Workplace acoustic design differs from hospitality, education, or studios. An office has to support both collaboration and focused work in the same volume, often with glass, hard floors, and an exposed or lightly finished ceiling. PET panels are a practical way to treat those surfaces without a construction-heavy rebuild.
This note is written from the factory-sales side: what typically gets specified, where coverage is wasted, and which PET formats work in open plan, meeting rooms, and focus spaces.
Why offices fail acoustically
Open-plan floors fail on two fronts at once: too much reverberation (voices smear) and too little speech privacy (every call is public). Meeting rooms fail on intelligibility — glass and drywall bounce consonants. Focus rooms fail when they are treated like leftover closets: no absorption, a hard table, a video bar.
A single NRC number on a data sheet does not solve this. Coverage, placement, and mounting depth matter more than chasing 0.90 on every wall.
Open office
Treat the largest hard planes first. Ceiling baffles or clouds in the circulation and desk field do more than a decorative feature wall. Desk screens in 12mm PET add a local barrier without blocking light. Feature grooved walls belong on the few surfaces people actually look at — reception, a collaboration bay — not every perimeter.
- Ceiling: baffles or clouds where there is no acoustic tile
- Desks: 12mm screens, typically 400–600mm high
- Perimeter: 12–18mm sheets or grooved panels on one or two long walls
Meeting rooms
Speech clarity is the spec. Surface-mounted 12mm sheets with a 25mm air gap, or perforated panels with a cavity, usually beat thicker material glued tight to the wall. Avoid covering only the back wall and leaving glass untreated in the reflection path. If the room is used for video, keep a quiet colour field behind the talker — it reads as premium on camera.
Focus rooms and phone booths
Small rooms need absorption on at least two adjacent planes so the voice does not slap. 12mm PET on walls plus a small cloud or baffle is a typical kit. Over-specifying 25mm everywhere adds cost and thickness you cannot use behind a door swing.
How to brief a quote
Send floor type (open / meeting / focus), approximate square metres of wall and ceiling you can actually treat, fire code, and whether you need CNC or stock sheets. I will come back with a cut list, colour set, and — if you are filling a container — a loading plan.