Sound First: The Missing Piece in Modern Workplaces

As offices and mixed-use workplaces get trendier, something important often slips through the cracks. Designers focus on glass, polished concrete, exposed ceilings, and uber-slick collaboration zones—the aesthetic of productivity, not the mechanics of it.

In the pursuit of cool, workplaces gradually became louder, harder and more reflective. They look incredible. They sound terrible. Somewhere along the line, acoustics stopped being treated as infrastructure.

In mixed-use environments, that oversight becomes even sharper. The same floor is expected to support deep focus, casual collaboration, hybrid presentations, and heavy footfall. Screens get specified, furniture is chosen, lighting is value-engineered — and the way the space sounds is left to chance.

The result? Meetings that strain, calls that fatigue, and teams working harder than they should to be heard.

Hybrid work has removed any remaining cover. A room that looks good but behaves badly now broadcasts its problems straight into the meeting. Suddenly, the ability to hear clearly — and be heard without effort — is no longer a background detail. It’s the difference between a workplace that functions and one that quietly drains everyone in it.

Sound isn’t decoration. It’s the medium of work. And when it’s designed properly, the room stops fighting you, and starts supporting you.

Designed to look good. Not designed to sound good...

Before hybrid, poor acoustics were annoying but survivable. Today, the room is broadcast to remote participants who hear every reflection, scrape and side conversation. At the same time, mixed-use floors combine conflicting activities: someone’s presentation overlaps with someone else’s one-to-one beside someone’s quiet hour. The building was designed around how it looks, not how work sounds.

The consequences: higher cognitive load, unclear speech, repeated questions, meeting drift and uneven inclusion for neurodivergent and hearing-impaired colleagues. Which leads to the question: can we make this environment sound intentional?

We can—that's the 'A' in AV...

Why mixed-use spaces unravel without AV

Multi-purpose floors live or die by sound. Focus zones need low ambient noise and controlled reverberation; collaboration areas benefit from gentle masking; circulation routes should buffer rather than bleed.

When AV is engaged early, these behaviours are designed on purpose. When it isn’t, each new activity adds noise and erodes clarity. The difference between “busy” and “unusable” is often a handful of well-placed treatments and calibrated systems.

The human core: hearing and being heard

Strip away the technology and trends, and workplaces succeed on a basic human truth: people must hear each other clearly and be heard without effort. When that happens, ideas move faster, decisions stick, and meetings end sooner. When it doesn’t, people compensate—leaning in, repeating themselves, guessing at intent—and fatigue becomes part of the process.

The AV Behind a Functional Workspace

1. Room tuning 
AV teams don’t just “put panels on walls.” They measure reverberation, frequency response, and speech clarity, then design treatments that fix the actual acoustic profile. No hexagonal felt stickers pretending to be acoustic science...

2. Intelligent microphones 
Beamforming arrays, ceiling microphones with proper lobe control, and DSP that isolates the speaker instead of the entire street outside. The kit only works properly after the room is treated, but once it is, the difference is night and day.

3. Structured audio zoning
Break the office into sound-managed areas: focus zones, collaboration zones, buffer zones. AV isn’t just about equipment; it’s spatial strategy.

4. Hybrid meeting optimisation
Acoustic dampening + tuned microphones + noise gating + proper speaker placement = remote participants who don’t feel like they’re listening through a drainpipe.

5. Visual + acoustic integration
AV can actually shape room layout: screen placement, table orientation, microphone geometry. When these are aligned, speech clarity jumps and meeting fatigue disappears.

6. The boring but crucial bit: standards compliance
STI (Speech Transmission Index), ambient noise levels, accessibility requirements, hearing-assist tech… all the stuff that architects forget and AV has to rescue afterwards.

7. Retrofitting without tearing the place up
Wall-mounted absorbers, baffles, ceiling clouds, smart materials, and targeted DSP adjustments. You don’t need to bulldoze your office. You just need someone who knows what they’re doing.

What this delivers

When workplaces fall short, it’s rarely because the furniture was wrong or the branding was off. It’s because the room didn’t support the very thing the organisation runs on: people trying to hear each other and be heard.

Sound shapes behaviour. It dictates whether teams collaborate easily or retreat into headphones, whether hybrid feels natural or second-rate, whether a space energises or quietly drains.

Treating acoustics and AV as an afterthought is how rooms end up beautiful but dysfunctional. Treating them as infrastructure is how they start performing. The moment you design for how work sounds—not just how it photographs—the entire environment shifts. Meetings tighten. Focus deepens. Hybrid stops apologising for itself. The building finally feels like it’s on your side.

That’s the difference measured AV makes.