RoomTone Scan Results Score: 29/100 | Bass: High | Echo: Very High | Voice Clarity: Poor
The people who share rooms with us are usually frustrated. This week's submission came with a note that said: "I dread being in this room after about 20 minutes. It's genuinely exhausting."
We've heard versions of this from a lot of parents. The playroom — the room that's supposed to be cheerful and fun — ends up being one of the loudest rooms in the house. Plastic toys on hard floors. Laughter bouncing off walls. Shrieking, which is already at a frequency that doesn't need any help, reverberating at full volume between bare painted drywall.
This room scanned at 29 out of 100. That's "Poor" — a room where the acoustic conditions are actively uncomfortable for everyone in it.
Here's why it sounds the way it does, and the changes that make it genuinely better.
What the Scan Found
High-frequency echo. Children's voices — and especially the excited, high-pitched sounds kids make when they're playing — fall in a frequency range that reflects sharply off hard surfaces. In a room with no absorption, those frequencies ping-pong between walls without losing much energy. The result is a kind of bright, chaotic layering of sound that's physically tiring to be around.
Parallel wall flutter. Like many playrooms, this one is a clean rectangle with bare walls on both sides. Sound bouncing between parallel hard surfaces creates a fast flutter echo — audible as a brightness or ringing quality to the room's sound.
Impact noise from hard toys. Toy clatter on hard floors adds a persistent layer of impact noise that reinforces the sense of loudness even when nobody is being especially loud. Every dropped block, rolling car, and knocked-over bin becomes its own mini sound event.
Bass: High. This surprised the owners. Low frequency buildup in a room full of high-pitched toys isn't intuitive, but it comes from the same source as everywhere else: corners and parallel walls bouncing bass frequencies back on themselves.
The Three Fixes
1. A Foam Play Mat (biggest impact — and the most practical)
Interlocking foam play mats are everywhere in playrooms, but most parents choose them for their kids' knees, not their ears. It turns out they're also highly effective acoustic treatment — thick EVA foam absorbs mid-range and high-frequency sound from the floor up, and reduces impact noise simultaneously.
The key is coverage. A mat that covers the main play area (not just a corner) makes a real difference. The larger the coverage, the bigger the acoustic benefit.
What to look for: At least 3/8 inch thick EVA foam, interlocking tile format so you can size it to the room. Thicker is better.
Recommended: Extra-Thick Foam Play Mat (Amazon) [affiliate link] — 5/8 inch tiles, soft enough for falls, effective enough to change how the room sounds.
2. Fabric Wall Art or a Tapestry (medium-high impact)
This is the fix that most parents already want to make for aesthetic reasons — and it turns out to be acoustically effective too.
A large fabric wall hanging — a tapestry, a textile banner, a fabric growth chart, or even a fabric art panel — adds meaningful mid and high-frequency absorption at ear height. In a playroom, the relevant ear height is lower than in an adult room, so a piece that starts around 2 feet off the ground covers the most active range.
The heavier and more textured the fabric, the better it absorbs. A thin cotton tapestry is better than bare wall. A heavy woven piece is significantly better.
What to look for: Heavy woven fabric, ideally with some texture or pile, hung loosely (not stretched tight against the wall).
Recommended: Kids Fabric Wall Tapestry (Amazon) [affiliate link] — colorful, child-appropriate designs, substantial weight.
3. A Bookshelf with Fabric Storage Bins (medium impact, doubles as organization)
Open bookshelves serve double duty in a playroom. The irregular surface of toys, books, and bins at varying depths diffuses sound — scattering it rather than reflecting it cleanly — and the fabric storage bins themselves add a layer of absorption.
This is the fix that feels least like "acoustic treatment" and most like "getting organized." The acoustic benefit is real: a shelf full of fabric bins absorbs noticeably more sound than a bare wall or a shelf of hard plastic containers.
What to look for: Cube organizer shelves with fabric bins that have some depth and fill most of the cube. The fabric content matters more than the color.
Recommended: IKEA Kallax with Fabric Bins [affiliate link] — sturdy, appropriately sized, the fabric bins do the acoustic work.
What to Expect
The playroom is one of the biggest-impact rooms to treat because the starting conditions are so reflective. Making all three of these changes — mat, wall art, fabric storage — typically moves a room from the upper-20s into the high-40s or low-50s.
More practically: you stop leaving the room with a headache.
The parent who shared this room did the mat first. They wrote back after the first full play session: "I can't believe a floor mat made this much difference. My husband thought I was imagining it until he spent an hour in there."
You're not imagining it. Hard surfaces are doing a lot of acoustic work in that room.
Try It in Your Room
A playroom has a different acoustic profile than a living room or bedroom — the problems are specific, and the best fixes are specific too. Scan your room to see what it actually needs.
Want to see your room score? Scan it free in the RoomTone app.