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Learning center / Acoustics by building type / Restaurant

Acoustic panels for dining rooms: the complete guide

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

2 minute read · Updated Nov 2026

Tables can talk without shouting, and the room still feels lively. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In dining rooms the main sound sources are many conversations, the kitchen and music, and the most common complaints are that guests shout to be heard at busy times, reviews mention the noise, and that the bar and kitchen carry into the dining room.

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 dining room of 50 × 30 ft with a 12 ft ceiling has a volume of about 18,000 ft³. With hard and bare surfaces (tile, concrete, glass and little soft furniture), its echo time is about 3.59 seconds. The target for dining rooms is 0.80 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 dining rooms.

The recommended starting point

For a dining room like the one above, we suggest about 54 36 × 72 in arch panel, 2 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 0.79 s. That is roughly 48% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for dining rooms is about 50% on walls and 50% on the ceiling.

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