Sabin converter
Convert sound absorption between metric and imperial sabins, and into the area of panel it would take.
That's 3.1× as absorbent as heavy curtains, while a treated living room is 2.7× more. In a 250 m³ room that gives a reverberation time of about 4.332 seconds.
What it means
How much sound does it soak up?
Absorption is strongly frequency-dependent. A panel that absorbs 90% at 1 kHz may absorb 20% at 125 Hz, which is why bass is so hard to treat.
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Your absorption in every unit
Learn
Three things worth knowing
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T₆₀ = 0.161 × volume ÷ sabins
A 250 m³ room with 40 sabins reverberates for about a second. Double the absorption and the tail halves.
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Wallace Sabine, 1898
Asked to fix an unusable lecture hall, he measured reverberation by ear with an organ pipe and a stopwatch, and discovered it depended only on volume and absorption. Architectural acoustics starts there.
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An imperial sabin is smaller
It is one square <em>foot</em> of perfect absorption, a tenth of the metric one. US and European figures for the same room differ by 10.76.
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Background
About sabins
A sabin is one square meter of perfect absorption — a wide-open window, which reflects nothing back. Every real surface counts as its area times its absorption coefficient: 10 m² of panel at α = 0.9 is 9 sabins.
Total up a room’s sabins and Sabine’s formula gives the reverberation time: T₆₀ = 0.161 V ÷ A.