Prior to the pandemic, acousticians and audio systems designers grappled with producing quality sound in “fishbowl” conference rooms—spaces featuring glass walls, concrete floors, perpendicular angles, and hard-surfaced furniture . As companies put their hybrid work strategies into practice, many of these issues remain … and a few new ones are presenting themselves.

One of the positive outcomes of our collective work-from-home experience is that people have become more aware of the need for a quality audio experience during conference calls, noted Rob Gilfillan, president of Cenero, an AV systems design and integration firm headquartered in Malvern, PA. “Over the years, everyone was so focused on the video and not as focused on the audio, but if there’s a glitch with the video, the call is going to be fine. If the audio is awful, however, the call is dead because it’s the primary way we communicate,” he explained. The struggle to hear and be heard while conferencing from home underlined just how important audio is.

[ The Future of Conferencing Audio ] 

Being forced into working from home for the last few months has many considering how to reconfigure in-office meeting and conferencing spaces so they deliver better experiences for remote participants in a hybrid work environment. “People were forced into having meetings using virtual tools and they had to figure it out—they were forced into adopting them,” Gilfillan said. “In doing that, they realized, ‘Wow, this is a really bad experience when you call into a room. I never realized how bad it was.’ When they go back to the office, I think people will be much more sensitive to that now than they were before, and they’re starting to think about the technology that they need to invest in.”

[ The Integration Guide to Conferencing & Collaboration ]

Joey D’Angelo, president of Joseph D’Angelo and Associates (DNA), an audiovisual and technology consulting firm based in Orange County, CA, relayed that one of the biggest trends he’s seeing is the creation of conferencing “rooms” within an open office plan, but without the traditional four-wall configuration. Instead, organizations are exploring partitions (usually ones able to accommodate a video display) that define a given meeting space within a large, open area. Unsurprisingly, this configuration creates speech privacy issues. “We’re trying to solve these problems with microphones that have directed lobes and cut-off points, and it takes a lot of testing, and trial and error,” he said.

These challenges spill into the open office space where people are participating in videoconferencing from their desks, and thus are exposed to extraneous noise such as ringing telephones, visitors to the office, and the chatter of neighboring colleagues. Acoustic fencing technology offers one solution to this problem, alleviating these distractions from the call itself so that participants on the other end don’t hear them.

[ Why 2021 Will Be the Year of Touchless Audio ] 

For those working in an actual office, sound masking solutions—such as those offered by Biamp’s Cambridge Sound—deliver speech privacy in open spaces featuring a lot of ambient noise and chitchat, noted Mark Higgason, executive vice president and partner at Encompass AV, an audiovisual systems design and integration firm based in Elk Grove Village, IL. While he acknowledges that sound masking isn’t a new concept, it’s one that’s being re-examined by organizations as they roll out their hybrid work strategies. “You’re not actually quieting anything. What you’re doing is making human speech unintelligible at a distance. You may still hear the mumble of a coworker on the phone, or one coworker who may be much louder in conversation than another—the sound is still there, but it’s unintelligible and it’s not really distracting,” he said. These solutions also mask noise coming from the HVAC system, and can be used for background music and paging as well.

Higgason also pointed to technologies like Shure’s Microflex microphone series that allow for more precise audio capture in spaces where, once again, ambient noise is a problem. “This newer generation has really allowed us to focus on areas that we want to pick up coverage from and reject the areas we that we don’t,” he said. “Even with bad acoustics, we can still make something far more workable than we could previously.”

[ Sound Reinforcement Remedies ] 

Huddle spaces are another area of focus for those returning to the office. With the need to distance people from one another, the concept of cramming three to five meeting participants in a small room is, for the moment, frowned on. For now, many of these spaces have been reduced to mini-offices, reconfigured for one or maybe two people. While capacity limits may have changed in these rooms, their technological makeup has not, Gilfillan noted. “The trend has been that every huddle space will be outfitted with USB video and audio devices, because conferencing in those spaces will be a constant moving forward,” he said.

He added that management platforms such as AppSpace, which feature analytics, monitoring, and reporting, give tech managers and other stakeholders insight into how these spaces are being used as the hybrid workplace evolves. “People are looking at being able to aggregate data to make better business decisions about their meeting spaces in terms of the rooms that are being booked, their size, who’s booking them, and how these spaces are being used. The huddle spaces are going to change based on that data.”

While the current focus may be on the hybrid workplace, D’Angelo believes that once the pandemic subsides, an increasing number of companies will require their employees to spend most of their time at the office. “People were working really hard [from home] during the pandemic because they wanted to keep their jobs and keep their companies strong,” he said. Post-COVID, he argues that productivity—particularly that of remote workers—will decline, driving organizations to make their remote work policies more restrictive. “I think it will be a boon for the AV industry because these companies will have built all of these less dense office buildings, and they’re going to need more, and there will be the need for renovations and changes and new buildings. I think it’s a win-win for the AV industry.”

Standardizing the Virtual Workforce

At the same time, Gilfillan noted that it’s wise to specify USB peripherals that are certified by the conferencing platforms that clients are using. “If, say, a USB microphone isn’t certified [by the platform in question], it might not deliver a great experience,” he said.

After a long spell of cobbling together remote work technologies, there is an argument that companies will begin standardizing the systems used by those who continue to work outside of the office, according to Rob Gilfillan of Cenero. In this model, organizations will list the make and model of the cameras, microphones, and USB devices they want their employees using for conferencing in an effort to control the quality of these calls. “Everyone is sick of being on a call with someone who just opens up their laptop and tries to use the microphone and speakers on that laptop, and they’re in a Starbucks with a lot of people around and shoddy bandwidth, and there is all this noise,” he said.

Click here to read more stories from the September 2021 issue of SCN.

More About Hybrid Work

The Future of Conferencing Audio • Ledetta Asfa-Wossen, September 18, 2020 • With meeting rooms at the nerve center of many companies, understanding the shifting use and technical requirements of the workspace is essential. So, what does the future hold for conferencing audio and specification?

How to Build a Killer Conference Room • Joe Dunbar, July 8, 2021 • We’re finally getting a glimpse of what things at the office will look like moving forward. We all know how we got here, so I won’t bother with that recap, but safe to say we’re seeing the predictions of hybrid offices filled with flexible spaces start to come to life.  As some of these discussions and plans turn into realities, I've been reflecting on the key components for a successful conferencing and collaboration space.

Adapting to the Hybrid Workplace • Jennifer Guhl , May 25, 2021 • Before the pandemic, companies were eager to integrate flexible conferencing and collaboration-based technology to increase engagement among employees and conduct global meetings more effectively. Now, however, companies are looking for guidance from technology providers to help them create not only a seamless hybrid working environment, but an intuitive one, too.

Work: In Progress • Margot Douaihy, Ph.D., January 4, 2021 • As more people return to offices, what tools and policies will prove to be essential? What lessons have we learned about UCC, AV, and visualization technologies and team morale during the pandemic?

UC Solutions Balance Safety and Productivity in Wake of COVID • Alex Peras, July 22, 2020 • When the pandemic struck, the move to remote work was swift, but even as more states open up and loosen social distancing restrictions, we will continue to see more companies opt for a hybrid work environment that comprises both in-office and virtual/remote students. This shift to hybrid work creates a unique opportunity for AV professionals to position their services and AV technology as one way to mitigate this challenge of balancing safety and productivity. This includes collaboration and unified communications (UC) solutions, technology platforms that support social distancing, provide important data and analytics, and can be easily added to existing or new systems in spaces of any size or scale.

Hybrid Work Model Increases Demand for Video Collaboration Technologies • Stefan Eriksson, April 26, 2021 • 2020 was a year of global societal change, and one of the most impactful cultural shifts has been the rapid transition to a distributed workplace, with nearly all traditional office-based companies instituting work-from-home policies on a part-time or full-time basis. For custom technology integrators, this movement has created opportunities to introduce clients to new digital tools—particularly video collaboration technologies—and upgrade them for effective communication between traditional offices and countless new home offices.

Office Design: Balancing Capability and Usability • Steve Greenblatt , December 01, 2018 • As organizations are doing more with less office space, technology has to support greater flexibility for multipurpose use, reconfiguration, and a variety of applications.

Office sound masking is an important workplace component that can help businesses protect private information and improve employee morale. 

What is Sound Masking?

Sound masking—otherwise known as “white noise” or “pink noise"—is the only acoustical treatment that involves all sound paths, according to the Taylored Systems Blog. The acoustical effect of walls, carpets, and ceilings do not change, but sound masking can be modified. 

According to Healthline, “the color of noise is determine by the energy of the sound signal.” White noise contains equal energy on every frequency. People often use it as constant background noise, and examples include a fan, radio or television static, or an air conditioner. 

Pink noise, on the other hand, is equal energy per octave, and is often compared to white noise with the bass turned up. Examples include waves at the beach, rustling leaves, or a steady rain. Pink noise is also helpful for private conversations, and it’s often more enjoyable to listen to in a working environment. 

Why Do You Need Sound Masking? 

An office sound masking system is important if you don’t want people to overhear certain speeches or conversations. This is especially important for certain industries, such as healthcare, government, law ,and finance, which often have strict confidentially requirements. For example, a business could install sound masking outside of a conference room if it’s near a reception area. 

When installing sound masking, architects often use an “ABC” approach: absorb, block, or cover sound. And if you’re concerned about aesthesis, don’t worry. Sound masking installation can be minimal and hardly noticeable. 

6 Benefits to Using Sound Masking  

Office sound masking is important for a variety of reasons. Not only does it help protect personal information, but it can also improve productivity and employee morale. 

Here’s how the six benefits can help your business: 

Protect customer information: Did you provide your credit card number over the phone? Did the recipient of that information read it back to you? If so, chances are high that others may have heard it as well. This is especially important in offices where there is a lot of open space. In some industries, such as healthcare, protecting customer information is the law.  

Protect personal employee information: You may think that casual employee conversations are private, but phones and other devices may pick up what you’re saying in the office. Be mindful that conversations between employees could potentially reach a customer’s ears. 

Ensure privacy for meetings: Meetings are meant to be private, and sometimes sensitive information is the topic, such as a new product launch, a personnel issue, or a company acquisition. Sound masking helps keep private meetings private, and according to Cambridge Sound, 60 percent of employees say a lack of speech privacy is a main point of dissatisfaction. 

Fewer distractions: According to Cambridge Sound Management, “employees can waste as much as 86 minutes per day due to noise distractions.” 

Remove awkward silences: Awkward silence can lead to distractions, and simple sound masking noises can make a work environment more comfortable. 

Enhance workplace productivity: Sound masking can lead to a more enjoyable and productive environment. Noise interrupts employees every 11 minutes, according to Cambridge Sound, and it can take 23 minutes for employees to get back on track. Also, research shows that employees waste almost 22 minutes a day due to distracting workplace conversations. If employees are less distracted, they are more engaged and according to Forbes, “highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability.” 

Office sound masking is an important tool with a variety of benefits that can enhance a workplace, such as protecting important information and ensuring privacy. 

Last fall, collaboration technology developer Plantronics released a report that examined how noise affects productivity in the workplace. The study noted that workplaces are getting noisier, with more employees inhabiting fewer square feet of office space. Over half of the survey’s respondents said they were disturbed by noise multiple times daily; more than a third said that customers calling in complain about the noise they hear in the background during calls. Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed said that they would prefer to work in a “more traditional workspace with high walled cubicles or offices.” In other words, open-concept workspaces may look sexy, but people don’t like them that much.

That’s not to say that open office spaces—and the glass fish-tank conference rooms that go with—are going away. “With the price of real estate, I don’t think [organizations] have a choice; they need to fit more employees into smaller spaces,” said Joey D’Angelo, consultant and founder of Joseph D’Angelo and Associates (DNA). “‘Densification’ is the term for it in the architectural and facilities groups among the companies that we work with.”

The question is: how can acoustical consultants and AV design and integration firms succeed at selling the importance of acoustics to clients that place more emphasis on aesthetics and less on making sure people can hear each other properly?

“Whenever I get a client that’s not so concerned with acoustics, [it may mean] that they just may not understand how it could benefit them, or what could happen when it’s not working,” said Robert Alvarado, principal and office director of the San Francisco location of Shen Milsom & Wilke LLC (SM&W).

Sometimes this requires leaning on past projects that the client may not be happy with because they didn’t follow acoustical recommendations. He cites one of his own clients as an example: “We did their first building and they took a lot of the recommendations, but many of those recommendations were never implemented correctly. The next go-round, it was interesting to see that they were really focused on acoustics, almost to the point of over-analyzing it and putting in as much as they could because of what happened in the past.”

Dick Tollberg, senior design engineer at AVI-SPL, says that real-world examples are among the most effective ways to illustrate the impact acoustics can have on a space. “I think that a lot of laymen do not understand just how much sound reaches them from the walls, the ceilings, the floors, the tables, compared to the direct sound that comes from the speaker,” he said. When AV firms can get into projects during the initial design phases, “taking the client into a room that is correctly done acoustically—both from the absorption that’s required, as well as ensuring that the ambient noise level is acceptable—and showing them the difference between that and the typical conference room makes great strides in helping them understand how much of a better experience they could have with a conference room that was acoustically well-designed.”

D’Angelo acknowledges that AV firms can’t force clients to execute their recommendations, but he does believe that the AV community can arrive at solutions that will at least improve the acoustical behavior of a space. For example, he cites angling walls six degrees from being parallel, or treating one wall with fabric-wrap panels, or installing acoustic ceiling tiles as several of the options available. He also notes that glass doors should be outfitted with gaskets to prevent sound from spilling out of the space, and that walls should run deck-to-deck. “On the other side of the coin, the audio processors are so powerful these days that we can deal with some pretty [poorly behaved] environments electronically as well, to a certain extent,” he said.

One of the biggest challenges AV firms continue to face is when they’re brought on board: Tollberg relays that more often than not, room designs are established before acoustics and AV are even considered. “They’ve been looking at the room [design] for weeks or months, they like all the glass, they like all of the other attributes, and we come in and say, ‘you know, there are some problems acoustically that are going to affect the quality of your audio,’ and they don’t understand,” he said. While he, too, concedes that audio processing can compensate for this, he also notes that there are limitations to what it can achieve. “If the room acoustics have been dealt with before the AV technology goes in, the AV technology works much better, is easier to set up, and the experience that the listener outside of the room gets from the system is much more pleasant.”

That said, according to Alvarado, some organizations are starting to pay more attention to acoustics. He believes this is linked to companies’ efforts to maintain—and boost—employee retention through providing healthy environments in which to work. “If you can differentiate yourself from another company [by creating] better conditions, you have better, happier, more long-term employees.”

Thinking Outside the Fish Tank

While almost every organization has remote workers in some shape or form, very often this part of the workforce is forgotten in conference room design. Dick Tollberg, senior design engineer at AVI-SPL, notes that it’s important to design acoustics that take remote meeting participants into account.

“Many times, people do not understand the difference between being in a room versus being in a remote location apart from the conference, and trying to hear what’s going on clearly in the conference itself,” he said.

When you’re in a meeting on site, you benefit from not only being close to the speaker––you can also take advantage of visual aids, such as gestures. “When you’re remote and you’re just listening and you don’t have the visual feedback, if the room is marginal acoustically, it becomes very, very difficult to understand what is being said. In order to understand you have to really concentrate, and as people have to concentrate like that, they don’t necessarily assimilate the same amount of information—they have a harder time retaining it, versus someone who can easily hear what is going on. A lot of people don’t [consider] that when they’re thinking about the design of these rooms.”

When it comes to animal welfare, the efforts of staff, volunteers, and donors means countless dogs, cats, and other (primarily) domesticated animals are saved from homelessness and given the chance of adoption into a loving home. Despite best intentions, shelter animals often suffer from anxiety, and this is accompanied by behavioral issues that present challenges to placing them. An obvious and easily remedied cause of their anxiety, often overlooked, is the persistent high-volume levels in these facilities.

By necessity, most shelters either occupy a space that was not initially designed for use as a shelter or one that is purpose-built but with the bare bones basics adhered to in favor of directing funds to the actual care of the animals. These well-meaning decisions are, in fact, counterproductive and inadvertently the cause of more health issues and stress to not only the animals, but to the staff, volunteers, and potentially to those visiting the shelter in search of their next pet.

Vancouver based acoustics treatment company, Primacoustic, has been providing solutions to help mitigate the intense sound pressure levels in shelters and kennels for several years. Primacoustic's Steve Dickson said: "More often than not, these shelters are built to withstand the wear and tear of consistently high occupation levels and turnover while also being convenient to keep clean and disease free. This frequently means the use of concrete floors and similarly structured walls. This is a recipe for an auditory nightmare. If you ask someone to describe their perception of visiting an animal shelter, you can be quite certain most will remark on the noise levels above anything else. And this is not just an uncomfortable reality, it's a health issue."

The sound pressure levels in kennel environments can be anywhere between 100dB and 118dB and it is well documented that sustained exposure to excessive sound pressure has a profound physiological and psychological effect on animals — human, canine, and feline, but canine in particular. Dogs can detect a frequency range of 67-45,000 Hz, compared to a human range of 64-23,000 Hz. So, if you had an uncomfortable auditory experience in an animal shelter, you can now appreciate how traumatic the same experience would be for a dog. And while your visit may have been short, some of these dogs are housed in shelters for weeks, sometimes months, or even years.

The Animal Welfare League in Port Charlotte, FL faced these circumstances in their facility. Having done good work since 1963, they spent many years fundraising for a new adoption centre. They were able to achieve their financing goals and break ground in the fall of 2005. Three years later the facility was complete, ready to house up to 42 dogs. But the noise levels became an immediate issue. Left unresolved, these are potentially dangerous.

The shelter's representative Aggie Aguila explains their next steps to reduce the noise levels: "The Board of Directors and staff started researching solutions, having discussions with volunteers, visitors, neighboring animal shelters, and local animal boarding facilities. The solution that became evident included the installation of acoustic treatment panels." They consulted with Primacoustic's Steve Dickson to find a suitable product. In this case, the installation of fabric wrapped fibreglass panels was all that was required to absorb the highly problematic sound waves.

The What: Lowell Manufacturing Company has released a new analog signal generator with 25W amplifier for sound masking applications.

The What Else: The SMGA-25 provides an analog pink noise signal that is used to feed masking speakers and mask ambient noise. The pre-EQ output has a flat spectrum for use with equalizers and masking systems requiring precise equalization. The post-EQ output can be adjusted with bass, mid, and treble controls for less demanding applications that utilize basic spectrum shaping. The 25W amplifier has a speaker line output that can also be adjusted by the bass, mid, and treble controls. Additional outputs include hi-Z line level, 8-ohm, and 70V speaker line (25W maximum).

The Bottom Line: The SMGA-25 features a sturdy 12-by-6-by-3-inch steel chassis with black finish. It includes a power supply (100-240V AC input, 24V DC output), and universal mounting brackets that are designed to allow a variety of mounting options, including standard 19-inch rack space.