Porsche Centre Melbourne

The Challenge

A premium conference room must support clear conversation, presentations and large video meetings. At Porsche Centre Melbourne, the meeting space looked professional but suffered from excessive echo and prolonged reverberation.

The room’s large footprint, hard floor, long meeting table, walls and untreated ceiling caused speech to reflect repeatedly. Instead of words fading naturally, they overlapped with the next sentence. This reduced speech intelligibility during face-to-face discussions and made Zoom meetings difficult, particularly when several people were speaking from different positions around the table.

The conditions were also challenging for participants using hearing aids, who found it difficult to separate spoken words from the surrounding reflections. The issue was not the people, microphones or conferencing platform. It was the room acoustics.

Pre-installation testing recorded an average RT60 of 2.15 seconds, with reverberation reaching 2.40 seconds at 2 kHz. This confirmed that the room required a targeted commercial acoustic treatment rather than adjustments to meeting behaviour or technology.

SoundFix regularly addresses this issue in offices, conference rooms and call centres, where clear speech is essential for productive communication.

The Solution

SoundFix Acoustics recommended a ceiling-based treatment using high-performance acoustic ceiling panels.

The ceiling offered the largest available area for introducing sound absorption without changing the meeting-room layout, covering Porsche artwork or reducing usable wall space. The panels were designed to absorb reflected speech energy before it could return to the table and continue circulating through the room.

This approach was particularly suitable for a large conference space used for presentations and hybrid meetings. While microphones and speakers can improve audio capture and playback, they cannot remove the reverberation already being produced by the room. In fact, conferencing systems may capture those reflections and transmit them to remote participants.

The goal was therefore to control the room itself. By reducing reverberation, the acoustic treatment would help voices sound cleaner and more distinct at the table while also improving the quality of audio received through Zoom and other video-conferencing platforms.

SoundFix’s guide to meeting room and open-office acoustics explains why reverberation control is essential when a room must support both in-person and remote communication.

The Installation

The ceiling panels were arranged across the conference room in a structured layout that worked around lighting, air-conditioning grilles, speakers and other existing ceiling services.

Rather than concentrating the treatment in a single area, the panels were distributed throughout the room to provide more consistent absorption above the long meeting table and surrounding seating. This helped address sound produced from multiple speaking positions rather than treating only the front of the room.

The panel finish and geometric arrangement were selected to complement the premium Porsche environment. The installation added acoustic performance without making the ceiling appear crowded or introducing a visibly industrial solution.

Careful placement was essential. Effective acoustic panel installation depends not only on the panel material but also on coverage, spacing and the relationship between the panels and the room’s reflective surfaces.

Once the installation was complete, SoundFix returned to conduct post-treatment measurements. This allowed the result to be verified objectively rather than relying only on subjective impressions of whether the room sounded better.

The Measurable Outcome

Post-installation testing recorded an average RT60 of 0.64 seconds, down from 2.15 seconds before treatment. This represents a verified 70% reduction in reverberation time.

The improvement was especially strong through the frequencies most important for speech. At 500 Hz, RT60 reduced from 2.17 seconds to 0.65 seconds. At 1 kHz, it reduced from 2.13 seconds to 0.63 seconds. At 2 kHz, it reduced from 2.40 seconds to 0.74 seconds.

These results created a much clearer professional meeting environment. Spoken words no longer remained in the room long enough to mask the next part of a sentence. Presentations became easier to follow, large group discussions were more controlled, and video-conferencing audio improved for remote attendees.

The outcome was also important for people who experienced difficulty understanding speech in the original room, including participants using hearing aids. By reducing competing reflections, the room now provides cleaner and more intelligible communication.

The treatment achieved the required reverberation reduction while integrating neatly with the existing ceiling and maintaining the premium appearance of the Porsche Centre Melbourne conference space.

Commercial Meeting Rooms

Modern meeting rooms are expected to support board discussions, training, presentations and hybrid collaboration. A room may have excellent screens, microphones and conferencing software, but those systems cannot compensate fully for excessive reverberation.

Acoustic treatment improves the sound inside a room by absorbing reflections and shortening RT60. It should not be confused with soundproofing, which is used to limit sound transmission between separate rooms or properties. SoundFix explains the distinction in its guide to acoustic treatment versus soundproofing.

At Porsche Centre Melbourne, the issue was internal echo rather than sound entering or leaving the conference room. Ceiling acoustic panels directly addressed that problem and delivered a measurable 70% improvement.

For commercial environments, better meeting-room acoustics support clearer decisions, more effective presentations and more inclusive communication. The room does not simply become quieter. It becomes easier to use.