Your Meeting Room Has the Best Gear and the Worst Sound

A remote participant leans towards their screen, straining to catch what's being said. In the room itself, everything looks right: a laser-crisp display, a beamforming ceiling microphone array, cameras that auto-frame the speaker with genuine precision. And still the call is unusable, because nobody treated the room, and every word bounces off glass, concrete, and a boardroom table the size of a small boat before it reaches the microphone.

This scene is common enough that vendors at trade shows have started naming it directly. At InfoComm 2025, booth visitors kept raising the same complaint: their rooms looked stunning and sounded terrible, and no amount of processing downstream could fix a problem that acoustic treatment was supposed to solve upstream, in the room itself. Acoustic echo cancellation can clean up a signal. It cannot manufacture intelligibility out of a space that was never treated to produce it.

Walk into a newly fitted-out office in Berlin, Manchester, or Stockholm this year, and the pattern repeats with striking consistency. Exposed concrete ceilings, glass partition walls, hard flooring throughout: every one of these elements is one an architect would put on a moodboard, and every one of them is a surface that reflects sound rather than absorbing it. The interior design brief and the acoustic brief have been operating as two separate conversations for years. Hybrid work is the reason that the gap has become impossible to ignore.

That gap between what a room looks like and what it sounds like has quietly become one of the more consequential blind spots in commercial AV. It's also, finally, becoming fixable in a way that survives a tender document rather than getting waved through as an interior design afterthought.

Hybrid work raised the acoustic bar on what a meeting room actually needs to do acoustically, and most rooms built for the open-plan, glass-partition aesthetic of the last decade were never designed to meet it. A widely cited 2024 industry survey of 2,000 knowledge workers across the US, UK, Germany, and France found that 63 percent struggle to concentrate because of noise in their own workplace, and that poor audio quality in calls carries its own separate mental-health cost. Those are not numbers about broken microphones. They're numbers about untreated rooms.

For years, the industry lacked a shared, testable reference for what an acoustically sound workspace actually requires. That changed with the publication of a European standard specifically covering acoustic quality in open-plan and flexible workspaces, giving architects, AV designers, and facilities teams a common technical language for what had previously been argued over on instinct.

The standard, ISO 22955:2021, Acoustics — Acoustic quality of open office spaces, sets out technical guidance covering six distinct activity types within open-plan layouts, from vacant floor plates through to spaces combining multiple activities. Its real value to an AV professional isn't the document itself. It's what having a testable reference does to a conversation with a client: reverberation time stops being a matter of taste and becomes a number you can measure, specify, and verify on handover.

In short, bad acoustics are no longer just an aesthetic complaint. They're now a measurable failure against a published standard, in front of a client who increasingly knows to ask.

Put two meeting rooms side by side, one with acoustic treatment and one without, and the former will sound noticeably better before either camera or microphone gets switched on. The difference is reverberation time, or RT60: a measure of how long it takes sound to decay in a room. Rooms built for video conferencing generally need this figure kept low and controlled; a well-treated meeting room lets a sentence die away almost as soon as it's spoken, rather than lingering and layering over whatever gets said next. Getting there is fundamentally a materials and surface-treatment problem, solved before a single microphone gets mounted, rather than a hardware problem solved afterwards.

What has changed is the material category available to solve it. Acoustic panels, ceiling clouds, and hanging baffles are now widely available in felt made from recycled PET plastic, typically sixty to sixty-five percent post-consumer content, alongside cork and other natural-fibre options. These aren't compromise materials chosen because a client asked for something sustainable. They perform. Manufacturers routinely publish absorption data alongside Environmental Product Declarations and Health Product Declarations, the same documentation architects already use to justify material choices under green building certification schemes.

That documentation is what turns acoustic treatment from a design flourish into a defensible line item. An AV designer who can point to a published absorption coefficient and an EPD is making a specification decision, not a decorating one. That distinction matters when a client's procurement team is comparing quotes, and it matters just as much when a sustainability-conscious client asks what's actually in the panels going on their walls.

It matters for a second, less obvious reason too. Panels made from recycled PET felt can be cut, coloured, and shaped into ceiling clouds, wall-mounted geometric patterns, or freestanding room dividers without sacrificing the absorption performance underneath. An integrator no longer has to choose between a room that measures well and a room that photographs well for the client's own marketing. Both requirements can now sit on the same line item, with the same supporting data.

Integrated Systems Europe's 2026 edition introduced dedicated high-end listening suites in a newly refurbished area of the venue, purpose-built environments where the acoustic treatment of the room and the audio experience inside it are designed together rather than in sequence. The show's own framing was explicit: the aim was to blend acoustics with the physical design of the space, not to bolt one onto the other after the fact.

The detail worth noticing isn't the show floor spectacle. It's the sequencing. When a major European trade event builds dedicated space around acoustics-plus-design as a combined discipline, that's a signal the category has matured past niche interest among specialist acousticians and into something the wider AV industry is expected to understand. Whether individual integrators catch up as quickly as the show floor did is the more interesting question, and one this category will likely answer over the next year or two.

AVIXA's own guidance on conference room design already treats acoustics as core scope rather than an afterthought, recommending treatment placed at first reflection points and chosen to complement the interior design rather than added apologetically once the room is finished. The shift now underway is about when that thinking happens, not whether it happens at all.

Measure before you specify. Run an RT60 assessment as a standard part of the needs analysis, before displays and microphones get chosen, not after a client complains that calls sound hollow.

Bring an acoustic consultant in at the same stage as the architect, not after the room is built. AVIXA's community has been making this case directly: acoustics and AV perform best as a unified discipline from the outset.

Treat acoustic materials as their own budget line, next to displays and microphones, not folded into a vague interiors allowance. Ask for absorption coefficients and, where the client cares about it, EPD or HPD documentation. Specify against a target RT60, not a material name.

Coordinate mechanical systems at the same time. Quiet HVAC, sound-rated ductwork, and proper air balance solve problems that panels alone cannot, and retrofitting them later costs considerably more than specifying them correctly the first time.

Write the acoustic outcome into the handover documentation alongside the equipment list. A client who receives a measured RT60 figure alongside their AV drawings has something to hold the room to. A client who receives only a list of installed hardware has no way of knowing whether the space itself was ever actually addressed.

Say this to a client directly, because it's true: no camera, microphone, or DSP setting fixes a room that reflects sound instead of absorbing it. Ask what the room's RT60 target is before agreeing on the AV budget, not after the install has already failed its first real call.

Displays get compared, mounted, and admired. Microphones get benchmarked in spec sheets down to the decibel. Acoustic treatment has spent years getting neither, being treated as decoration rather than infrastructure. That era is closing. A published standard, materials with real sustainability documentation, and a major European trade show now all point the same way: treat the room as a specified system, not a finished backdrop you apologise for afterwards. Put RT60 on the spec sheet before you put a single microphone in the ceiling. Everything downstream of a bad room is just expensive compensation for a decision that was never made.