A comfortable shop where staff and customers can talk. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In stores the main sound sources are music, customers and staff, and the most common complaints are that music sounds harsh, sales conversations are hard, and that the store feels empty and echoey.
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 store of 50 × 30 ft with a 13 ft ceiling has a volume of about 19,500 ft³. With hard and bare surfaces (tile, concrete, glass and little soft furniture), its echo time is about 3.77 seconds. The target for stores 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 stores.
The recommended starting point
For a store like the one above, we suggest about 248 24 × 48 in diamond panel, 2 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 0.80 s. That is roughly 48% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for stores is about 60% on walls and 40% on the ceiling.
Open the designer with this setup loaded, or browse ready-made models on our retail store and showroom 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 stores.
- 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.