A buddy of mine the other night mentioned playing a gig in an office filled with all those partitions that make up cubicles, and marveled and how acoustically dead the room was.
 
Any thoughts on this material applied to studio situations?

If the same kind of fabric covered boards are used in the US to create cubicles as are used in the the UK to divide up open-plan offices (we're not so big on cubicles as the US), the material's been used in studios as portable screens/room reverb control for many years.

I worked for the school board and scored a whole bunch back when I had my commercial building. They came in 2' 3' 4' and 6' sizes all about 5' high. Covered with a nice burgundy material. They added a very posh look to the studio. I had it all along this 16' wall and two places where it T'd off coming 6' into the room. This made for teaching booths as well as the drums had a little alcove that really helped control the volume. I also had a few that where free standing.
I sold them with the building and now I want them again. I'm hoping there's still a bunch still stored in the basement of one of the schools. I just joined a band who's practice space is all hard surfaces and it's terrible. We use in ears and if you remove them you'll go deaf. My meter shows 115+ decibels. 
The guy who owns the space doesn't seem into gluing acoustic dampening or even hanging quilts. So the "gobo's" are the ticket as they are easily moved around and cause no alteration to a room. The way they are put together allows for adjusting the sound. Each corner attachment is like a hing so you can put them at any angle and even fold them out of the way.  Example we would make a square box for the drummer when recording. To get out you just push the corner out like a big gate. 
Because they where 5' tall you could see each other over the tops. 
Just keep your eye out for an office that's shutting down. 

Interesting. Here's to office failures lol.

I used to do grunt work at an upstart studio and they had cubicle style separators around (but they weren't full height ones... not even sure what the original application could have been for them but they were essentially short cubicle dividers).
 
This was a big live room intended for live off the floor recording. Those barriers could be put in front of the kick drum (remember they were short) and or in front of the guitar amps. Essentially the kick, snare and amplifier mics are all around the same height (1' to 3 1/2' off the ground) so the kick and snare could throw into the amp mics and vice versa. By putting up the barriers you could reduce bleed between those close mics (kick and snare transients tend to cut and you don't want guitar in either of those tracks either) without losing any of the room ambience.
 
Very useful for a live room like that.

Office cubicle partitions were actually the first acoustical treatment I ever used. I'd gotten a bunch of them for next to nothing when the company I worked for went belly-up, along with some desks and chairs.
 
I found two things about them. First of all, different models and manufacturers use very different construction for what appear to be the same panels. You can tell which are the good ones by lifting it - not recommended for someone with a bad back, as they are extremely heavy. Those have a solid metal core inside; the cheaper ones that don't work as well have a kind of cardboard interior.
 
The second realization is that they are not the least bit linear in their absorption or isolation. They sound dead because they stop the upper midrange where most of your annoying office noises reside such as talking on the phone and fingers clacking on keyboards. But below about 700 Hz they do next to nothing.
 
If you buy them new they're quite expensive, putting even Auralex to shame on pricing. However, defunct businesses are liquidating assets all the time so bargains can be found. I think I paid 30 bucks for 8 panels plus two desks and four chairs. Here in the Seattle area, Boeing Surplus used to be a good source if you don't mind military-looking furniture.
 
The biggest upside is that they look nice. And you can hang shelves from them, that's another plus. But as an acoustical treatment they're just not terribly effective on their own.

I'm with Bit on this. The cloth covered screens look nice but they're either heavy, very expensive and not very good or very heavy, very very expensive and not particularly good.

The ones with a steel or grp/very high density plastic sheet core can stop some sound passing through them but tend to be reflective while the ones that aren't reflective let sound through. The ones that let sound through could make a good bass trap and general purpose broad-frequency reflection reducer if placed a few inches off the wall and the space behind them filled with rockwool or dense foam, but there are far cheaper ways of building the same thing yourself.

About 20 years ago a musician I know a bit decided to set up a small studio with a view to giving up his day job. It failed, largely because though he ploughed a heck of a lot of money into the project he's a lousy, partially deaf engineer with no understanding of the technology at all and a pig-headed refusal to listen to anyone who does. He bought a number of the portable screens to use to deaden his live room, which otherwise had bare brick walls.

It was just like recording in a brick-walled room.

Well then, there goes my dream of spending the rest of my life in an office cubicle.  :) 

I had a quote from a local company to finish my basement using stuff like that. I ended not doing it because of the cost. However, the first thing I noticed that when I walked into their showroom, was how "dead" room sounded. My wife even noticed it. 
 

tlw
It failed, largely because though he ploughed a heck of a lot of money into the project he's a lousy, partially deaf engineer with no understanding of the technology at all and a pig-headed refusal to listen to anyone who does. 

I got a good chuckle out of that entire post. Who'd have guessed that a partially-deaf engineer with no understanding of technology might be prone to fail? 
 
Actually, come to think of it, that description applies to Brian Wilson, and he did alright. I guess being an ace songwriter and arranger can make up for other weaknesses. Not being either of those things myself, I've no choice but to keep studying acoustics, electronics and DSP.