For audiophiles like me, achieving the highest possible sound quality is the top priority—but I still care about how my space looks. This aesthetic component is the failure point of many acoustic panels, which are wall attachments or modular blocks designed to absorb background noise, reduce echo, and improve the general sound of a given room. At worst, they look like burlap-sack tapestries. At best, though—as I recently learned when I tested Gik Acoustics’ Soundblocks system—they look like high-design conversation pieces that marry function and visual sophistication.
Gik Acoustics makes acoustic panels that don’t look like weird hunks of insulation. Its SoundBlocks system that I tried out in my home studio and office allows three panels to stack together to form little walls that look legitimately cool, more like wooden sculptures than professional music gear.
My most stylish friends have complimented the panels and guessed they were either a high-end guitar amp cabinet or an actual sculpture. Nobody identified them as acoustic panels. Importantly, the panels have also improved my listening and recording experience.
Why Do I Need Panels?
Photograph: Parker Hall
Even if you buy the best audio gear available, the quality of your sound might not be top-notch without acoustic panels, and that’s often due to physics. Rectangular modern spaces, often outfitted with reflective walls, windows, and few soft surfaces to absorb noise (like ’70s-style shag carpeting), just don’t sound that great.
To understand why, think of your room like a still swimming pool. Your speakers are a series of rocks repeatedly making different-sized splashes in the pool. The overall sound is a product of various frequencies of wave, all of which fly through the air and bounce around. Waves that hit a wall and bounce back against new waves can cancel each other out or create weird phase (wave overlap) issues, much like you can imagine the water in a pool would bounce around and against itself to create weird peaks and valleys. The better that walls are able to absorb the waves to minimize the bounce-back effect, the better the quality of sound in a room.
No matter how cleanly your speakers (or rocks) can make waves, the majority of the sound you hear has to do with the listening environment. In an ideal world, the musical “splashes” from speakers reach your ears evenly, without any weird “splash back” from previously transmitted sound waves. Unfortunately, this is hard to achieve without a soft and dense surface (or a specialized room like a professional-grade recording studio) to absorb the waves and prevent reflections.
Living Room or Studio
Photograph: Parker Hall
Design is one reason an audiophile may pass on buying the acoustic panels they need in order to ensure premium sound. This is where Gik Acoustics’ SoundBlocks shine. Sold in sets of three boxes, you can choose from among 20 fabric colors, 14 wood front designs, and five wood finish shades. You can stack them into what looks like a wooden sculpture using the slide-and-lock railing system, or arrange them as singular cubes throughout the room for a modular effect.
