Board room soundproofing — keep the conversation in the room
A board room is where you have the conversations you least want overheard — and it’s almost always the worst-built room in the building for it. Big glass walls, a hard table, plasterboard and a bare ceiling. The sound bounces around inside until everyone’s exhausted, and it leaks straight out into the offices next door. We fix both ends of that.
Get a Free Quote — or call (08) 6146 3310.
What’s going wrong in your board room — in plain English
There are two completely different problems in a board room, and people mix them up all the time.
One is echo. Glass, a big hard table, polished floor, nothing soft anywhere — every voice bounces off the lot. People sound far away, an hour-long meeting wears you out, and on a Teams call the other end just gets a hollow, echoey mush.
The other is privacy. The stuff said in a board room is exactly the stuff you don’t want carrying — HR, money, strategy, the lot — and it finds the weakest point in the room and walks straight out.
One’s about how the room feels when you’re sitting in it. The other’s about what escapes. Most board rooms have both, and they need fixing differently.
Absorption vs barrier — and why a board room needs both
This is the same thing we explain on nearly every job. They’re different products for different problems.
Absorption (acoustic panels) takes the echo out of the room. The room goes calmer, voices get clearer, your video calls stop sounding like a tunnel. It does nothing to stop sound passing through a wall.
Barrier (a proper door, seals, glazing, sealing the joints, wall work) stops the conversation getting out. It does nothing for the echo inside.
So if the room’s draining to sit in, that’s absorption. If you can hear the meeting from the hallway, that’s a barrier. A board room is the textbook case where you want both, and we’ll work out which one’s actually your problem before we quote a cent.
Where the noise actually escapes — it’s rarely just the door
Everyone assumes it’s the door. Often the door is part of it — but it’s usually not the whole story. The conversation gets out wherever there’s a hole or a weak spot, and in a board room that’s most commonly:
- A return-air vent. Whether it’s a hollow corridor wall or a solid one, the moment there’s a return-air vent in it, that vent becomes the easiest path for sound — it’ll be the weakest part of the room.
- Poor wall-to-ceiling joints. We see this constantly — the sound flanks straight over the top of the wall through the ceiling void into the next room.
- The wall-to-window join. We regularly pick up flanking noise where the wall meets the window.
After that it comes down to two things: how quiet the room actually needs to be, and how well — or how badly — the existing walls are performing.
So our rule of thumb is simple: plug the holes first. Fix the door if it’s a problem, seal the ceiling-wall join, sort the wall-window join and any vents — then get the reverberation under control inside the room. Do it in that order and you get the maximum result for your money.
What you can realistically expect
On the door, we can guarantee a 10 dB drop over your existing door — and 10 dB is internationally recognised as a halving of the perceived sound. In a lot of jobs we do considerably better than that. Every application is different — it depends on the room, the walls and what you’re up against — but a guaranteed halving over your existing door is the floor, not the ceiling.
And echo is the easy win. Of everything we treat, reverberation is the one we most reliably knock out of the park. Half the time we’ve barely got the panels leaning against the wall and the client’s already saying “I can hear the difference these panels have made already.” That’s how quickly it lands. We calculate the panel area for the room too — we don’t guess. Specific calculation, every job.
How we treat a board room
- Plug the leaks first — the door (custom acoustic door with perimeter seals and a drop-down at the threshold), the ceiling-wall join, the wall-window join, and any return-air vents.
- Acoustic wall and ceiling panels to kill the echo — neutral so no one notices, or a feature if that’s what you want.
- Secondary glazing where glass walls or windows are leaking the conversation or letting outside noise in — and you keep the glass, we don’t rip it out.
- Wall or partition work where the talk’s going straight through a shared wall.
Where we’ve done this across Perth
We’ve treated board rooms and meeting rooms right across Perth — corporate head offices, city fit-outs and heritage buildings, including the heritage city building McKinsey & Company work out of, where we fitted secondary glazing on the inside without touching the heritage frontage. Over the years our work across Perth has included the likes of Channel 7, Water Corporation, Westrac, Telethon Speech and Hearing and Emyria. After this many years we’ve honestly lost count of the board rooms we’ve done — and we’re happy to nominate specific companies and reference sites on request.
The top three questions we get asked
1. Will the panels make it look like a call centre?
Honest answer: most people never notice the ceiling ones. On walls we pick a colour that disappears into the fit-out — or we make them a feature on purpose. Your call.
2. Can we keep the glass walls?
Usually, yes. We treat the glass with secondary glazing instead of replacing it, so the room keeps its look and you still get the noise result.
3. How messy and how long?
Panels are a clean job — no demolition, no dust, a day or two for a typical room. Sealing joints and a door changeover are quick. We work around when the room’s actually being used.
When a board-room treatment isn’t the answer
We won’t load you up with work for the sake of it:
- The leak isn’t where you think. If it’s a return-air vent or the ceiling void carrying sound into the next room, the flashest door on earth won’t fix it. We find the real path first.
- It’s only half a problem. If the room just echoes and privacy isn’t an issue, you need panels, not the full treatment — and we’ll tell you that.
Straight answers, every time.
FAQ
How much does it cost?
Depends on the room, the door, the joints and how much glass is involved. We calculate it and send you an honest online price. We don’t quote blind.
Will it fix our awful Zoom audio?
Yes. Echo is exactly what makes video-call audio sound hollow, and panels are the direct fix.
Can you actually stop people hearing us?
That’s the most common board-room request we get. We plug the leaks — door, joints, vents — and the conversation stays in the room.
Do you treat glass-walled board rooms?
Yes, with secondary glazing on the glass rather than tearing it out.
How long does it last?
It’s a permanent install. Panels, doors and glazing don’t lose performance over time.
Can you work after-hours?
Yes. We can fit around the room being in use through the day.
Get a free quote
Conversations leaking out, or a board room you can’t hear yourself think in? Quash has installed over 3,000 soundproofing solutions across Perth since 2009. Tell us the room, what the noise is, and what’s being overheard, and we’ll come and look at it properly.
Get a Free Quote — call (08) 6146 3310.
