Can the panels be painted or covered?

No, they cannot be painted, and covered is how they are meant to be installed. No C-ATS panel is painted: that holds for all three, not just the reverberation panel. They are designed to sit behind a stretch-fabric wall or ceiling finish, concealed, and any acoustically transparent cover works. Fabric Walls pairs naturally with them and is not a requirement. They also work behind an acoustically transparent projection screen, which puts the image surface, the speakers and the acoustic treatment in one wall. The rule on the cover is the only rule: it has to be acoustically transparent, because a cover sound cannot pass through is a cover that stops the panel working.

So the finished face of the room is never our panel. That is the design, not a limitation of it: the surface the client sees is the fabric, chosen with the interior design, and the treatment performs behind it. It is also why the panels are specified on performance rather than on appearance: nothing about how they look survives into the finished room.

The consequence is worth more than the compatibility. A concealed layer is planned, not retro-fitted. In a real project the physical architecture comes first (that is the isolation design moment), then the interior concept, and then the cinema is engineered as one, with nothing decided in isolation. The treatment depth is part of the wall build-up, and the acoustic design is drawn from the finish schedule. Left to the end, the acoustic layer becomes whatever the build-up has room for.

What to read next

The finished face is Fabric Walls, the stretch-fabric system that delivers the surface the client sees while the treatment performs behind it. For the sequence a room is engineered in, see the system.