Sound Absorbing Acoustic Wall & Ceiling Panels

Acoustic Wall and Ceiling Panel FAQ

• How do Acoustic Panels work?

  Acoustic panels are excellent at absorbing sound waves inside a space to reduce reverb or echo. They can help quiet down a space as well, but the largest benefits come from improving speech intelligibility and sound quality. Acoustic panels will not stop sound from traveling between two spaces – we call that soundproofing.

  How acoustic panels remove sound from a space requires a bit of technical understanding. Imagine you’re in a room. This room is filled with an insane number of tiny particles. When you speak, you’re not throwing sound around the room like a tennis ball. You’re energizing molecules in a semi-sphere around yourself. The more molecules that are “excited”, the more you’ll get that sense of reverb and echo. Acoustic panels work by inserting friction into this space, so that sound energy turns to heat energy faster. More acoustical panels (or more sound control) means sound energy fizzles out faster.

  When the sound energy hits a reflective surface or is traveling through open air, it loses energy very slowly. When the sound energy hits a soft, absorptive material like an acoustic panel, it’s turned into heat very quickly which prevents it from energizing additional molecules.

• Does Acoustic Panel Placement Matter?

  Let’s assume we’re talking about your typical room (NOT a home theater). The most important thing is to add ANY absorption to the room, as every additional sabin will reduce reverb and echo. More acoustic panels means more total absorption in the space.

  That being said, it is STRONGLY recommended that you follow some general guidelines to ensure you get the most out of your acoustic panels.

  1.   Spread the panels around the room. If all the panels are in one location in a large room, you can end up with weird or bad acoustics in parts of the space. In a small room, it doesn’t matter as much.
  2.   In a smaller room, you don’t have to install panels on all 4 walls (although that’s great if you can!). Small rooms should have panels on at least two perpendicular walls for best results.
  3.   If panels are placed too close, they will be less effective per square foot of panel. A good general rule is at least 6” of space between panels, unless there’s an aesthetic reason to bunch them up together.
  4.   Place the panels based off the sources of noise. For a room with people, that means about eye level (like hanging a picture frame). For a room with machinery, that means near the machinery.

• How Many Acoustic Panels Do I Need?

  Hmm, another complicated question. Don’t you love an “it depends” answer? There are 5 factors to consider:

  1.   What should the reverberation time of my room be to meet its intended use?
  2.   What are the sources of noise we are treating?
  3.   How big is the room?
  4.   What are the walls, floor, and ceiling made of?
  5.   What kind of material is going to be added to the room? How absorptive is it?

  If we know these things, the answer is pretty simple – we just need to do a little math to determine the correct number of acoustic panels for the room. Reach out to a Second Skin acoustics professional to get an analysis done of your space. With that said, smaller rooms with a normal ceiling height (8’ high) are easier. Here’s a couple examples that may be helpful for your room.

  • 6’ x 8’ room (48 sq ft): 16 sq ft of acoustic panels
  • 10’ x 10’ room (100 sq ft): 32 sq ft of acoustic panels
  • 12’ x 12’ room (144 sq ft): 44 sq ft of acoustic panels

• How to Install Acoustic Panels

  There are a huge variety of methods for installing acoustic panels. Our favorite method is with Rotofast Snap-On Anchors, which we go into detail with our how to install acoustic panels article.

  Our preferred installation methods depend on the specific panel, but they include:

  1.   Rotofast
  2.   Construction / Spray Adhesive
  3.   Screws
  4.   Z-Clips
  5.   Impaling Clips

• Where to Place Acoustic Panels in a Home Theater

  In a high fidelity listening environment, like a home theater, optimal placement of the acoustic panels is very important.

  A home theater is different than your typical room because there are consistent sources of sound (the speakers) and you actually care about peak sound quality. Because we’re in that specific situation, we are going to think of sound like that little pong ball in the old school videogame “Pong” (Oh no, are we dating ourselves?) Every time sound hits a hard surface, it changes direction, and loses some of its energy. We want to intercept the sounds in a home theater at the “first reflection”, which is the direct path from the speaker to your ear if the sound wave were to bounce off the ceiling or wall.

  You also should be installing bass traps and other methods of sound control, but we go into detail on that in our home theater acoustic panel article.