Privacy is an important consideration for all working environments, particularly when confidential or sensitive information is being discussed. In this world of vast open plan workplaces, it’s very easy to overhear conversations which are morally unacceptable and may also breach GDPR regulations. In the past, noisy office equipment and inefficient air conditioning units used to add to the background noise in the workplace and acted as a method of drowning out the noise but thanks to wonders of modern efficiency a lot of that noise has been suppressed.

So how do you try and deal with this overspill of confidential information? An obvious way would be to install acoustic partitions between every workspace but the expense would be crippling even to the largest of businesses so what else can be done? This is when a noise masking system comes in very handy. Noise masking systems are basically sound systems that inject noise into a workplace to disrupt the intelligibility of the spoken word which in turn results in no one trying to listen in as it would be difficult to understand what’s being said. 

That all sounds very simple but it’s not that easy! The sound that is played needs to be the correct signal to disrupt speech but not disruptive to the general working requirements of the workplace. The audio broadcast level is also critical as it should be virtually unnoticeable to the occupants of the space whilst still being loud enough to do its job.

There are many solutions for noise masking nowadays and it can even be achieved using invisible loudspeaker solutions so even the plushest of offices can benefit from the advantages that sound masking systems provide.