The walking pad noise test: twelve pads, four floors, one meter

This is a planned study, and we haven’t measured anything yet. We’ll put 12 walking pads on hardwood, tile, carpet and a rubber mat, read a sound meter at desk height and in the room below at 2 and 3 mph, and join a video call from each one to hear whether it comes through. The full table goes up on this page once all 12 are done. The three targets at the top are what we expect to be able to report, not findings.

Why we’re doing this

Every walking pad listing says quiet. Nobody prints a number, and the few numbers out there come from manufacturers with no speed, floor or distance attached. Meanwhile, the question we hear most about walking pads isn’t about speed or weight rating. It’s whether the person at the next desk, the person on the call or the neighbor downstairs will hear it.

Those are three different questions with three different answers, because a walking pad makes noise in three ways. The motor and belt hum, which is what you hear at the desk. Your feet thud, and that’s what travels through the floor. And the whole pad resonates against whatever it’s standing on, which is why the same machine sounds different on tile and on carpet. We want one measured number for each of those, for each pad, so you can compare two listings on something other than adjectives.

The twelve pads

We’re buying all 12 at retail, the way you would, from pads under $250 up to the office-grade machine many companies buy. They are the WalkingPad C2, WalkingPad Z1, WalkingPad A1 Pro, WalkingPad X25, WalkingPad R1 Pro, Goplus 2-in-1, Superfit 2-in-1, UREVO Walking Pad, DeerRun Walking Pad, PitPat Walking Pad, Yagud Walking Pad and LifeSpan TR1200-DT3.

Each pad runs for 2 hours at 2 mph before we measure anything, to settle the new belt, and gets lubricated per its manual. A dry belt is louder than a lubricated one, and we don’t want to end up measuring the factory grease.

Four floors

Walking pads live in apartments, home offices and bedrooms, on whatever floor was already there. We’ll test each pad on four surfaces in the same house: hardwood over a joisted ceiling, tile over the same kind of ceiling, low-pile carpet with a standard pad, and a 6 mm rubber mat laid over the hardwood. The mat is what most people are told to buy, and we want to know whether it earns its price. We’ll report the carpet pile height alongside the carpet figures.

The meter and the room below

We’ll use a calibrated class 2 sound level meter reading A-weighted decibels on slow response, mounted on a tripod, in two positions. The first is at desk height, 3 ft from the center of the belt, roughly where your head is at a standing desk set up for walking. The second is in the room directly below, with the meter at seated ear height in the middle of the room and the door closed. That second position answers the apartment question, and nobody’s published it.

We’ll measure at 2 and 3 mph, which covers how fast people actually walk at a desk. Faster speeds matter for the 2-in-1 pads that jog, and the walking pad product pages will carry those from the standard bench test described in how we test. Our tester weighs about 170 lb. A heavier walker will thud harder, and every table will say so.

Before each run we’ll read the room’s ambient level with the pad off and subtract it. We’ll do three runs per pad, floor and speed, stopping and restarting the pad between runs, and the median goes in the table. That’s 12 pads by 4 floors by 2 speeds, 96 cells, each backed by three readings at two positions.

The call test

Decibels don’t tell you whether your coworkers can hear the pad. So we’ll join a video call from each pad at 2 mph on the hardwood floor, wearing the same mid-priced headset with a boom mic, while a second tester on the far end listens through ordinary laptop speakers. Without being told which pad is running, the far end rates each one as not heard, heard but not distracting, or distracting. We’ll record the far-end audio too, so you can listen for yourself.

What we’ll publish

The full 96-cell table, sortable by pad, floor and speed. A per-pad figure for how much the 6 mm mat changes the room-below reading, because we expect that to vary a lot between a 45 lb pad and a 119 lb one. The call ratings and recordings. A note on each product page in our under-desk walking pad picks and budget walking pad picks pointing back here. Anything that doesn’t match a manufacturer’s claim will be called out plainly, with the method right next to it.

We haven’t set a publication date. Results go up on this page once all 12 pads are through, and the changelog will note it.

How to request the data

Once the study is published, journalists, researchers and anyone comparing their own pad can have the raw readings, the ambient figures and the recordings. Ask through the link in the sidebar and tell us what you’re using them for, so we can send the right files.