Acoustic Pods in Australia: How to Compare Them Honestly

Two acoustic pods sit side by side in a showroom. One is advertised at 34 dB, the other at 30 dB. The 30 dB pod is quieter.

That is not a trick. It is the ordinary result of an industry where suppliers quote different measurements, on different things, under different standards, and print them all as a bare decibel number. If you are specifying pods for an Australian office, the single most useful thing you can learn is which number you are being shown.

This guide is brand-neutral. We sell Framery, and we will say so wherever it is relevant, but the method below works against any supplier including us. Ask us the same questions.

The number that matters: D_S,A under ISO 23351-1

ISO 23351-1:2020 is the standard written specifically for this product category. It measures the speech level reduction of a furniture enclosure — how much a speaking voice inside the pod is reduced for someone outside it.

What makes it the right test is how it is run. Sound power is measured in a reverberation room without the pod, then again with the source inside the pod, across octave bands from 125 Hz to 8 kHz. The source is an artificial mouth positioned at the height of a real occupant's mouth — 1.20 m seated, 1.55 m standing. The result is a single number in decibels, written D_S,A.

The point is that this tests the assembled pod. Walls, glazing, the door, the door seals, the floor and the ventilation path all contribute, because all of them leak. It measures the object you are actually buying, with speech coming from where speech actually comes from.

Performance is banded into acoustic classes. These bands are widely cited across the industry and appear in published academic measurement work, though the classification table itself sits inside the paywalled standard:

The practical reading: a typical open-plan office runs 40 to 60 dB of background noise and a raised voice is around 70 dB. Class A and B put speech at or below the background, so it stops being intelligible. Class C and D only work if the surrounding office is noisy enough to cover the difference — which is precisely backwards, because the quiet, library-like floors that most need privacy are the ones where a Class D pod fails hardest.

Why the bigger number on the other quote is not better

When a supplier advertises "34 dB soundproofing" with no standard named, they are almost always quoting R_w — the weighted sound reduction index. R_w is a laboratory measurement of one building element: a wall panel, a door, a pane of glazing, tested flat and in isolation.

A wall panel tested on its own has no door gap, no glazing junction, no hinge, no lock and no ventilation duct. The assembled pod has all of them. In building acoustics generally, field performance runs 5 to 10 dB below the laboratory figure for the same construction, and closer to 10 dB for lightweight steel and timber.

You cannot convert one number to the other, and you cannot compare them. A pod quoting 34 dB R_w may well perform worse than a pod quoting 30 dB D_S,A, because the second number describes the whole product and the first describes its best panel.

You will also encounter NIC (Noise Isolation Class, an American field metric under ASTM) and NRC. Be careful with NRC in particular: it measures how much sound a material absorbs, which says nothing whatsoever about how much it stops from getting out. A pod lined in absorbent felt can have an excellent NRC and leak like a sieve.

The study every pod buyer should know about

In 2020, researchers at Turku University of Applied Sciences in Finland did something the industry had not: they bought eleven commercially sold phone booths and measured all of them to ISO 23351-1 in the same laboratory.

The results ranged from 15.0 dB to 30.3 dB. Only one of the eleven reached Class A. Five of the eleven were Class D — the bottom classified band. None reached A+.

Every one of those pods was on sale. Every one of them was marketed as a soundproof booth. That single spread of results is the strongest argument there is for demanding a test report rather than a brochure.

The study found something else worth carrying into a tender: floor thickness correlated significantly with performance, while total mass and outer volume did not. A heavy pod is not automatically a quiet pod. Weight is not evidence.

Ventilation: the specification that decides whether people use it

There is no pod-specific ventilation standard. The relevant Australian benchmark is the general one: AS 1668.2 requires 10 litres per second per person for offices and meeting rooms. That is your sanity check. Take the manufacturer's airflow figure, divide by the number of seats, and see whether it clears 10 L/s.

Two questions the number alone will not answer. First, at what fan setting is it quoted — maximum, or normal? Second, is the fan gated behind a motion sensor, and what happens when someone sits still on a long video call?

On carbon dioxide, be careful which threshold you are quoted. The National Construction Code uses 850 ppm averaged over eight hours as a ventilation design threshold. Safe Work Australia's workplace exposure standard is 5,000 ppm — but that is a toxicity limit, not a comfort target, and a supplier citing it as evidence their pod is fine has answered a different question from the one you asked. Cognitive performance is generally discussed well below it.

The honest summary: a sealed one-person box fills with CO₂ quickly. Passive ventilation — vents with no fan — becomes uncomfortable inside twenty minutes, which is how you end up with an expensive pod nobody books.

Australian compliance: the part that has recently changed

Pods are commonly sold as furniture that needs no approval. In New South Wales, that is no longer a safe assumption.

Building Commission NSW practice advice, issued 24 January 2025, states that office pods are rooms rather than furniture, and that their installation is to be treated as building work. The reasoning rests on the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act: a room is a space within a building separated by walls or partitions, and furniture is not intended for occupation. On that reading, approval runs through a construction certificate or complying development certificate, with an occupation certificate at completion.

The advice names the clauses a certifier will look at: non-combustible construction and fire hazard properties of linings, access and egress and accessibility under AS 1428.1, fire services and equipment, room height inside the pod, light and ventilation, and energy efficiency.

It flags three services as commonly overlooked: automatic fire suppression, automatic fire detection, and occupant warning systems — the last one specifically because pods are designed to be quiet. This is a genuine life-safety point rather than a paperwork one. A pod that achieves Class A speech privacy is also very good at muffling a building alarm. Have it tested with the door shut.

Two things worth being straight about. First, several suppliers hold compliance letters concluding the opposite — that their product is furniture or joinery and needs no approval. Some of those letters predate the 2025 advice; at least one widely cited assessment was issued by a Finnish body under Finnish rules. None of them binds an Australian certifier. A supplier's compliance letter is a document to hand your surveyor, not a substitute for one.

Second, this advice is New South Wales. No other state has published an equivalent position that we could find. That does not mean pods are furniture everywhere else — it means the question is open, and a certifier elsewhere applying the same reasoning would not be surprising.

On sprinklers, and a number you should not trust

We could not find a published Australian rule keyed to pod footprint, ceiling clearance or open-top design. What does exist in AS 2118.1 is a general requirement for clear space below sprinkler deflectors, and a rule about sprinklers beneath wide ducts. That duct figure circulates online as though it were a pod rule. It is not. In practice most pod manufacturers design for internal sprinklering — pre-drilled penetrations or ceiling knock-outs are common — and the determination belongs to your fire engineer.

And on depreciation

We found no ATO determination naming office pods. Third-party blogs quote effective lives with no ruling reference behind them, and the treatment plausibly turns on the same room-versus-furniture question above, since a fixture is treated differently from plant. Ask your accountant. Anyone who gives you a confident depreciation rate for a pod without a ruling reference is guessing.

What the brands actually publish

The most revealing thing about this table is not the numbers. It is how many suppliers publish no standard at all.

Three things fall out of that. Only three brands publish a D_S,A figure with a class, and all three are European. One brand publishes two different decibel numbers on two of its own pages, on two different scales. And one brand whose entire premise is acoustic isolation publishes no acoustic figure at all.

The warranty spread is the other quiet finding: two years at one end, ten years structural at the other. Nobody compares these, and on a five-figure asset the difference is real money.

A name collision worth knowing about: Silen (Estonian) and SilentPod (Australian) are unrelated companies. Searching for one will find you the other.

The ten questions to put to every supplier

1. Send me the ISO 23351-1 test report — laboratory name, test date, and the model number tested. Not a brochure figure. Confirm the model tested is the model you are quoting.
2. If you quote R_w, what was tested? The wall panel, or the assembled pod? It is nearly always the panel.
3. What is the airflow in litres per second, at what fan setting, and is the fan motion-gated? Divide by the number of seats and compare against 10 L/s per person.
4. Has an Australian registered certifier assessed this product since January 2025? Older letters and overseas assessments predate the current NSW position.
5. Does the pod attenuate the building occupant warning system? Ask for it to be tested with the door closed.
6. What is the floor loading, and over what footprint? These are heavy objects on a small area. On a suspended slab, get a structural opinion.
7. What are the power and data requirements? Standard outlet or a dedicated circuit? Is an electrician needed?
8. What does relocation cost, and what does it do to the warranty? Seals and levelling are the usual issues, and improper dismantling is a common exclusion.
9. Who holds spare parts in Australia? Fans, door seals, hinges, glazing. What is the service response time? This is the question that separates suppliers once the pod is three years old.
10. What is the lead time, in writing? Locally manufactured pods can ship in days. European pods ship from Europe.

Where we stand

Chair Dinkum is an authorised Australian Framery dealer, so we have an interest here and you should read this guide knowing that. What we would say in our own defence is that Framery is one of only three brands in the table above that publishes a class and a figure against the correct standard, and we have written our own Framery pages to the same rules we are asking you to apply to everyone else.

If you are comparing brands, run the ten questions past all of them, us included. If a supplier cannot produce a test report with a laboratory name on it, that tells you something the brochure will not.

Call 02 9640 0642 or use our contact page if you want to talk through a floor plan.

Frequently asked questions

What does D(S,A) actually mean?

It is the A-weighted speech level reduction of an assembled furniture enclosure, measured under ISO 23351-1:2020. It tells you how much a speaking voice inside the pod is reduced for a listener outside it, with the whole product in the test — walls, door, seals, glazing and ventilation path.

Is a pod advertised at 34dB better than one at 30dB?

Not necessarily, and often the opposite. A bare decibel figure with no standard named is usually an R_w laboratory measurement of a single wall panel, tested in isolation with no door, seals or ventilation. A 30 dB D(S,A) figure describes the assembled pod. The two numbers are not comparable and cannot be converted.

Do office pods need building approval in Australia?

In New South Wales, Building Commission NSW practice advice issued 24 January 2025 states that office pods are rooms rather than furniture and their installation is to be treated as building work, which brings construction and occupation certificates into play. Other states have not published equivalent advice. Supplier compliance letters do not bind an Australian certifier — give them to your building surveyor and let them decide.

How much ventilation does a pod need?

There is no pod-specific standard. AS 1668.2 requires 10 litres per second per person for offices and meeting rooms, which is a reasonable sanity check. Divide the manufacturer's airflow figure by the number of seats, and ask at what fan setting it was measured and whether the fan is motion-gated.

Are heavier pods quieter?

No. An independent measurement of eleven commercial booths found that floor thickness correlated significantly with acoustic performance, while total mass and outer volume did not. Weight is not evidence of performance.

Can acoustic pods be relocated?

Generally yes — they are designed to be disassembled and reassembled, which is much of their appeal against building a room. Plan it before it happens: check access, ceiling height and services at the new site, and check what relocation does to your warranty, because improper dismantling is a common exclusion. In NSW you should also expect the certification question to arise again at the new location.