ADF Industries is a leading Australian manufacturer of quality audiometric rooms and
soundproof booths. Its custom-made products feature in audiology clinics and hospitals, mining sites
and in mobile hearing testing vehicles worldwide.
When Melbourne man Mr John Davies founded his business more than 50 years ago, he always said yes to any manufacturing request that came along.
So, when someone asked him if his sheet metal fabrication company could make a hearing test room, he proceeded without hesitation.
His son, Mr Jono Davies, continues this legacy today, paying homage to the fact his father would give anything a go and loved a challenge.
From manufacturing that first audiometric room 35 years ago, ADF Industries has grown to design, manufacture and install hundreds of custom-made audiometric rooms and soundproof booths across Australia and the world.
Its ‘can do’ attitude, flair for innovation that has enabled diversification into various specialties, and a non-negotiable edge to the quality of its products have ensured the family-owned business has flourished.
Nowadays, a third of its business is audiometric rooms and sound booths. It builds, transports and assembles them in hospitals and audiology clinics. All are engineered and built to Australian or international standards to provide an optimal level of ambient sound, producing lab-type conditions to perform hearing tests.
The company’s humble beginnings were in 1968 when John began an apprenticeship as a sheet metal worker. When the workshop downsized, he lost his job and in 1974 started his own air conditioning company with some of the shop’s former employees.
Later he started a side business building custom boat trailers in the garage of his Dingley house in Melbourne. In the 1980s the business became All Duct Australia, a duct manufacturing shop, but in the recession of 1991, he separated from his business partner and formed another company, All Duct Fabrications (ADF).
Best booths
This was created to expand on a growing need for total fabrication solutions and become a more general sheet metal jobbing shop, along with making ducts for industrial heating and air conditioning.
“It’s always been a family business. I worked there on weekends. My sister would clean the office. Mum would be there when she was needed and still cooks monthly lunches for the team. We had aunties and cousins working there,” recalls Jono, a mechanical engineer and the company’s managing director since his Dad’s passing.
“We built anything and everything including acoustic equipment for CityLink tunnels, Brisbane Airport Link, and many mining sites.
“In the realms of audio booths and audiology, everyone wants to deal with us because we make the best booths. It’s taken a lot of hard work to get where we are though.”
In the early days, his father built two hearing test rooms at Cochlear in East Melbourne to meet Australian Standards for occupational noise management auditory assessment for testing patients and testing and development of equipment.
Due to traffic sounds in East Melbourne, ADF brought in an independent specialist to do vibrational analysis as the rooms needed increased attenuation levels to compensate for loud air conditioning and traffic. Smaller windows and duress alarms were also needed.
“Now we set our sights on building 12 large audiology rooms and about 35 single person rooms a year,” Jono says. “All the big hospitals have several large booths and some private practices also take large booths to do paediatric work or they’re ENTs and want to perform free field testing.”
Mining companies often buy single booths for regular workplace hearing tests, and organisations or clinics sometimes have mobile hearing testing vehicles fitted out for remote work and field day attendances.
Jono says ADF has fitted audiometric rooms in just about every hospital in Australia including the Brisbane Women’s and Children’s Hospital, Monash Health and Adelaide Women’s and Children’s Hospital, Perth Children’s Hospital and The Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital in Victoria.
Cranbourne, Whittlesea and Craigieburn community hospitals in Melbourne all have two booths each. The business has just signed up to do the next Northern Health hospital at Epping, which will be a large addition, and has just finished a private practice in Newcastle.
It also did five audio rooms at NextSense centre for innovation in Sydney.
ADF has fitted booths in audiology clinics for larger practices including Connect Hearing and Amplifon but most of its work is with smaller, independent practices that buy audio booths.
Quality certification
Getting quality management system certification in 1995 was a pivotal moment because it confirmed the procedure was repeatable, and the product quality assured from one facility to the next.
“Other assessors do independent testing to prove that what we’ve installed meets the standards,” Jono says. “It comes down to how we test and certify. If people want it built to Australian standards, we can, or we can provide a booth to meet international standards.
“An offsider or I come to the first site meeting to do measurements. We’ve just started Dubbo Hearing, and I flew there, measured it up and came back to start the process. We take care of everything from start to finish so practitioners don’t have to worry about anything.”
Jono says the business has perfected its method of building booths, so it covers all pain points. If there are problems, it designs around them.
“It’s a point-of-difference because we like to manage all the people that need to work on it, whether it’s electricians, meetings with acoustic engineers or organising fire sprinklers,” he says. “We learnt a lot of this working with big builders where there’s many different inputs.
“We do the drawings and there are meetings for everything from air conditioning to the carpet. That’s how we evolved, and we source everything so customers get a turnkey project.
“We’ve built all sorts of weird things to hold speakers, televisions that hang from the roof, extra LED lighting – if the customer wants it, we can give them 95% of the things they want.
“There’s a lot of things people ask for, and we’ll always look into it; it’s part of who we are.”
Improvements can be made too. For example, the interior panels of large booths can be removed and cleaned after this adjustment was made when a child vomited on one.
Jobs at hospitals take about a year from initiation due to the design process, he adds. “The paperwork can take months but once the drawings are signed off, we can have a big booth manufactured in eight weeks, depending on our workload, then after that it only generally takes us a week to do the installation.
“At MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, we designed, manufactured and installed 21 booths for different purposes from studies on equipment to testing of patients. This was in the middle of the COVID pandemic,” Jono recalls.
“It took 10 semi-trailers to transport them. It was amazing, the biggest in Australia and the most booths that have ever been done for one place in the Southern Hemisphere.”
Different types
ADF offers three styles of single person booths. “They’re set and forget to a certain degree, we let customers choose their colours, but we have them ready so they can go straight off to paint and come back.
“There are little variations on every booth because we need to know if they’re a right- or left-handed opening door but there’s not a long wait for installation once they’re ordered and we always have two versions of each in stock.”
The micro booth will fit through any space, and a modular version can be installed panel-by-panel if it can’t fit through a tight hallway or space. “We can pull it apart when it arrives and put it back together as we install it,” he says.
To install a large room, such as at a hospital, ADF employees need the space to themselves for about a week, but small rooms are delivered and pushed into place immediately. “Practitioners at independent practices don’t need to close their clinic at all,” Jono says.
At Perth Children’s Hospital, ADF manufactured six rooms for different purposes for paediatric testing, built to meet international standards. “This was our first foray into working with international standards,” he adds.
“New community hospitals all have international standard booths now that everyone is going in that direction because it helps with paediatric testing and future technologies.”
Smaller practices generally go for Australian Standards, which are fit for purpose for what they need, he says.
“Our customers need the quietest rooms possible for testing; that’s what we deliver, the optimum level of low ambient noise for hearing testing for Australian and international standards,” he adds.
ADF has also built and fitted booths worldwide including in New Zealand, Singapore and Europe. It built Samoa’s first audiometric rooms and a trailer with a hearing booth which travels to schools for hearing checks. The project, alongside ENT surgeon Associate Professor Bernard Whitfield, was for Aid Australia and the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons.
“That was extremely rewarding because we’re giving children a chance to get back on track including with their education which is wonderful,” Jono says.
ADF recently exhibited at Audiology Australia’s 2025 Conference. “It was the first time we’d advertised. Response was great, everyone was coming up saying, ‘you’re the booth guys, I’ve seen your work’, or ‘I’ve been in your rooms, you build great stuff’,” he says. “Sometimes they say we’re expensive but that’s because we don’t compromise on quality.
“We’re sheet metal fabricators and boilermakers but when we build an audiology room, we’re building a product that gives back. It can improve someone’s life with hearing aids or a cochlear implant – that testing’s done in our room. We’re giving people a chance and we’re very proud of that.”
For more information, see ADF Industries.
