Sound masking raises the ambient noise floor to reduce speech intelligibility across the open floor — it makes conversations harder to understand for distant listeners. It does not reduce the noise level inside a call space, and it does not prevent a pod occupant’s voice from being heard by adjacent colleagues. Soundproof pods provide physical acoustic isolation in both directions: ambient office noise does not enter the pod, and the pod occupant’s voice does not leave it. For call privacy and focus work quality, pods provide qualitatively higher performance than masking systems — at the cost of being fixed-capacity (one pod = one space) rather than floor-wide.