Yeah, phonons are just the quanta of sound (acoustic) waves; the wavelengths relevant for thermal purposes are quite high indeed, and easily scatter, and absorb and emit spontaneously (as you might assume from being thermalized..!), so it's not like you're going to hook up a piezo disc and listen to its temperature; but the physics is the same as regular LF acoustics. So we can think of it in terms of impedance matching between bulk substances of varying speed-of-sound and density. (Also, not that these parameters are exactly the LF values either; I believe there's some skew to them, approaching cutoff? And of course, the upper cutoff is given by, essentially, the mode where every other atom in the crystal is moving oppositely, the spacial Nyquist limit if you will.)
(Which, such a cutoff is obvious enough in solids, and, I believe was sufficient to explain the heat capacity of materials? But applying the same reasoning was quite the quandry for EM radiation. Circa turn-of-the-last-century. The same wavelength vs. degrees of freedom argument, applied to the EM field, leads to the "ultraviolet catastrophe" because there's simply no such limit to the classical EM field: the further up you go in frequency, the more modes fit in a given volume of space, and those modes should all fill equally with thermal energy (equipartition theorem). Setting an energy-based cutoff, and solving a fairly nasty integral, delivered the black-body spectrum perfectly; but no one quite believed the method, or really understood why it worked. IIRC, Planck himself disapproved of QM and always considered his trick a hack; mind, this was at a time when convenient hacks were popular in physics, Rutherford's "plum pudding" model, or Bohr's (literal) atomic orbit model of hydrogen, for examples. It took some decades before we had QM developed well enough to reasonably believe, yeah this weird shit seems to actually be what's going on, and to justify those hacks via direct solution or suitable approximation from the equations of motion, or state.)
Tim