How Acoustic Wall Panels Control Echo

Echo is the same sound reaching you twice. A hard wall returns almost everything that hits it, so in a room finished in drywall, glass and tile every voice arrives once directly and again a fraction of a second later off the surfaces around it. That smearing is what makes a room tiring to talk in and a recording impossible to clean up.

An absorption panel replaces a reflective surface with an absorptive one. Sound passes through the acoustically transparent fabric into a 6 pcf fiberglass core, where it is converted to heat inside the fibers instead of being sent back into the room. Two inches of that core is what gives these panels an NRC of 1.05 – and thickness is what keeps a panel working down where a room actually booms.

Where Sound Absorbing Wall Panels Work Best

Anywhere there is hard wall to spare and a room that rings:

• Recording studios and home theaters – kill the first reflection off the side walls before it reaches the mic or the listening position.
• Classrooms and lecture halls – speech intelligibility is the whole job; reverberation is what destroys it.
• Restaurants and bars – every table talking over the last one, on hard floors and bare walls.
• Worship centers – long reverberation times and speech that has to carry to the back row.
• Offices and conference rooms – glass, whiteboards and hard ceilings, with calls happening in all of it.
• Gyms and multipurpose rooms – the loudest rooms in most buildings.

Treat the walls where the reflections are strongest first – the surfaces either side of the talker, and the wall facing them. If the ceiling is the biggest hard surface in the room, hang acoustic ceiling clouds instead and come back to the walls afterwards.

How Many Acoustic Panels Do You Need?

• Speech spaces – classrooms, offices, restaurants: cover 15 to 25% of the floor area.
• Music, high ceilings or a lot of glass: 25 to 35%.
• Worked example: a 30′ x 20′ dining room is 600 sq ft, so it wants 90 to 150 sq ft of panel – eleven to nineteen 2′ x 4′ panels, or six to ten 4′ x 4′ if you would rather cover it in fewer, cheaper-per-sq-ft pieces.
• Spread them out. Sound has to reach a panel to be absorbed, and gaps expose the panel edges, which absorb too. Scattered panels beat one solid wall of them.
• Start at ear height. The reflections that matter arrive between roughly 3 and 7 feet off the floor.

Send us your dimensions and what the room is used for and we will work it out with you.

What Makes Our Wall Panels Different

• 2" of 6 pcf fiberglass, NRC 1.05 – against 1.2" polyester felt at NRC 0.85. The extra thickness and density are what buy you the low end.
• Impaling clips included. Screw the clips to the wall, press the panel on, done – 15 minutes, no frame and no trim.
• Fabric wrapped on every face with no exposed fiberglass at the edges or the back.
• 24 fabric colors, not five, and every one costs the same.
• Handmade in the USA with recycled content in the core.