Office phone booths and meeting cubicles help staff stay away from distractions and boost overall work efficiency, yet these advantages can only be realized through regular daily use. To bring their practical value into full play, such pods need to be arranged within easy reach of users, which puts forward strict requirements on their sound insulation performance.
In practical application, qualified sound insulation means these pods can be installed directly beside common office workstations, ensuring outside staff cannot hear any conversations taking place inside. This performance is particularly vital for single-person office pods for casual daily use.
The newly released ISO 23351-1 standard is available to comprehensively evaluate the overall sound insulation effect of office pods. It adopts a unified index known as speech level reduction to judge indoor voice privacy performance. Generally speaking, a 30-decibel speech level reduction fully meets the above practical sound insulation needs. If the sound insulation effect fails to reach this standard, the pods need to be placed farther away from external working areas. You can click here to learn more details about this latest ISO industry standard.
Apart from external sound isolation effect, internal acoustic environment inside the pods is also a key factor that cannot be ignored. Poor indoor acoustic conditions will hinder smooth communication during phone calls and group discussions, and users tend to speak louder unconsciously, which will further damage internal conversation privacy.
Reverberation time is a common indicator to judge indoor acoustic quality. Due to the compact space of office pods, accurate and credible reverberation time testing cannot be carried out. Instead, the coverage area and thickness of internal sound-absorbing materials can effectively reflect its actual acoustic performance. Similar to sound insulation testing, field practical trial is essential to confirm that users can enjoy clear and natural voice communication inside the pods.