Acoustic panels for public buildings and local authorities.

Public buildings combine two factors that worsen acoustics: large volumes and hard surfaces, often washable for hygiene reasons. Tiling, stainless steel, glazing, concrete, smooth floors. Nothing absorbs the sound, everything reflects it. Noise does not escape, it bounces from wall to wall and accumulates. That is reverberation, and it turns the slightest din into continuous racket.

Add a mechanism every parent knows without naming it: the Lombard effect. In noise, everyone spontaneously raises their voice to be heard. The neighbour does the same, and the level climbs step after step. In a school canteen full of children, the result often tops 80 dB(A), the equivalent of dense road traffic endured throughout the service. Canteen staff spend the day there, every day of the week.

In a classroom, the problem takes another form: the teacher's voice drowns in its own sound tail. At the back of the room, a pupil no longer makes out the words, only a mush. The right answer is not to shout louder, it is acoustic treatment: fitting absorbent surfaces to reduce the reverberation time and make speech clear.

Placing panels by guesswork means spending public money with no guarantee of results. We always start from a numeric goal. The key indicator is called the reverberation time, or RT: how long a sound takes to decay once the source stops. The longer it is, the more the room rings and the more confused speech becomes. That is exactly what makes a canteen deafening and a classroom painful to follow.

This benchmark is not something we made up. The NF S 31-080 standard serves as an acoustic-quality reference and sets targets according to the room's use. For a classroom, a common aim is an RT of around 0.4 to 0.6 second. For a canteen or a large volume, the target is adapted to the type of space and its ceiling height. Setting that goal at the outset gives a measurable heading to size the amount of absorbing area, instead of a vague "we want it to be less noisy".

One last technical point that weighs in public spaces: PET felt works mainly between 250 and 4000 Hz, the band of the human voice. That is precisely where the intelligibility of an instruction or a lesson is decided. So we choose the panel thickness, their layout and the air gap behind them based on that target and the room's real volume, never on a single recipe applied to everything.

A fair question, all the more when the money is public. Let's be concrete. A made-to-measure acoustic panel starts at around 49 € depending on the format and the printing. A project's budget depends mainly on the absorbing area to install, so on the volume to treat and the level of comfort you aim for. A classroom is often treated for a few hundred euros, a dining hall or a multipurpose hall for a few thousand, depending on size.

Rather than a per-square-metre rate disconnected from the result, we price a layout that targets a specific acoustic goal, the famous RT. You pay for the effect obtained, not a pile of panels. The quote details the treated area, the formats, any printing and the lead time, which makes it easier to weigh internally or in council.

For a public tender or a call for bids, we supply the administrative documents useful for your tender file: detailed quote, product sheets, fire report, absorption sheet, and a technical memorandum if needed. Delivery ships DDP, duties and taxes included, with no hidden cost on receipt. For a school group or several sites, we align deliveries and installations with your holiday or works calendar.