Acoustic Ceiling Tiles and Printed Wall Panels in a Brisbane Office: Megaport

Megaport is a Brisbane-headquartered network services company. Their office had the problem most offices have. Hard surfaces, open working areas, a suspended ceiling doing nothing acoustically, and speech carrying further than anyone wanted it to.

We supplied and installed Autex Quietspace Ceiling Tiles across the suspended ceiling, and four Autex Cube panels printed with Megaport's own artwork across a 3900mm feature wall.

The before and after clap tests are further down. This is a walk through of that project, followed by what we would tell anyone researching acoustic treatment for an office: why the ceiling usually matters more than the walls, and what a printed panel can and cannot do.

The project: Megaport, Brisbane

The room had the profile you would expect from a modern commercial fitout. Plasterboard walls, hard flooring, glazing, and a standard suspended grid ceiling fitted with mineral fibre tiles that were never specified for acoustic performance.

That combination leaves almost every surface reflective. Sound produced anywhere in the room bounces between the floor, the ceiling and the walls, and each reflection arrives at the listener slightly later than the last. Speech stops sounding crisp, people raise their voices to compensate, and the room gets louder without anyone doing anything differently.

The client brought the artwork

Megaport supplied their own design, a deep blue cloudscape with concentric arcs running through it, and it was printed onto the panel face rather than approximated with off-the-shelf colours.

The panel width came from the wall, not from the stock sheet. The wall measured 3900mm, so the artwork was divided into four equal 975mm sections. Panels are supplied wider than that, but sizing to the wall rather than to the sheet meant four equal panels with evenly spaced joins and no narrow offcut at one end. On a feature wall carrying artwork, an uneven final panel is the detail that makes an installation look unresolved.

At 24mm the panels are also doing genuine acoustic work, not just carrying a picture. Cube rates NRC 0.70 at that thickness, so roughly 10.7m² of previously bare plasterboard became one of the more absorptive surfaces in the room while becoming the most visible thing in it.

That is the argument for a printed panel over a painted feature wall. The wall was always going to be a branding surface. Making it a working acoustic surface at the same time costs nothing in floor area and nothing in design intent.

What makes artwork work on an acoustic panel

Not every design translates well, and the ones that do tend to share a few things. Megaport's did, which is part of why it came out cleanly.

Soft, gradient-heavy artwork suits the surface. A polyester acoustic panel has a fibrous face rather than a smooth one, so it holds broad tonal areas beautifully and is less forgiving of hairline detail than paper or vinyl would be. Large shapes, gradients and generous forms read exactly as intended. Very fine linework and small type are the elements to be careful with.

Join placement is the other consideration, and it is worth resolving at design stage rather than on site. A panelised wall will have joins, and wherever they land they will cross the artwork. Dividing the design into equal sections and positioning the joins so they fall through open areas rather than through a focal element keeps them almost invisible. Where a join has to cross something detailed, the eye finds it immediately.

Practically, that means supplying artwork at the full finished wall size and treating the panel divisions as part of the design rather than something applied to it afterwards. If you send us a design, we will mark up the divisions and send it back before anything is printed.

Hear the difference

A clap test is the simplest way to hear reverberation, and it is worth doing in your own space before you spend anything. Clap once, then listen to what happens after the clap rather than to the clap itself.

In an untreated room the sound does not stop when the clap stops. It carries on for a moment as a tail, ringing off the hard surfaces before it dies away. That tail is what makes speech hard to follow, because each word is still audible underneath the next one.

Before treatment:

After treatment:

The clap itself is much the same in both. What changes is what follows it. In the treated room the sound stops close to where it started, which is exactly what you want in a space where people talk to each other and to clients on calls.

Why the ceiling carries most of the load

The printed wall is the part everyone notices. The ceiling is the part that changed the clap test most.

In almost any office, the ceiling is the largest uninterrupted surface in the room. Walls get broken up by doors, glazing, joinery, screens and whiteboards. Floors get covered by desks and people. The ceiling is one continuous plane from wall to wall, and in most fitouts it is doing nothing acoustically at all.

Standard mineral fibre grid tiles are specified for cost, fire performance and appearance. Absorption is not usually the reason they are chosen, and many of them absorb very little. Swapping them for an acoustic tile changes the single biggest surface in the room without touching a wall.

Quietspace Ceiling Tiles rate NRC 0.85 and are sized at 1190 x 590mm to drop straight into a standard suspended grid. There is no fixing, no adhesive and no making good. The old tile lifts out, the new one drops in, and each one weighs about 7kg.

That matters more than it sounds for an occupied office. A ceiling tile changeover can be staged room by room, or done outside business hours, without trades working overhead across a live floor. Very few acoustic upgrades are that undisruptive.

What we would tell anyone treating an office

Start with the ceiling

If you have a suspended grid ceiling and an echo problem, the ceiling is almost always the first move and often the only one you need. It is the biggest surface, it is usually untreated, and it is the easiest to change. Treating walls first is a common and expensive mistake, because you end up covering wall area you wanted for something else while the largest reflective plane in the room stays untouched.

Use walls for what ceilings cannot do

Walls come into their own for two things. The first is targeted treatment near where people actually talk, such as meeting areas, breakout spaces and call-heavy zones. The second is design, which is what happened here. If a wall is going to be a brand surface anyway, making it absorptive costs no extra space.

Do the clap test before you brief anyone

Record it on your phone. Stand roughly in the middle of the empty room, clap once, and let the recording run for a few seconds afterwards. Do it in each space you are worried about, and keep the files.

Two reasons this is worth thirty seconds of your time. It gives you something concrete to send a supplier instead of describing the problem in words, and it tells you which rooms are genuinely the worst rather than which ones feel worst when you happen to be in them. Meeting rooms and breakout areas often measure worse than open floors, because a small hard room with parallel walls holds sound in a way a large space does not.

It also gives you a before. Once the treatment is in, the same clap in the same spot is the only proof you will need that the money did something.

Check the fire classification before anything else

Wall and ceiling linings in commercial buildings must meet a material group number determined by testing to AS 5637.1, and which group is permitted depends on the building class, the location within the building and whether the building is sprinklered.

Both products used here are classified Group 1, the best available classification, with the ceiling tile rated Group 1-S to ISO 9705. Ask any supplier for the group number in writing before you order. If they cannot produce one, the product cannot be signed off as a lining no matter how well it performs acoustically.

The products used

Autex Quietspace Ceiling Tiles are 1190 x 590mm acoustic tiles made from 100% polyester fibre with over 60% recycled content, available in 25mm (0.75 NRC) and 50mm thickness (1.0 NRC). They drop into a standard suspended ceiling grid and are classified Group 1-S to ISO 9705.

Autex Cube Acoustic Panels are semi-rigid polyester wall panels available in 12mm and 24mm, rated NRC 0.45 and 0.70 respectively, with higher figures achievable when installed with an air gap. They come in a large solid colour range and can be printed with custom graphics, as they were here. Made in Australia, carbon neutral, and covered by a ten year warranty.

Talk to us about your space

We supply and install acoustic treatment across Brisbane and South East Queensland, from single-room ceiling changeovers through to full office fitouts. If you have a space that sounds like the first clap test, we can look at it and tell you what will actually make the difference.

Acoustic panels in Brisbane: onsite quotes and installation