In a typical open-plan office at 60–65 dB ambient, DS,A = 29.4 dB brings the pod interior to approximately 31–36 dB — the acoustic equivalent of a quiet library or a residential room with distant street noise. The specific quality of the experience is not silence — it is the absence of intelligible background speech. You can hear that the open floor is active, in the way you can hear a building’s ambient presence from inside a room. But no specific words, no conversational threads, no phonological detail reaches you as language. The cognitive machinery that was involuntarily processing background speech — consuming working memory capacity in the process — has no linguistic input to process. The working memory is available for what you are actually trying to do.