Open office environments have become the default in Calgary and across Alberta — and most of them have a serious acoustics problem default in modern corporate design. No walls, no separations, just one big collaborative space where everyone’s working in the same acoustic soup. And every company that’s done this eventually realizes the same thing: it’s loud, it’s distracting, and productivity takes a hit.
But most offices don’t think about this as an AV problem. They think it’s just the reality of open-concept work. What they don’t realize is that acoustic design—and the AV systems that support it—can fundamentally change the acoustic environment and make offices actually functional places to work.
The Hidden Cost of Poor Office Acoustics
The problem is subtle but pervasive. Without acoustic treatment, an open office becomes a space where: Conversation from one area echoes across the entire space; It’s hard to have a phone call without everyone hearing your business; Focus is nearly impossible because there’s constant auditory input; Meeting rooms don’t acoustically isolate, so multiple meetings happening near each other create overlapping conversations that confuse everyone.
This isn’t trivial. Studies consistently show that noise is one of the top complaints in open office environments, and chronic low-level noise exposure causes stress, cognitive fatigue, and decreased productivity.
The AV industry — including AV integrators here in Calgary — has been largely absent from this conversation, but they shouldn’t be. Acoustic treatment and audio system design are directly in the AV domain.
How Sound Behaves in Open Offices
Before you can solve an acoustic problem, you need to understand it. This requires thinking about how sound behaves in a space.
Sound travels in waves. When a sound wave hits a hard surface (concrete, glass, tile), it bounces back. When it hits a soft surface (carpet, foam, curtains), it’s absorbed. The balance between reflection and absorption determines how a space sounds.
An office with concrete floors, glass walls, and high ceilings is highly reflective. Sound bounces around like it’s in a parking garage. An office with carpet, soft furniture, and acoustic ceiling tiles is more absorptive. Sound dies out quickly.
Reverberation Time: The Key Metric
The acoustic problem in most open offices is that they’re designed for aesthetics and flexibility, not acoustics. High ceilings are open and feel spacious. Glass walls let light through. Hard floors are easy to clean. None of these is acoustically ideal.
Reverberation is the technical term for this bouncing. In a highly reverberant space, a sound takes a while to die out. If someone speaks, you hear their voice, then echoes of their voice bouncing around the room for another second or two. If multiple people are speaking, their voices overlap with the echoes of previous speakers, creating a garbled, fatiguing acoustic environment.
There’s actual research on this. Acousticians measure reverberation time (RT60)—the time it takes for a sound to decay by 60 decibels after the sound stops. For an open office to be reasonably functional, you want an RT60 of about 0.6 to 1 second. Most hard-surfaced open offices have RT60 of 2-4 seconds. That’s a huge difference.
There’s also research on speech intelligibility. If you’re in a room with high background noise or high reverberation, it’s harder to understand what people are saying. You have to work harder, and that cognitive load is tiring. Over an 8-hour workday, that fatigue accumulates. People make more mistakes, they’re more irritable, and productivity drops.
The threshold for comfort in an office is roughly 55-60 dB (A-weighted decibels, which measure sound in a way that roughly matches human hearing). Most open offices run 65-75 dB during working hours. That’s significantly above the comfort threshold.
Acoustic Treatment: Absorption Materials
The most direct solution is to add absorptive materials. This might be acoustic ceiling tiles (if you’re replacing the ceiling), wall panels covered in fabric-wrapped absorptive foam, or architectural elements like baffles or clouds (hanging absorptive panels from the ceiling).
The challenge with open offices is that you can’t just cover everything in foam—you’d lose the visual openness that was the whole point of the design. So acoustic design becomes a balancing act: where to place absorptive materials to address the worst acoustic problems without turning the space into a bunker.
An acoustic consultant (or an AV integrator who understands acoustics) can model this. You measure the existing acoustic conditions, identify problem areas, and strategically place treatments. This might mean absorptive panels along certain walls, fabric-covered baffles in large open areas, and carpet or heavy rugs in meeting zones.
Sound Masking Systems
If you can’t eliminate background noise, you can mask it. Sound masking systems emit a subtle, consistent background sound (usually described as similar to air conditioning noise) at a level that covers up distracting sounds.
This sounds strange—adding sound to reduce noise problems?—but it works because of how human hearing works. Our brains filter out consistent, predictable background sounds (this is called the cocktail party effect). A consistent masking sound becomes background and stops registering. Meanwhile, disruptive sounds (conversation from across the office) become less noticeable because they’re masked by the consistent background.
Sound masking doesn’t work if the background sound is annoying. It has to be specifically engineered—the right frequency spectrum, the right level, and good spatial distribution so it feels even throughout the space. This is often done with speakers in the ceiling, driven by a dedicated sound masking system (products like Cambridge Sound Management or QSound).
Movable Acoustic Solutions and Focus Zones
Some companies use movable acoustic panels or partial walls to create zones within an open office. This doesn’t create complete isolation—sound still travels—but it reduces the acoustic coupling between zones and makes it feel less like one giant echoing space.
The AV component is ensuring that if multiple video conferences are happening in different zones, the audio systems are isolated enough that they don’t interfere with each other or make the background noise worse.
Active Noise Cancellation at Room Scale
This is emerging technology. Some high-end headphones use active noise cancellation, which monitors ambient sound and plays an inverted sound wave to cancel it. This works better for consistent sounds (like airplane engine noise) and less well for variable sounds (like office conversation).
There are also room-level active noise cancellation systems being developed, though they’re not yet common in commercial installations. They work on the same principle but at a much larger scale.
Integrating Acoustics Into Your AV Design
If you’re designing an AV system for an office (or retrofitting an existing space), here’s how you think about acoustics: Assess the current acoustic conditions (this might be as simple as walking through the space and noticing how echo-y it sounds, or as rigorous as hiring an acoustician to measure RT60 and sound levels); Identify specific problem areas (where are the worst acoustic issues?); Determine the budget (acoustic treatment costs money); Design the solution (this might include specifying acoustic treatments, positioning speakers and microphones for conference systems to minimize acoustic problems); Integrate with other systems (if you’re adding sound masking, it needs to integrate with the background music system).
Acoustics have traditionally been the domain of specialized acousticians. AV professionals typically focused on technology. But modern AV systems include audio components (microphones, speakers, conference systems) that are fundamentally acoustic devices. An AV integrator who understands acoustics can design systems that work better in real-world spaces.
Moreover, as open offices have become ubiquitous, the acoustic problems have become unavoidable. Companies are desperate for solutions. AV professionals who can address acoustic issues—not just install technology, but understand how to make spaces sound better—have expertise that’s genuinely valuable.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Some Office Layouts
The uncomfortable truth is that some open office designs are acoustically unsalvageable without major structural changes. If a space is simply too hard, too big, and too reflective, no amount of AV tweaking will make it great.
But most spaces can be significantly improved. By understanding acoustic principles and applying thoughtful design—a combination of physical acoustic treatment, smart AV system design, and possibly sound masking—you can transform an open office from exhausting and distracting to functional and pleasant.
Making Real Improvements
It’s not glamorous work. There’s no glitzy display screen or impressive technology to point to. But the impact on day-to-day working life is profound.
Acoustic Solutions for Calgary Offices
Fermi AV doesn’t just install speakers and screens — we think about how sound behaves in your space. If your Calgary office has acoustics problems affecting productivity or meeting quality, get in touch for a free assessment. We serve offices across Calgary, Red Deer, Lethbridge, and all of Alberta.