Better Meetings and Video Calls: Treating Meeting Rooms with Wood Wool

Companies spend heavily on conference cameras and beamforming microphones, then put them in glass boxes that sound like aquariums. The remote side hears every reflection. The uncomfortable truth of hybrid work: bad call audio is usually a room problem, not an equipment problem, and it is fixed with absorption, not firmware. Wood wool cement board, the material long known in Europe as fibrolite, is particularly well suited to the job. Here is the recipe.

Why meeting rooms sound bad

The modern meeting room is small, glassy and hard: a table, a screen, six chairs and four reflective surfaces. Speech bounces between glass and plasterboard and arrives at the microphone smeared. Human listeners in the room adapt; microphones cannot. The metric that matters is reverberation time, and small hard rooms routinely sit at double or triple the comfortable value for speech.

The 25 percent recipe

For a standard meeting room, plan absorber area around 25 percent of the floor area, split between ceiling and one or two walls:

• Ceiling field over the table. The single most effective move. For a 5 x 6 m room, roughly 5 m2 of 25 mm panels centred on the table. If the soffit is concrete, mount on battens with a cavity for extra low-mid absorption.
• The wall facing the camera. The conference microphone points at the far wall; treating that wall removes the reflections it hears loudest. A band of 2400 x 600 panels at seated head height, roughly 0.9 to 2.1 m from the floor, is the standard detail.
• One side wall if glass dominates. Glass cannot be treated, so compensate on the opposite solid wall.

This recipe reliably brings a small meeting room from harsh to broadcast-comfortable. The remote side notices immediately; nobody can say why the room got better, only that it did.

Small call rooms and phone booths

One and two person call rooms are the extreme case: tiny volume, close microphone, all reflections early and loud. Here coverage goes higher, toward 40 percent, but absolute areas are small: a 1.5 x 2 m call room needs only about 2.5 m2, one panel on the ceiling and one behind the seat. Two panels per booth, multiplied across a floor of booths, lands neatly at pallet quantity.

Why wood wool specifically

• Real absorption where speech lives. A 25 mm panel reaches alpha w around 0.60 to 0.65 depending on spec and mounting, solid performance across the speech band.
• It survives office life. Chairs hit walls, screens get remounted, rooms get rearranged. Cement-bonded fibre takes the abuse fabric absorbers cannot.
• It reads as design. The woven texture in Natural, Grey or Black looks specified, not retrofitted. Facilities teams like that it never needs re-stretching or re-tensioning.
• Documentation. B-s1,d0 fire classification to EN 13501-1 and CE marking under EN 13168 keep the fit-out file clean.

Acoustic etiquette for the rest of the room

Panels do the heavy lifting; details finish the job. A rug or carpet tile under the table removes the floor bounce, solid doors with seals keep corridor noise out, and locating the HVAC diffuser away from the microphone matters more than most furniture choices. None of this replaces absorption; it complements it.

Rolling it out across an office

The pattern for a fit-out is straightforward: standardise one treatment per room type, meeting room, call room, board room, and order centrally. A pallet of 25 mm Sonablock covers 30.96 m2, roughly four to six meeting rooms at the recipe above. Delivery is on pallets across the EU, and colours can be standardised to the interior concept from the five factory finishes or a RAL tone for volume.

Specify from the Sonablock wood wool collection, or send us your room schedule and we will turn it into a panel count and pallet quantity for the whole floor.