Acoustic consulting & room acoustics measurement

Acoustic consulting: when it pays off

If your meeting room echoes, children in the group room struggle to understand each other or the open-plan office quickly gets loud, the cause is usually a reverberation time that is too long. Hard surfaces such as glass, concrete and smooth walls reflect sound instead of absorbing it, and speech intelligibility and concentration suffer. Acoustic consulting clarifies how much absorber area your room needs, where it belongs and which acoustic elements suit the way the room is used: wall absorbers, ceiling panels, acoustic art panels or partitions.

For a single room at home, the free Acoustic Check is often enough. Room acoustics consulting pays off above all for offices, schools, nurseries and meeting rooms, for several rooms at once or when a target value under DIN 18041 has to be demonstrated. Costs only arise once you commission a remote analysis (from €150 incl. VAT per room) or an on-site measurement.

Room acoustics measurement: what is measured

The key figure is the reverberation time: how long a sound lingers in the room until it has dropped by 60 dB. We measure it once before planning and once after installation. The target value comes from DIN 18041 and depends on room volume and use: a classroom needs a different value from an open-plan office.

To be clear about the scope: room acoustics deals with reverberation inside a room. Sound insulation between rooms, impact sound and sound insulation reports under DIN 4109 belong to building acoustics, and a building physics engineering firm is the right contact for those. If you would like to check the reverberation time roughly yourself first, our guide Measuring reverberation time will help.

Acoustic consulting in Munich and across Germany

FENNEXT is based in Ismaning near Munich. We offer on-site appointments with measurement in and around Munich and throughout Germany. The initial assessment and the remote analysis work from anywhere anyway. Three documented projects with measurements before and after:

• Blindeninstitut München: in the 81 m³ multi-purpose room, ceiling and wall absorbers brought the mean reverberation time down from 1.47 to 0.41 seconds (−72%).
• BMW Group Werk Landshut: in the 329 m³ analysis room, 56.5 m² of absorber area brought it down from 2.92 to 0.76 seconds (−74%).
• Room 33, Auenschule Schweinfurt: in the classroom it fell from 1.31 to 0.67 seconds (−49%).

Looking for an acoustic consultant for your office, school or nursery? Briefly describe your room. The initial assessment is free.