Not a guess. Not a sales pitch dressed as advice.
Most rooms end up treated one of three ways: someone guesses, someone sells you a fixed amount of panel regardless of the room, or someone appoints a consultant for a problem that might have been solved with £34.99 and about a minute. Echo is built for the gap between the first two and the third.
Check a room →- 1
One room that echoes
Most rooms end up treated one of three ways. Here is the same room each time, with the late echo drawn in amber.
- 2
Someone guesses
- 3
A fixed amount, whatever the room
- 4
Echo: this room, this amount
- 5
Or the answer is "this is fine"
| Guesswork | Generic panel seller | AcoustaPLOT Echo | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it's based on | Instinct, or "this always works" | A fixed formula: cover X% of the walls, regardless of the room | The room's actual volume and surfaces, run through standard reverberation-time equations and IEC 60268-16 |
| Tells you if no treatment looks necessary | No — a guess rarely concludes "do nothing" | No — the business model is selling panels | Yes. If the model predicts the room already reaches the target, Echo says so |
| Compares more than one fix | Rarely | No — one product, one recommendation | Five routes, each with the area it needs and the figure it would leave you with |
| States what standard it's checked against | No | Occasionally, loosely | Always, by name, with the target and its basis stated |
| Time to an answer | Immediate, and often wrong | Immediate, and always "buy more" | About a minute, and shows its working |
| Replaces a full acoustic consultant | No | No | No — and says so. See How it works → |
What Echo isn't
It isn't a substitute for a qualified acoustic consultant where a signed-off, measured figure is genuinely required — for anything contentious, contractual, or tied to planning or building-control conditions, you still need one. Echo exists for everything before that point: the rooms where the honest answer turns out to be "this is fine", and the rooms where it turns out you were right to be worried, found out fast enough to act on it.