Case Study: How to Efficiently Design a Music Studio

NIa markovska - october 24, 2025

📖 Reading time: 8 minutes and 34 seconds

A well-designed music studio is more than just a collection of high-end equipment. It’s a carefully built environment where architecture, acoustics, and aesthetics work together to support creative work. The space around you shapes how accurately you hear and how comfortably you create.

We believe that acoustic design should never be an afterthought. The right panels, placed in the right locations, can transform even the most ordinary room into a reliable, inspiring production space. Let’s walk together through the essential steps of designing a music studio that performs just as well acoustically as it does visually.

From ceiling panels that shape your soundstage to acoustic walls that double as design features, here’s how to build a space that both sounds right and feels right.

Every Sound Starts with the Room

Before choosing microphones or monitors, start with the space itself. The shape, size, and materials of a room all influence how sound behaves. In untreated spaces, early reflections, standing waves, and flutter echoes can distort what you hear. This inevitably leads to poor mix decisions or unpredictable recordings.

The Invisible Architecture of Sound

Hard surfaces like glass, concrete, or bare drywall reflect sound. In small or rectangular rooms, these reflections build up quickly. This creates a harsh, uncontrolled acoustic environment. On the other hand, too much soft furnishing or clutter can absorb high frequencies unevenly, dulling the sound without improving clarity.

To test your room, let’s try our favourite clap test. Stand in the middle of the space and clap your hands once. If you hear a metallic ringing or a quick echo, your room has strong reflections. These can interfere with detail in vocals, instrument playback, or monitor output. This happens especially in the mid and high frequency ranges, where our hearing is actually most sensitive.

Acoustic Treatment vs. Soundproofing

We often emphasise the importance of the difference between acoustic treatment and soundproofing.

Acoustic treatment improves how sound behaves inside a room, reducing reflections, controlling reverb, and helping you hear clearly.
Soundproofing prevents sound from leaving or entering the room, stopping external noise or leakage between spaces.

This article focuses on the acoustic treatment, which makes the room itself more accurate, balanced, and comfortable to work in.

Where Does Treatment Matter Most?

Every surface in a room affects the way sound behaves, but some play a far bigger role in shaping what we hear. Knowing where to focus your acoustic treatment can save time, budget, and frustration in listening spaces such as music studios, editing rooms, or content creation setups.

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Reflections and the Listening Position

When sound leaves your speakers, it travels straight to your ears and also bounces off the nearest surfaces. These are usually the walls beside you, the ceiling above you, and the wall behind your desk or mixing position. These “first reflections” can reach your ears just milliseconds after the direct sound, blurring clarity, collapsing the stereo image, and introducing phase issues.

Even in casual use, like video calls or content playback, these reflections can make voices feel distant or muffled.

Bass Build-Up in Corners

Low-frequency sound waves are longer and behave differently from mids and highs. Instead of bouncing cleanly, they tend to collect in corners, particularly where two walls or a wall and ceiling meet. This results in uneven bass response, and this leads to some notes feeling exaggerated, while others seem to somehow disappear completely.

Ceilings and Vertical Reflections

Ceilings are often overlooked, literally, but they contribute heavily to room echo and flutter. In small or untreated rooms with hard surfaces, sound can bounce vertically between the ceiling and floor, creating an unpleasant ringing or hollow effect. This affects not only what you hear, but also how long you can stay focused in the space.

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Back Wall and Energy Return

The wall behind the listening position reflects energy back into the room. If untreated, it can send delayed reflections toward your ears that interfere with what’s coming from the front. This disturbs spatial awareness and can make a well-balanced mix or recording feel strangely disconnected.

Studio Precision in the Heart of Rome

When designing a studio for an Italian composer and an independent label in Rome, every surface was considered part of the instrument. The goal was to achieve complete acoustic balance and create a space where recordings sound accurate, mixes translate perfectly, and long sessions remain comfortable.

Layering Absorption for a Balanced Room

The studio walls combined two types of panels, each addressing a different frequency range. WAVO Perforated Wooden Panels were used to absorb mid-range frequencies, which are often the most challenging to control in smaller studios. Their patterned surface helped break up sound energy without over-deadening the room, maintaining warmth and detail across instruments and vocals.

On the other hand, ECHO Wall Panels targeted the higher frequencies, managing reflections and flutter echo near the mixing position. Together, they created a controlled but lively acoustic field.

In similar setups, ECHO PRINT panels offer an alternative where branding or creative identity is important. These printed panels maintain high acoustic performance while allowing full visual customisation. They are perfect for artists, labels, or commercial studios that double as content spaces.

Absorption That Works with the Architecture

In studios, ceilings are often overlooked. But here, they became a defining feature. The DECIBEL team installed GLL Textile Panels in a carefully mapped layout. Their faceted, non-linear design breaks up reflections while absorbing sound in the vocal and instrumental range. This is especially essential for clear recordings and fatigue-free listening.

To complement this, ECHO MOON circular ceiling panels could also be considered in larger or shared studios. Their floating form fits around lighting and ventilation systems without interfering. That is ideal for maintaining clean sightlines and architectural flow.

In the Rome studio, warm LED strips framed the GLL panels, creating a sense of rhythm and depth. Lighting affects how we perceive space and time, especially in long sessions. Here, acoustic treatment and lighting worked together to support the creative focus.

Positioning the Bass Traps

Low-end frequencies are notoriously difficult to manage, especially in smaller rooms. To ensure tight bass response and translation across playback systems, the team positioned Pi Bass Traps around the listening zone.

Placed in corners and behind the monitors, they prevented boominess and standing waves. This is actually one of the most common issues in untreated studios. This helped the composer make confident decisions during mixing and mastering, especially in genres with heavy low-end content.

Pi Bass Trap Acoustic panel Low Frequency sound absorber DECIBEL

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Adaptable Acoustic Solutions

While this Rome project required custom planning, the same acoustic logic applies to smaller or more flexible environments.

By choosing panels that control, diffuse, and improve sound, the final space became a reliable acoustic environment where the artist can create, listen, and trust what they hear.

You don’t need to cover every surface. Acoustic comfort is about placement, not excess. Start with the loudest, hardest, or most reflective surfaces and build from there.

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