Designing Acoustic Architecture for Corporate Boardrooms and Auditoriums

The Science of Speech Intelligibility

Even the most advanced visual displays cannot compensate for poor acoustic performance. In corporate boardrooms and auditoriums, excessive reverberation and uneven sound pressure levels create cognitive fatigue and lead to miscommunicated information during high-stakes presentations.

1. Target RT60 Reverberation Benchmarks

Reverberation time (RT60) is the time required for sound energy to decay by 60 decibels after the sound source has ceased. In executive conference rooms, the target RT60 should sit strictly between 0.5 and 0.7 seconds. For auditoriums, values between 0.8 and 1.2 seconds balance speech intelligibility with natural acoustic warmth.

2. Distributed Audio vs Point-Source Loudspeakers

In wide or deep rooms, relying on single point-source speakers positioned beside the display causes sound to be painfully loud in the front rows while remaining muffled in the back. A distributed ceiling audio system with tapped 70V/100V transformer lines ensures even Sound Pressure Level (SPL) distribution throughout the entire seating plane with a variance of less than ±2dB.