Every room has a sound.
Most people have never seen theirs. This is what sound actually does in a room — the physics Echo calculates — one step at a time.
343 metres a second.
A word crosses a 12-metre office in 35 milliseconds. Then it keeps going — off every wall, floor and ceiling it meets, until there is nothing left of it.
Five things worth knowing before you check your own room.
It doesn't stop when the talker does.
every sound reflects off the room's surfaces again and again before it fades
in a bare, hard-surfaced office the sound lingers well after the talker stops
the longer it lingers, the less of what's said survives the room
Illustrative example, not a customer result: a 12 × 8 × 3 m open-plan office — hard floor, painted plaster walls, plasterboard ceiling, normally furnished. It's here to make the physics visible, not to measure a real room. The figures for your own room come with your own report.
The first 50 milliseconds help. The rest gets in the way.
What reaches a listener isn't one sound but hundreds of copies of it. The direct sound arrives first. Reflections that land within about 50 ms blend with it — your ear hears them as the same word, only louder. Anything later lands on top of the next word, and that overlap is what makes a room hard to understand.
Acousticians call this balance C50: early energy against late. In a bare room the weakest seats get far more late energy than early, and the reflected sound can be louder than the voice itself. Your own report shows how your room does.
Early sound helps speech. Late sound blurs it. The best seat in a room and the worst seat can hear two very different rooms, and the difference comes from a few specific reflections.
An illustration of the idea, not a customer result. Your own report has the detail for your room.
Same room. Same sound. A much shorter tail.
Reverberation time — RT60 — is how long a sound takes to fall 60 dB after it stops. Hard surfaces hand almost all the energy back, so it lingers. Porous material turns it into a trace of heat instead. Add enough, and the tail shortens until speech sits clear of it.
Before. Every surface hard — energy keeps circulating.
Bare, the sound lingers. Treated towards the target for the room, it fades quickly and speech is easier to follow. How much absorption a room needs, and where, is what your own report works out for your room.
After. Absorption in place — the room goes quiet between words.
The two clips are illustrations of the physics, not simulation output. Your own report has the figures for your room.
Loud isn't the problem.
Overlap is.
Raise your voice in an echoey room and the tail rises with it. The words don't get clearer — the blur just gets louder. That's why the back rows give up.
How much of what's said survives the room.
The Speech Transmission Index scores it from 0 to 1 by asking how well the rhythm of speech — the rise and fall that carries syllables — gets through the room's reverberation. Echo predicts it from the room's own decay. Bare, a room like this office scores noticeably lower; treated, it scores higher. Your own report gives the figure for your room.
Predicted from reverberation alone — it assumes a quiet room — so it's the best a room can do, not a certified measurement.
A score from 0 (unintelligible) to 1 (perfectly clear). Treating a room moves the score up, and the report shows by how much for your room.
Every seat hears a different room.
A single reverberation time describes the room as a whole. The person by the window and the person at the back don't hear the average. Pro reports seat by seat, so the weakest positions show up instead of hiding inside one number.
The real room shape
Pillars, partitions, pitched ceilings and raked floors are part of the picture.
A map of every seat
Seat by seat, so the dead spots show up on a plan instead of hiding inside an average.
Hear it from a seat
Put headphones on and listen from any seat: its own reflections, each arriving from its real direction.
Paperwork that stands up
A design-submission dossier and an annotated seat map, plus CAD/DXF export of seat positions for the install team.
Know which problem you have before you buy anything.
A noisy room can mean three different things, and each has a different fix. Treating the wrong one wastes the money — panels do nothing for a meeting room you can hear through the wall.
Echo inside the room
Sound lingering off hard surfaces. This is what Echo calculates and what absorption fixes.
Echo, Studio and ProSound coming through from next door
Transmission through walls, floors and doors — a mass-and-airtightness problem, not an absorption one. Echo doesn't model it, and says so; Studio's noise-complaint check tells you which of the two you're dealing with.
Studio's noise-complaint checkBackground noise
Ventilation, plant, traffic. Measured as a spectrum and rated on the NC and NR curves — Echo Pro rates any spectrum you have from a meter or an equipment data sheet.
Pro's NC/NR ratingClap once. See a rough guess in five seconds.
Your microphone, not a lab. This is a fun, rough browser guess — noise, mic quality and where you're standing all throw it off. The real prediction below is standards-based (Sabine/Eyring, IEC 60268-16) and doesn't depend on your laptop's microphone.
An illustration of the physics, not simulation output.
Now see your own room.
Four plain questions. About a minute. Free to see whether you have a problem.
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