Sound masking vs acoustic panels: what's the difference?

Sound masking and acoustic panels solve opposite problems, so they are usually complementary rather than alternatives. Sound masking adds a low-level, engineered background sound through ceiling or under-floor emitters to raise the room's noise floor, which makes nearby speech harder to understand and improves privacy. Acoustic panels are passive absorbers that soak up sound energy to cut echo, reverberation and overall loudness. One adds controlled sound; the other takes sound away.

From the floor. The mistake we see most often is a client asking for acoustic panels to fix an open-plan privacy or distraction complaint. Panels make the room quieter and clearer, which can actually make a colleague's phone call across the floor more intelligible, not less. Privacy is a masking job; echo is a panel job. Diagnose which problem you have before buying either. David Corker, Technical Sales Director

The physics are the key. A hard-surfaced meeting room with glass and plasterboard suffers from reverberation: speech bounces, intelligibility on video calls drops, and the room feels loud. Acoustic panels and baffles fix that by absorbing reflections. An open-plan floor has the opposite issue: it is often too quiet between conversations, so a voice two desks away is perfectly clear and distracting. Sound masking raises the ambient level by a few carefully tuned decibels so that speech blends into the background beyond a metre or two.

Many high-specification offices use both. Panels treat the enclosed rooms and any echoey shared spaces, while masking covers the open-plan and circulation areas for speech privacy, particularly where confidentiality matters, such as legal, financial or healthcare floors. The two are tuned together so the masking sits just above the treated room's residual noise without being noticeable.

Quick reference: acoustic panels to cut echo and reverberation in hard rooms; sound masking to add privacy and reduce distraction in open-plan space; both together for confidential, high-specification offices.