This is the question behind almost every acoustic enquiry, and it usually arrives in one of two forms. Either “the office is unusable on a conference call” or “I can hear next door’s television”. Those sound like the same complaint. They are not, and only one of them is fixed by putting panels on a wall.
The distinction that decides everything
Absorption is about sound bouncing around inside a room. Hard floor, plasterboard walls, glass — every surface reflects, the reflections pile up, and speech stops being intelligible. That is echo, or reverberation, and it is what panels are for.
Insulation is about sound getting from one space into another, through a wall, a floor or a door. That is a mass and construction problem. It is solved with dense layers, isolation and sealing gaps, not with felt.
Quick test: if the room is annoying when you are making the noise, that is absorption. If it is annoying when the noise is coming from somewhere else, that is insulation.
What the panels are
Most of our acoustic range is PET felt: recycled polyester pressed into a dense board. It comes as plain panels — 2440 × 1220mm at 9mm, 12mm or 24mm — and as decorative faces built on the same material.
The slat panel is the one most people picture: 27mm slats with a 13mm gap between them, over a felt backing. The gaps are not decorative. They are what lets sound reach the absorbent layer behind the slats instead of bouncing off a solid face.
Thickness, coverage and the gap behind
Three things change how much a panel does, in roughly this order of importance.
Coverage. How much of the room’s hard surface is treated. This is the big one and the one most under-specified. A few panels on one wall of a hard room will take the edge off; treating a meaningful proportion of the reflective surfaces changes the room. Spreading the same quantity across two walls and some ceiling beats concentrating it all in one place.
The air gap. A panel battened off the wall with a void behind it absorbs lower frequencies than the same panel glued flat. The void does real work and costs nothing but the battens. If the complaint is boominess rather than hiss, the gap matters more than the thickness.
Thickness. A 24mm panel absorbs more, and lower, than a 9mm one. But it is third on this list, and swapping 9mm for 24mm across too small an area is not as effective as covering more of the room in 12mm.
Why we do not publish a number per panel
You will find suppliers quoting a single absorption figure against each panel. We do not, and it is worth explaining why rather than looking like an omission.
Absorption is not a property of the panel on its own. It is a property of the panel, the void behind it, how it is fixed and how much of the room it covers. The same 12mm panel glued flat to plaster and battened off with a 50mm void behind it are two meaningfully different products acoustically, and quoting one number for both would be marketing rather than information.
So we hold the tested figures and give you the ones that match your build-up. Tell us the room and how you intend to fix them, and we will send the data that actually applies.
Working out roughly what you need
| The room | Where to start |
|---|---|
| Home office, one hard wall, calls sound boxy | One treated wall, slats or plain, battened off |
| Meeting room, glass on one side | Treat the wall opposite the glass, plus ceiling if possible |
| Open-plan office, general noise | Ceiling first, then vertical surfaces and dividers |
| Hallway or stairwell that rings | Any one large surface — these respond quickly |
| Studio or anywhere being measured | Ask us before ordering. This is where the tested figures matter |
Fitting
PET felt cuts with a sharp blade and a straightedge, and fixes with adhesive or screws depending on the substrate and whether you want a void behind. Slat panels are cut through the backing between slats, not through a slat, and the cut edge is hidden by the trim or the next panel.
It is a genuinely forgiving material to work with, which is part of why the category has grown the way it has. The thing to get right is planning the layout before the first panel goes up, so the cuts land at the ends of the wall rather than in the middle of it.
Send us the room
Dimensions, what the surfaces are, and what is actually annoying about it. That last part is the one that decides everything — and it takes one sentence.
