To reduce echo in a room for calls, cut down the hard, bare surfaces your voice bounces off and get the microphone nearer your mouth. Moving the mic to a hand-span away costs nothing and does the most. After that, a rug on a hard floor, curtains over glass and a full bookshelf on the wall you face soak up the reflections that make you sound hollow. One or two acoustic panels on the first reflection points come next, and only if you still need them. Thin foam squares stuck everywhere come last, if at all.
Before you buy anything, clap once where you sit. What you hear after the clap tells you which fix you need.
1. Tell echo, reverb and noise apart
Three different problems get called "echo" on a call, and each has a different fix.
- Reverb is your voice reflecting off every hard surface and arriving at the mic in a smeared tail after the words. It is what makes a bare room sound like a bathroom.
- Flutter echo is a distinct, bright ringing between two hard parallel surfaces, such as two bare walls facing each other. You hear it most after a sharp sound.
- Acoustic echo is the other people on the call hearing their own voices come back to them. That is your speakers feeding your mic, not your room, and headphones fix it.
Noise is a separate thing again: sound that has nothing to do with your voice, such as traffic, a fan or a neighbour. Room treatment does little for noise, which is why the budget soundproofing sheet is a different page.
Acousticians measure reverb with a number called RT60, the time it takes for a sound to fade by 60 decibels once it stops. HyperPhysics notes that it depends on the size of the room and how much absorbing surface it has. You do not need the number to fix a home office, but it explains the whole page: more soft surface means a shorter tail.
What each surface does with your voice
Every surface absorbs some sound and sends the rest back. Acousticians express this as an absorption coefficient between 0 (reflects everything) and 1 (absorbs everything). HyperPhysics, the physics reference run by Georgia State University, publishes a table from Hall's acoustics textbook. These are its figures at three frequencies in the speech range:
| Surface | 500 Hz | 1,000 Hz | 2,000 Hz |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acoustic tile, rigid mount | 0.7 | 0.8 | 0.6 |
| Draperies, medium velour | 0.5 | 0.7 | 0.7 |
| Upholstered seating, unoccupied | 0.6 | 0.7 | 0.6 |
| Heavy carpet on felt backing | 0.4 | 0.5 | 0.6 |
| Heavy carpet on concrete | 0.15 | 0.4 | 0.6 |
| Ordinary window glass | 0.2 | 0.1 | 0.07 |
| Ordinary plaster on lath | 0.1 | 0.05 | 0.04 |
| Gypsum wallboard, ½ in on studs | 0.05 | 0.04 | 0.07 |
Source: hyperphysics.gsu.edu, "Table of Absorption Coefficients" (data from Hall, 2nd ed., Table 15.1), read October 9, 2026. HyperPhysics lists no figure for a bookshelf.
The pattern is the point. Plasterboard walls, plaster and glass, the surfaces most home offices are made of, all sit near zero: they hand almost all of your voice straight back. Curtains, a carpet with a felt underlay and an upholstered chair sit far higher. You do not need to cover every wall. Swapping a few of the biggest hard areas for soft ones changes the balance.
2. Run the clap test
Sit where you take calls, with the door closed and the room as it usually is. Clap once, sharply, and listen to what follows.
- Listen for a bright zing or flutter. That is two hard parallel surfaces trading the sound back and forth. Softening one of the pair, a curtain on the glass or a full shelf on the bare wall, usually stops it.
- Listen for a long wash that fades slowly. That is general reverb, and it means the room has too little soft material overall.
- Record a few sentences and a clap on your phone's voice memo app from where your mic sits, then play it back on headphones. You will hear the room the way your callers do.
If you want a number rather than your ears, Room EQ Wizard (REW) is free desktop software for Windows, macOS and Linux that graphs reverberation time (RT60) per octave, with a paid Pro upgrade for those who want more. Its help pages cover setup. For a home office, your ears and a voice memo are usually enough.
3. Fix the ratio at the mic first
- Move whatever mic you use to a hand-span from your mouth: a headset boom, a desk mic on an arm, or the laptop brought closer.
- Angle it slightly off your breath line if plosives pop.
- Repeat the voice-memo test from where the mic now sits.
A microphone hears two things: your voice arriving directly, and the room's reflections arriving late from every side. The room's share hardly changes when you move. Your voice's share does. Halve the distance and the direct sound gets markedly louder, so you can turn the input level down and the reflections drop with it. Our mic placement guide covers angles and arms.
Room treated, still hollow in places?
Physics first, always. When the room is as good as it will get, Krisp's echo cancellation and noise filtering sit underneath every call app on Mac and Windows. Seven trial days, no card, are enough to hear the difference in your own room before paying anything.
Layer Krisp over the room Software vs room treatment — the full picture →4. Kill the loudest reflections for pocket money
- Rug on a hard floor: the largest bare surface in most rooms.
- Curtains over glass, even thin ones: window glass is listed at 0.1 at 1,000 Hz.
- A filled bookshelf on the wall you face: uneven depths break up what they do not absorb.
- Soft chair, cushions, a throw over the filing cabinet: unglamorous, effective.
- Rug on a hard floor
- Curtains over glass
- A filled bookshelf
- Soft chair, cushions
5. Spend deliberately if you still want more
- One or two proper acoustic panels on the first reflection points (the wall behind your screen and the wall behind you) beat a dozen thin squares scattered around.
- Treat the spots nearest you and the mic, not the whole room. A call setup is not a recording studio.
- Skip egg-crate bargain foam. It is too thin to do much across the voice range.
Panels absorb reflections inside your room. They do not block sound coming through the walls, so if your problem is the neighbour rather than the echo, see budget soundproofing instead.
6. Know when software helps (and when it can't)
Software works on the signal, not the room, and some tools target room reflections directly:
- Krisp lists echo cancellation as a built-in feature, on by default, and describes it as eliminating "room echo and acoustic reflections in real time". It installs as a virtual mic that any call app can use, on Macs from macOS 14 and on 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 PCs. Once its 7-day, card-free trial ends it is paid: Core is $8 per user each month when paid yearly or $16 when paid month by month, and Advanced $15 or $30 (Krisp pricing page, October 9, 2026).
- NVIDIA Broadcast has a Room Echo Removal effect. It is free, but it needs an NVIDIA RTX graphics card (a GeForce RTX 2060 is the lowest GeForce model NVIDIA names), and 64-bit Windows 10 is the only platform on its requirements list.
- Zoom's echo cancellation setting (Auto, Low, High) targets acoustic echo, the speaker-to-mic loop, not your room's reverb.
Software cannot put back clarity that a distant mic in a bare room never captured. It does its best work on a signal that is already close and reasonably dry, which is why it comes after steps 3 to 5, not instead of them.
Still stuck?
- Callers hear their own voice? That is acoustic echo, not your room. Wear headphones; our piece on headphones that prevent echo on Zoom explains why any pair works.
- Hollow only on some calls? Each call app processes audio differently. Record a local voice memo to hear your room's true share.
- Renting and can't change much? The mic-distance step plus a rug and a heavy curtain carry most of the value, and all of it moves house with you.
- Cheapest way to soundproof an office? Soundproofing blocks noise coming in; it is a different job from echo. Door seals are the cheapest start; see budget soundproofing.
Quick answers
How do I reduce echo in a room for calls?
Move the mic to a hand-span from your mouth, then cover the biggest hard surfaces: a rug on the floor, curtains over glass, a full bookshelf on the wall you face. Add one or two acoustic panels only if callers still hear a hollow sound.
How do I reduce echo in a room for Zoom?
Fix the room as above, and if other people hear themselves, wear headphones: that is speaker-to-mic echo, which Zoom's echo cancellation targets. Zoom's setting does not remove your room's reverb.
What is the cheapest way to reduce room echo?
Moving the microphone closer, which costs nothing. After that, rearranging soft things you already own onto the paths between you and the walls.
Do I need acoustic foam for calls?
Usually not first. Mic distance and soft furnishings clear most conversational echo in a home office. Thin foam squares do little across the voice range; a couple of proper panels in the right spots is the better buy if you need more.
Why do empty rooms echo so much?
Their surfaces are mostly hard and flat. Plasterboard, plaster and glass are listed near zero absorption at speech frequencies, so sound keeps bouncing until it fades. Furniture, rugs and curtains are what normally soak it up.