Drop ceilings are very common, and any office or school you walk into will have drop ceilings somewhere. Its purpose is primarily aesthetic: to hide the building’s wiring, ventilation, or plumbing systems. Its purpose is not to soundproof the room.

Most spaces need some level of ceiling soundproofing. And a drop ceiling won’t provide that soundproofing on its own.

Dropped ceilings are not soundproof because the drop ceiling tiles stop noise about as well as a piece of cardboard. They won’t block any sound, because they are not dense enough to actually prevent noise from passing through them. A room with a dropped ceiling is kinda like a box with the top open. When we soundproof a drop ceiling, it’s like closing and sealing up the top of the box.

If you have a drop ceiling in a room and noise issues, soundproofing the drop ceiling is one of the first places you should go to solve your noise issues. With any ceiling, you're going to be dealing with two types of noise:

• Airborne noise, such as from people talking and TVs, travels from the source of the sound to the listener through the air
• Impact noise, like walking or dropped objects, is from sound waves traveling through physical structures before reaching the listener

When trying to create a soundproof ceiling, it's essential to address both types of noise.

Dropped ceilings can do a better job than most ceilings at stopping structural noise. The process hanging the ceiling at least partially decouples the ceiling from the floor above it, hijacking the path for structural noise. You can fully decouple the drop ceiling using one of our sound isolation clip systems, and better prevent that structural noise.

Drop Ceiling SOundproofing for airborne noise

Airborne noise tends to be the biggest problem for a drop ceiling assembly. Again your room is like a lidless box where sound can come into the top really easily. This airborne sound tends to travel via two paths:

1. The most common path is noise from adjacent rooms will go over the walls and into adjacent rooms. This is really common in a commercial building, because the wall will typically end at the dropped ceiling. That leaves an open-air space above the wall between two rooms.
2. The second common problem is that any noise from the ventilation system will pass right through the ceiling tiles to the floor below.

The Noise Reduction Coefficient (NRC) is a metric used to measure the material's sound absorption. The higher the NRC rating, the better the material absorbs sound on a scale from 0.0 to 1.0. Your typical acoustic ceiling tiles have an NRC rating of 0.70 or higher. The NRC rating is very important for determining the sound quality (acoustics) in a room, but it does not mean the material is actually going to block noise from traveling from one space to another. To block noise, we need a dense, airtight barrier. To determine how well a structure blocks airborne sound, we use a different metric called STC rating, or with ceilings specifically sometimes referred to as a Ceiling Attenuation Class (CAC). The CAC rating is on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher the number, the better the ceiling system is at blocking airborne sound.

If you want to fix sound problems in your space while trying to work, you have two options. The first path is to replace your dropped ceiling with a more traditional ceiling assembly like drywall. For high STC requirements (think recording studio), going with a traditional drywall assembly is required. The second and most common is to install soundproofing materials to the existing drop ceiling assembly.

That about covers the basics on how to soundproof a drop ceiling. You have a few different options on ways to go about it, and the right choice for you depends on the noise issue, how much sound reduction you need, and your own preference. For our other ceiling sound treatments, read our article on the topic! If you need to soundproof a metal roof above your dropepd ceiling, read our article on the topic. For all soundproofing questions, feel free to reach out any time via phone or chat. Our soundproofing experts are here to help!