When you’re presenting A/V and control solutions to corporate facilities clients, how often do you ask them about office acoustics? Do they know that as an integrator you can improve their work atmosphere as much as the guy who installs the water cooler?

“The most important things about sound masking are providing speech privacy and comfort,” says Jonathan Leonard, vice president of Lencore Acoustics.

“The industry has been missing the point,” he says. “Where are people most emotionally connected to on a daily basis? Their workstation - where they sit, where they speak. The number one complaint in offices is acoustics. [Commercial integrators] look at the boardroom; I look at the whole building.”

Leonard stresses that integrators can look beyond the boardroom for installation opportunities involving sound masking and acoustics. Along with office spaces, healthcare, government facilities, educational environments and almost anywhere mass notification systems are employed can benefit from acoustics.

Plus, he adds, integrators and clients may not be aware that sound masking and acoustics solutions can earn points toward LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification, which is becoming more important in today’s commercial construction projects.

To bring more attention to the category, and to help integrators pitch it to potential customers, Lencore has created a comprehensive checklist (.pdf) of proposal items that covers areas such as fundamentals, comfort, speech privacy, open platform network and control capabilities, and paging.

Along with the checklist items, Lencore’s S.M.A.R.T. (Sound Masking Assessment Review Template) cheat sheet includes some general factors regarding comfort and speech privacy that you need to consider when spec’ing a system, such as:

• Origin of the sound, and number of sources used to create it
• Distribution and delivery of sound
• The uniformity or coverage of the sound, dependent on layout and speaker orientation
• The spectrum, and the system’s ability to produce low frequencies and frequencies within the speech spectrum range
• Ability to customize the sound
• Ability to mask speech unobtrusively while adding acoustical comfort
• Contouring sound appropriately to achieve proper masking curve for the environment
• Achieving levels of speech privacy according to standards such as ASTM (E-1130), RASTI, STIPA and more

Other factors that will affect your system design include equipment serviceability, speaker type, security IT issues, controllability, and maintenance costs and flexibility. “When [clients] don’t know the difference between products, price is usually the tiebreaker,” Leonard says. For integrators looking to expand their wares, getting better educated on sound masking can pay off big.

About the author

Arlen Schweiger

Arlen Schweiger is managing editor of CE Pro and Commercial Integrator magazines. Arlen contributes installation features, business profiles, manufacturer news and product reviews.

View all posts by Arlen Schweiger