Choose an Office Sound Masking System

What is an office sound masking system?

The office sound masking system has been widely used for more than 50 years in the 1960s for the Department of Defense, and has been used to provide better acoustic privacy in the office space since then.

The basic idea behind the sound masking is that if I fill in the sound spectrum, it makes it very difficult to understand the conversation that occurs around me. And if I can't understand it, they tend to distract me. Thus, office sound masking systems both increase office privacy and increase office productivity.

Human ears work like radar dishes - continue to look for sounds that show a kind of structure. Your ears are bombarded by sound throughout the day - and your brain must filter out useful sounds from irrelevant ones. So he is looking for a structure. Language and music have a structure, for example. The sound of a broken twig or a creaking door communicates information that is useful for your 'battle or flight' instinct. On the other hand, your brain will eliminate the relatively consistent hustle and bustle of the food court at the mall, or other constant sounds such as the cooling fan on your computer. Sounds do not vary, do not have a structure, so your brain determines that it does not communicate anything and therefore ignore the sound and keep looking for structured sounds.

How does the office sound masking system work?

Effective office sound masking system must be uniform in terms of spectrum and volume. All modern office sound masking systems use a specific sound spectrum, targeted to cover up human speeches. The older force system depends on expertise and installation efforts to adjust it correctly, while the newer system comes before, but all are designed to produce a sound masking spectrum that properly targets the frequency range produced by human speech. So in the end, this led to how uniform the sound masking system treated the office area.

Think about your office area like a balloon that increases at a birthday party. At each point in the balloon, the inch of the-square pressure (PSI) is the same. The best sound masking solution for you will be the most uniform voice to every point in the office.

Which office sound masking system is the best?

There are two main types of sound masking systems: the plenary system and direct terrain system, and the last is usually considered more effective. As written by Acoustic Expert David Sykes for Working Groups for Electronic Interchange (Wedi) data shows, '[Direct Field System] is the latest, in the lowest, easiest cost to be installed, and has been widely used since 1998.'

Initially, all sound masking systems were placed in a grid pattern above the suspected sky. Large loudspeakers are bolted to the concrete deck above, and hung on the chain. The speaker will then blow the sound up in the concrete deck and bounce in the area between the deck and the ceiling, known as the plenary. Thus, this older force system is called the 'plenary system. The idea is that the sound will bounce and fill the plenary, and then filter down through the sky -ceiling tile into the office room below. This configuration was needed 50 years ago, given the available speaker technology and the existence of a relatively uniform sky -cement structure and empty plenary space. This makes sense: the speaker at that time was hard and had a fairly narrow dispersion angle, but if you could reflect a little sound, it overcomes this limitation.

However, when the plenary room is filled and the heavenly assembly becomes more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to really get the sound to fill the plenary uniformly, let alone filter into the office space below in a uniform way. Now, the typical plenary space is filled with heating channels and air conditioners, low voltage cables and networks, and electricity channels and lighting. The ceiling assembly has become an acoustic nightmare of a mixture of reflective and absorbent material, affecting the spectrum and volume depending on where you stand. To compensate for this, many plenary systems develop increasingly complex ways to change their speakers (usually in the 3-speaker zone). But - like patches for bugs in computer programs - this is ultimately only a band-AID solution.

So acoustic engineers continue to work and appear with a prototype for what is finally known as a 'direct field' sound masking system. Realizing that the problem could not be resolved by continuing to patch up the old way of doing something, they pulled the speaker out of the plenary. But only using speakers designed to reflect sound in the plenary will not do it, because they use a relatively narrow dispersion angle. Using the old style speaker in a new configuration does not solve the problem, because it still produces a 'hot and cold' point that is not uniform.

Finally-Borrowing from the home theater industry, engineers developed a patented ultra-wide dispersion speaker, which spread the sound at an angle of 170 degrees. This turned out to be the key that unlocked a new level of effective office sound masking - and because the direct field system produced was simpler, eliminating human variables to adjust the complicated system and technology systems with their additional failure points, IT, IT they had a failure rate which is almost non -existent.