When Grammy-winning mastering engineer Adam Ayan decided to build his new studio in Portland, Maine, he faced a familiar challenge: how to recreate the sonic trust and precision he’d developed over two decades at Gateway Mastering. This time, he'd be in a new environment: eventually, his permanent home at Ayan Mastering, but also in a temporary workspace while he found the perfect location and build for the shell of his new permanent home. Because he needed to maximize his flexibility, he wanted to achieve elite acoustics performance without relying on traditional, permanent architectural treatments.
To solve that problem, Adam turned to GIK Acoustics and James Lindenschmidt for the acoustic design. We deployed a new modular treatment strategy built around our 10" Sound Blocks and Soffit Bass Traps. The result is a mastering room that not only achieves the world-class performance at Gateway, but in several measurable ways surpasses it.
A New Approach to Mastering-Grade Acoustics
Traditional mastering rooms are often built from the ground up, with false walls concealing thick broadband absorbers, tuned resonators, and intricate diffusion geometry. While this approach can deliver stunning results, it’s also permanent, expensive, and inflexible. Once the walls are sealed, changing the room, whether for new formats like Dolby Atmos or evolving workflows, can mean starting over entirely.
For Ayan Mastering, we took a different route: a design with modular, shippable treatments installed in a spaced, distributed configuration with many freestanding (and easily movable) components to fine-tune the design in situ. Each acoustic element in the room could be manufactured offsite, shipped as a discrete unit, and installed without any permanent construction. This not only reduced cost and complexity but also made the system fully adjustable for future needs.
At the heart of this concept are GIK SoundBlocks, modular 2’ × 2’ panels measuring 10" deep, available in broadband absorptive, membrane-enhanced bass trapping with Range Limiters, or hybrid diffusive configurations with Amplitude plates. By spacing, stacking, and distributing these blocks strategically, we were able to recreate the broadband response and modal control of a traditional architectural build on a performance level, but with the flexibility and repeatability of a modular system.
Design Goals and Room Constraints
Ayan’s new mastering room was modeled closely on his former Gateway space, with interior dimensions of 15’ 4" × 20’ × 10’. Because of the similarity of two dimensions, it produces a few stacked modal resonances. While theoretically suboptimal, Ayan had grown accustomed to and had internalized the sound this shape produced. And we'd also have quite a lot more bass trapping in the new room to deal with these problems.
Several practical constraints also shaped the final design:
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Two load-bearing posts in the rear of the room could not be relocated.
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Adam wanted the front of the room to remain acoustically dry, minimizing early reflections.
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The rear should maintain a more open and natural diffusion field for a balanced sense of depth and space.
These factors guided a hybrid treatment plan combining freestanding modular stacks, ceiling-mounted Sound Blocks, Soffit Bass Traps in the corners, and a central array of Q7D diffusers on the rear wall.
Front-End Precision: Absorption Where It Counts
In any mastering room, the most critical goal is achieving absolute trust in the monitoring environment—meaning the sound arriving at the engineer’s ears is free from early reflections and low-frequency modal distortion.
To achieve this, the entire front half of Ayan Mastering was treated with broadband absorptive Sound Blocks. These units line the side walls and ceiling reflection zones, with a small 4" air gap between ceiling panels to further enhance bass absorption through impedance transitions.
The result is a reflection-free zone surrounding the engineer’s position, ensuring that every detail, stereo imaging, transient clarity, and tonal balance, translates exactly as intended.
Rear-Wall Strategy: Controlled Diffusion and Bass Management
While the front of the room is highly absorptive, the rear half introduces a mix of diffusion and low-frequency control.
Behind the listening position, we installed a row of GIK Q7D diffusers, flanked and surrounded by Sound Blocks with Amplitude plates. This configuration scatters energy evenly while maintaining decay-time uniformity across the spectrum.
In the corners, we deployed stacked Soffit Bass Traps, each 16" deep and extending nearly to the ceiling. The space behind the rear posts provided a natural alcove with enough room for two Soffit stacks per corner (4 Soffits per rear corner), creating extremely effective corner absorption. These deep devices target the first few axial modes, tightening the low end and smoothing decay times across the critical 30–80 Hz range, and also helping throughout the midrange and treble.
Modularity and Adaptability
One of the major successes of this design is its modular adaptability. Each Sound Block or Soffit Trap can be repositioned or swapped to fine-tune the room’s response as needs evolve.
Because Ayan initially used the same units in a temporary workspace, he was able to work in a fully treated environment while the permanent studio was under construction, and then move the entire treatment set into the finished room. This reusability represents a dramatic improvement over traditional fixed installations, where performance depends entirely on the room’s architecture and build.
It also gives Ayan complete freedom to adjust his setup for future monitoring formats or to further optimize low-frequency decay without reconstruction.
Performance Results
Room performance was verified through detailed spectrogram analysis before and after treatment.
In the untreated shell, decay times in the bass range exceeded one second, with clear modal buildup between 40–70 Hz and uneven peak energy times across the spectrum:
After treatment installation, spectrograms revealed a dramatic improvement:
We were pleased by these results, specifically:
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Decay times became much more uniform and consistent across all frequencies.
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Peak Energy Time (the light blue line superimposed over the Spectrogram) in the 60–200 Hz range flattened into a ruler-straight line—crucial for mastering clarity. Most modern music has a lot of energy in this range so hearing it accurately is essential for mastering.
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Resonant peaks around 45–55 Hz (the 1-1-0 and 2-0-0 modes) were significantly reduced, even without tuned traps.
Most impressively, these results were achieved without any permanent structural treatment and without using tuned resonators or pressure traps. The system remains scalable (pressure devices can still be added in key corners if desired). Whether this happens or not remains to be seen, but current performance already exceeds that of the original Gateway room, widely regarded as one of the best mastering spaces in the world.
The Listening Experience
Measurement data tells only part of the story. The true test of a mastering room is how it feels to work in, how confident the engineer feels making decisions that will hold up everywhere else.
According to Adam, that confidence came immediately:
“If you go down this road and do it this way, instead of building things into walls that may or may not work, the beauty of this is that you can move it around. You can also do it in phases and always add to it. I feel like we far exceeded our goals. This room is better than the best rooms I’ve worked in—and I’ve worked in some of the best on the planet.”
That statement underscores what this project represents: a shift in how world-class rooms can be built. By combining large-format, high-depth modular absorbers with distributed diffusion, it’s now possible to reach mastering-level precision without the permanence or cost of traditional architecture.
The new Ayan Mastering studio stands as proof that modular acoustic systems can deliver results on par with the most advanced architectural builds. The room achieves near-perfect decay uniformity, tight low-end control, and pristine imaging, all while remaining adjustable, shippable, and repeatable.
For GIK Acoustics, this project demonstrates how thoughtful design and precision manufacturing can bridge the gap between science and art: creating spaces where engineers like Adam Ayan can continue shaping the records that define modern music.
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