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Achieving Office Privacy  If your office is like most, it's sorely lacking in the acoustic privacy department. Most offices are actually designed to be too quiet, with the result that conversations can be easily understood far beyond their intended audience, causing distractions, worker stress and creating potential liability issues. In order to overcome these privacy issues, sound masking remains your primary solution.What is Sound Masking and How Does It Work?Sound masking is based on the phenomenon that when low-level background noise is added to an environment, intruding speech and noise are less intelligible. Sound masking fills in the sound spectrum around you with barely perceptible, low-level noise that is actually designed to sound like typical office air conditioning, so that you won't notice it. In other words, it's a gentle "whooshing" sound. Your Comfort and Privacy Depend on This Key Element!The level of comfort and privacy provided by any sound masking system is determined by one key element: uniformity. How uniform or even sound is distributed throughout the treated area (both volume as well as frequency) determines your degree of privacy. Only highly uniform sound will provide highly effective privacy. Two Types of Technology: How Do They Affect Your Privacy?For more than 40 years the industry has used indirect-field (define) speaker systems to add sound masking to office environments. The newest of these systems now rely on networking technology in an effort to improve their uniformity. However, this increased sophistication doesn’t address the underlying source of the uniformity problem, it only reduces the effort required by installers who adjust the system.  Figure 1 (left, click to animate) illustrates the near-impossibility of achieving good uniformity using an indirect field system. The basic assumption is that the plenum (define) will "spread out" the sound in the plenum, improving the uniformity. What actually happens is that the plenum itself actually causes the opposite to occur. Plenums hide large structural elements, such as HVAC ductwork or structural beams, which effectively compartmentalize the sound. Even if the plenum is atypical and contains no large elements, openings in the ceiling for air returns and lighting fixtures permit proportionately more sound to be emitted below them. Next Generation Privacy Technology Tired of the endless chore of developing increasingly-sophisticated ways to compensate for the problems of putting speakers above the ceiling, designers developed a "direct field" system (define) that addressed the root cause of such difficulties by moving the speakers out of the plenum. In contrast with an above-ceiling system, the uniform gray in Figure 2 (right, click to animate) illustrates the superior effectiveness of direct field technology.By properly choosing ultra-wide dispersion (define) emitters or speakers, the background sound exhibits greater uniformity, with a variability of less than 1 dB throughout the treated space – several decibels better than any indirect-field system can reliably achieve.
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