Home office acoustics: how to stop sounding like you’re in the bathroom

People on your calls say you sound as if you’re in the bathroom, even though you’re sitting in an ordinary room? You’ve already bought a better microphone and it barely helped? That’s very common in home offices, and the culprit is almost always the room rather than the equipment. This guide explains where the echo comes from, where to hang acoustic panels in a home office and how many you need.

Where the echo on video calls comes from

When you speak, sound spreads out in every direction. Some of it goes straight to the microphone, but most of it travels to the walls, ceiling, window and desk, bounces off them and comes back – to the microphone as well. Those reflections arrive a few milliseconds to a few tens of milliseconds later. The microphone can’t tell them apart from your voice, so it records everything together. The result is a voice that sounds smeared and distant, with a tail that trails after every word.

Home offices make this especially obvious. They are usually small rooms with bare walls, a window, a hard floor and a desk, and very little that is soft enough to absorb sound. On top of that, the microphone in a laptop or webcam usually sits half a metre or more from your mouth, so reflections make up a large share of what the other people hear.

Echo tires you out, too. In a room where sound lingers, you end up speaking louder without noticing, reach for headphones more often, and feel worn out after a day of meetings sooner than you should.

How much echo is too much

Echo is described by reverberation time, written as RT60: the time it takes for sound to fall by 60 dB – to practically nothing – once the source stops. An empty room with hard walls can reach 0.8 s or more; a furnished one is usually around half a second. For work that relies on your voice – calls, presentations, teaching – it helps to get down to about 0.4 s. Speech is clear at that point, and the room doesn’t yet sound unnaturally dead.

You can estimate your own room below. The calculator uses the Sabine formula and typical absorption values for a room, so treat the result as a starting point rather than a measurement.

The wall in front of you and the wall behind you

Two surfaces matter most. The first is the wall in front of you, behind your monitor. Your voice travels towards it most strongly, and it bounces straight back into the microphone, which usually sits on the desk or is built into the monitor. A panel on that wall, at head height, usually makes the biggest difference.

The second is the wall behind you. It’s the one your camera sees, and it also reflects sound back towards the microphone. A panel behind you does two jobs at once: it absorbs reflections and tidies up your background. Match its colour to the wall and it will barely show on camera; choose a contrast and it becomes part of your backdrop.

If your desk is against a wall, start with the wall in front of you. If it stands in the middle of the room or faces a window, the wall behind you matters just as much.

First reflection points

Besides the walls in front of and behind you, your voice also bounces off the side walls. The spots that send reflections back to the microphone by the shortest path are called first reflection points. The easiest way to find them is the mirror method: sit at your desk while someone slides a small mirror along the side wall at the height of your head. Wherever you can see the microphone or camera in the mirror is a first reflection point – and a good place for a panel. There’s more on this in our guide to panel placement.

The centre of the panel should be roughly at ear height. At a desk that is usually 110–130 cm from the floor, depending on your chair and your height.

How many panels, and what size

In a typical study of about 10–12 m², four to six panels of 60 × 120 cm – 3 to 4 m² of absorbing surface – usually work well. That covers roughly 15–25% of the wall area. You can swap larger panels for smaller ones or the other way round: what matters most is the total area and where the panels hang.

Rather than standard sizes, it’s worth fitting the panel to the wall. If there are 84 cm between the window and the wardrobe, an 84 cm panel fills that space completely and looks like part of the room rather than an add-on. In the configurator you set the size to the centimetre.

5 or 10 cm for an office

A 5 cm panel is plenty for speech. The voice carries most of its energy in the mid frequencies, which a 5 cm panel absorbs almost entirely. A thicker panel makes sense if you also record voice-overs or a podcast, or if the room is noticeably boomy. There’s more detail in our guide to 5 or 10 cm.

What panels won’t fix

Panels won’t keep out noise from the street, the neighbours or the next room. If people on your calls can hear next door’s dog or traffic outside, that’s a soundproofing problem, not an echo problem. Airtight windows, a door seal and, as a last resort, a directional microphone closer to your mouth will help there. We say more about this in soundproofing vs acoustic treatment.

Your desk, your chair and the rest of the room

What hangs on the walls isn’t the only thing that affects how a room sounds. A glass or lacquered desktop reflects sound straight into a microphone that sits on it; a felt pad or fabric mat under the keyboard and microphone helps. A bare laminate or tiled floor is another large, hard surface, and a rug under the desk and chair cuts down reflections from below.

A bookcase with books of uneven depth scatters sound, so it works well on one of the side walls. Heavy curtains absorb some of the reflections from the window glass, one of the hardest surfaces in the room. None of this replaces panels, but it all works with them: every soft surface you add means slightly fewer panels for the same result.

How to check the result

The simplest test is to record yourself before and after hanging the panels. Sit at your desk as usual, start recording in your call software or on a phone placed where the microphone normally sits, and read the same paragraph aloud. After the panels go up, record it again in the same conditions. Listen on headphones: afterwards your voice sounds closer, and the ends of words no longer trail behind you.

You can also clap your hands in the middle of the room. Before the panels you’ll usually hear a short, metallic tail; afterwards the clap dies away faster and sounds drier.

Typical sets

• A small office of up to 10 m² with the desk against the wall: two 60 × 120 cm panels behind the monitor and one or two on the wall behind you.
• A room of 10–14 m²: four to six 60 × 120 cm panels – two in front of you, two behind you and one on each side wall at the first reflection points.
• An office with a window behind you: panels in front of you and on the side walls, and heavy curtains at the window.

You can put any of these together in the configurator in a few minutes. Start with the panel that will hang behind your monitor.