurate monitoring and clean vocal takes in a spare room. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In home studios the main sound sources are studio monitors, instruments and vocals, and the most common complaints are that mixes sound different everywhere else, flutter echo between parallel walls, and that bass build-up at the mix position.

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 home studio of 13 × 11 ft with a 8 ft ceiling has a volume of about 1,144 ft³. With typical surfaces (drywall, a rug and some furniture), its echo time is about 0.84 seconds. The target for home studios is 0.30 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 home studios.

The recommended starting point

For a home studio like the one above, we suggest about 15 24 × 48 in rectangular panel, 4 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 0.29 s. That is roughly 31% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for home studios is about 75% on walls and 25% on the ceiling.

Open the designer with this setup loaded, or browse ready-made models on our home recording studio 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 home studios.
  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 home studios