Sound Masking Solutions for Your Workplace
Sound masking systems are designed to reduce distracting noises and enhance privacy in workspaces. By introducing a subtle, engineered ambient sound, these systems effectively drown out unwanted noises and conversations, making the office environment more peaceful and productive. This smooth sound layer makes it harder for employees to overhear conversations, ensuring greater confidentiality and focus throughout the workspace.
Request a DemoWhat is Sound Masking?
Sound masking is a technology used mainly in office spaces to reduce distractions and protect privacy. By adding a subtle, ambient sound, similar to airflow, through strategically placed speakers, it elevates the background noise level, making it harder to overhear conversations. This creates a more comfortable, focused, and private work environment, especially in open office settings where noise can be distracting.
Blog & Articles
Latest Workplace Trends, Industry News, Sound Masking Experts' Insights, and Much More.
Interview With Work Design Magazine
Work Design Magazine Founder and Executive Publisher, Bob Fox, recently interviewed Soft dB’s Jeff Cauchon, President & CEO and Kate Paradis, Sound Masking Specialist for Southern California & Arizona. Watch the video here to see what we learned!
How Sound Masking Works
Watch this video to learn how sound masking systems can reduce noise distractions, improve speech privacy, and create a more comfortable acoustic environment.
Benefits of Sound Masking
Fewer Noise Distractions at Work
Sound masking makes surrounding conversations and common noisy distractions a lot less audible. This results in employees feeling less distracted, achieving better concentration, and becoming significantly more productive—especially with cognitively demanding tasks.
Better Acoustic Privacy and Comfort
It's simpler and cheaper to rely on a sound masking system than on standard soundproofing methods to ensure good speech privacy and confidentiality in meeting rooms, private offices, and open floor plans alike.
Lower Office Construction Costs
Sound masking reduces the need for specialty acoustic insulation and extra drywall layers in closed rooms requiring good acoustic privacy. It increases the soundproofing capacity of demountable partitions with no compromise on design flexibility and aesthetics.
Learn more about benefits
Top Sectors That Benefit from Sound Masking Technology
Financial Services
Banks, insurers, and accounting firms have the responsibility to protect their clients' sensitive data. Sound masking helps keeping information confidential when discussed among employees, making conversations less intelligible for others.
Retail Banking
Customers expect a comfortable and private experience when visiting their local bank branch. Sound masking improves privacy between teller stations and meeting pods where personal information is shared with advisors.
Attorneys & Law Firms
What is the attorney-client privilege without a rigid approach to confidentiality? The world's greatest law firms rely on sound masking to make their meeting rooms more private and improve acoustic comfort in open-plan areas.
Healthcare Facilities
Hospitals and medical practices rely on sound masking for HIPAA compliance, ensuring better speech privacy and patient confidentiality in exam rooms. Intensive care units also use it to help patients sleep and recover better.
Government Offices
Federal agencies use sound masking to reduce common noisy distractions and ensure superior acoustic privacy for thousands of employees working side by side in collaborative, flexible open-plan office environments.
Educational and Training Facilities
Employing sound masking in corporate training rooms and educational facilities to improve learning and teaching conditions by minimizing external noise distractions.
Call Centers
Sound masking is a cost-effective solution to ensure a better, smoother calling experience for both service agents and customers by muffling out concurrent phone conversations carried by neighboring call center agents.
Hotels & Casinos
Hotels use sound masking to make their rooms more private and soothing acoustically, which also improves their guest sleeping experience. Casinos use it to conceal private conversations, at the cashier desks and in staff only areas.
Technology and R&D Labs
Utilizing sound masking in R&D and technology labs to minimize distractions and protect intellectual property by making conversations less audible.
These Global Leaders Chose Our Sound Masking Technology
Backed by a team of dedicated professionals in business development and a network of hand-picked distributors, we're honored to have won the trust of many Fortune 1000 organizations worldwide. But no client is too small to benefit from our sound masking system.
What our clients say about us
"Our Soft dB sound masking system covers 21 floors in two adjoining buildings and 14 floors in a third building. This system is an absolute pleasure to work with and manipulate when changes are necessary. I have personally operated many sound masking systems in the past and never experienced something so user-friendly with almost unlimited system functionality."
Andrew Svedin, Chief Engineer, CBRE
What Types of Spaces Should Use Sound Masking?
Open-Plan Offices
Scientific research confirms that sound masking significantly enhances speech privacy and improves employee wellness in open-plan offices. By reducing distractions from surrounding conversations and incidental noises within a 15- to 40-foot radius of sound masking speakers, employees can better focus and feel at ease. Even without physical partitions to block noise propagation, sound masking helps create a more comfortable and productive work environment, allowing everyone to concentrate on demanding tasks and achieve higher productivity.
Private Offices & Meeting Rooms
Did you know that raising a room's ambient sound level can enhance acoustic privacy just as effectively as using more soundproofing materials? Sound masking increases acoustic privacy by making private rooms and adjacent spaces less silent, reducing the need for expensive soundproof doors and thicker walls. This solution helps achieve higher composite STC ratings without sacrificing design aesthetics. By incorporating sound masking, office construction costs can be lowered by up to $3 per square foot.
Hybrid Workplaces
In hybrid working environments, no two days are alike. The soundscape tends to vary a lot based on the ever-changing levels of occupancy, from buzzing and distracting to pindrop quiet and fairly tense. Sound masking continuously evens out the office soundscape by eliminating pindrop silent moments, preventing conversations from being singled out in the space, and muffling out surrounding distractions on busier, noisier days.
LEED & WELL Certified Workplaces
Both LEED and WELL building standards provide globally acknowledged roadmaps to delivering spaces that put health and comfort of occupants at the core. And both LEED v4 and WELL v2 certifications reward design decisions made about improving acoustic privacy and comfort of spaces. Unsurprisingly, both rating systems outright encourage the use of sound masking to meet their high acoustic performance requirements.
Understanding Sound Masking Systems
All sound masking systems serve essentially the same purpose: artificially increasing the ambient background sound level of a space just enough to even out its sonic landscape, eliminate awkward pin-drop silent moments, and decrease speech perception within open work areas and between adjacent private rooms.
How Much Does Sound Masking Cost?
It is often assumed that a sound masking system is an extra expense that can hardly fit into an office buildout or retrofit budget that's already tight as it is. But do you know the cost of workplace distractions and lack of acoustic privacy in terms of employee productivity?
Calculate return on investmentWhy Choose Soft dB’s Adaptive Sound Masking
Soft dB sound masking system is a proven, cost-effective solution for improving acoustic privacy and comfort in workplace, healthcare, and hospitality settings. The automatic and precise tuning of the masking sound based on the unique design attributes and acoustical conditions of individual areas covered is what makes our system special. The world's most effective yet simple sound masking technology is all about 3 key features:
Adaptive Volume Based on Office Noise Levels
Because you never really know how loud or quiet your workspace will be on any given day, our system can self-adapt to its activity levels. The masking volume automatically increases during busier, noisier periods and decreases as things go quieter. Would you rather have complete control? Just use the timer function and set volume levels on your schedule. Read Scientific study conducted by Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands
Automatic Equalization Based on Room Acoustics
Our system's patented calibration process analyzes the room's frequency response in real time and automatically generates the optimal sound masking spectrum based on the unique acoustical properties, sound absorbing tiles, reflective surfaces, furniture, etc., of each zone covered. Entire sound masking systems can be calibrated in a matter of minutes, not hours.
Networkable Multi Zone Control & Source Mixing
Wired or wireless, our system makes it simple to split an office space into small, independently controlled sound masking and paging zones, at lower installation costs. You want louder sound masking in the open work area than in private meeting rooms, but only want paging and/or ambient music in the hallway and lobby? It's easy. Need to flip that around? Done!
Accredited Course for Architects, Interior Designers, and AV Professionals
We’ve built a simple online course to help you gain in-depth understanding of how sound masking is one of today’s most cost-effective methods of delivering an office soundscape that employees will love. The course is registered with AIA/HSW, GBCI, IDCEC and AVIXA for learning units.
Take the course10,000,000 ft2 of Office Sound Masking Installed Each Year
Chances are you've visited a space covered by our sound masking system before without even knowing it. In fact, some of your friends may be working in offices that run our system without even realizing it. And that's the whole point of sound masking: Ensuring better acoustic privacy, making distant conversations less intelligible, and helping busy employees stay in flow state—all while remaining virtually unnoticed except for the relief it provides.
Financeit by Clearspace
Toronto, ON
Designed with a modern touch and impeccable taste, these offices truly exemplify the essence of a dynamic work environment. Our advanced sound masking system seamlessly integrates into the design, providing the perfect acoustic balance.
New Balance Headquarters
Boston, MA
Delivering an optimal working soundscape in America's first LEED V2009 Platinum Core & Shell certified corporate headquarter to earn all points in indoor environmental quality.
Partners Healthcare's Campus
Somerville, MA
Improving some 4200 employees’ acoustic comfort, privacy, and focus across 12 office floors in Partners Healthcare's LEED-certified administrative campus in Assembly Row.
Akamai Technologies Headquarters
Cambridge, MA
Helping a global technology leader strike the perfect balance between the need for smooth interactions among teams and quiet time to concentrate on complex engineering tasks.
Make Your Workspace a Better Place With Sound Masking
Our advanced sound masking technology will help you increase productivity in your workspace by reducing noisy distractions while improving concentration and acoustic privacy. A comfortable working environment positively impacts employee mood, drive, and performance.
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