6/30/2023
MBI Products: A Heavyweight in the Office Acoustics Market
The call for RTO (return to office) is drawing attention to workplace acoustics.
MBI Products’ office projects are soaring, and for good reason. We are among the most experienced suppliers in the market.
MBI Products pioneered the original Cloud-Lite Acoustical Baffle over fifty years ago and remains a key player in the office acoustics space, according to a report on the global office acoustic panels market.
Cloud-Lite® Acoustical Baffles top the industry
Cloud-Lite sound-absorbing panels are ideal for offices with excess noise issues. They are easily suspended from ceilings, bar joists, horizontally stretched cable, or pre-engineered suspension systems, manufactured in countless colors and sizes. Class A fire-rated, lightweight, cost-efficient, and easy to install, Cloud-Lite Baffles are the industry’s most practical solution to noise control in office environments.
The noisy transition from home office to shared workspace
With working from home steadily declining, traditional office traffic is picking up. As some of the country’s largest companies like Disney, Amazon, and Google bring workers back to the office, many more will follow suit. In fact, less than 10% of workers in the U.S. currently have a fully remote job.
Consequently, the physical workplace is getting more attention than ever. Companies feel pressure to create an appealing, comfortable, and productive work atmosphere, and MBI Products has the depth of knowledge and experience to assist and remediate noisy office environments.
The effects of intrusive office noise can be serious and frustrating. For those who have returned to the office after working in virtual cocoons at home, the noise at work is often distracting and even detrimental to productivity. Depending on the size of the space, office chatter, telephones, electronics, and other sounds can take a long time to dissipate, layering the noise intensity. This effect makes the human brain unsettled and tired, causing a loss of concentration and productivity where it’s needed most — in the office, particularly in open configurations.
Many agree: open offices promote distraction
While open office plans are intended to foster collaboration and creativity among employees, many agree on the drawbacks to a design that features wide open spaces. Frequent interruptions and distractions while working can be costly to overall productivity. Concentration requires quiet for most of us, but an open office is anything but. The primary cause? A lack of excess sound absorption. Acoustic design often gets overlooked or lost when designing open offices, and employees suffer the consequences. We see it all the time.
Here’s what is happening in that noisy room and how the volume can be lowered with simple acoustic solutions. When a sound wave strikes a surface, such as a floor, wall, or ceiling, the direction of travel is changed by reflection. Reflected waves will continue darting around the space, losing only a fraction of power by absorption at each reflection.
The prolongation of sound is called reverberation, and it fatigues and confuses the human mind over time. “For maximum comfort and productivity, we like to see the reverberation time in an office environment down to about one second,” says MBI’s Chuck Splain. “At this level, employees don’t have to compete with each other to be heard. If everyone has to keep raising their voices, it eventually becomes impossible for anyone to be heard.”
MBI Products’ acoustic solutions
So what is the main culprit? Hard, flat surfaces around the office space. We hear the complaints, and we’re here to help. Incorporating some sound-absorbing surfaces to reduce multiple reflection points will alleviate the noise problem permanently. The Cloud-Lite system was designed to bring down the decibel level in a room and shorten reverberation times, creating a calmer environment for working. We’ve installed many thousands of baffles over the years with great success for office dwellers.