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Learning center / Acoustics by building type / Podcast studio

Acoustic panels for podcast rooms: the complete guide

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

2 minute read · Updated Nov 2026

Close, dry voice recordings that need little editing. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In podcast rooms the main sound sources are the hosts' voices, and the most common complaints are that voices sound roomy on the recording, the hosts' microphones pick each other up, and that HVAC noise in the background.

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 podcast room of 12 × 10 ft with a 9 ft ceiling has a volume of about 1,080 ft³. With typical surfaces (drywall, a rug and some furniture), its echo time is about 0.83 seconds. The target for podcast rooms 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 podcast rooms.

The recommended starting point

For a podcast room like the one above, we suggest about 49 24 × 21 in hexagon panel, 2 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 0.30 s. That is roughly 32% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for podcast rooms is about 80% on walls and 20% on the ceiling.

Open the designer with this setup loaded, or browse ready-made models on our podcast 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 podcast 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 podcast rooms