It doesn't matter how much you've spent on the room—if the position is wrong, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much you spent on your speakers—if the position is wrong, it doesn't matter. The easiest, cheapest thing you can do to move toward your goal of a room where it's easy to make decisions—and those decisions translate—is to position your speakers where they goddamn should be.

Yeah, and position yourself where you therefore have to be. That’s like 80% of the work.

Welcome to Bobby Owsinski’s Inner Circle. I'm Bobby Owsinski, and this is a show all about music, music production, and the music business.

My guest today is acoustician and studio designer Hush Paz. Hush’s company, Sense & Sound, offers an exclusive Studio-in-a-Day service, where they design, install, and calibrate your studio acoustics in just one day.

Clients who have utilized this service include mixer DJ Swivel, film composer Sam Ewing, producer/composer Mike Woods, and video game audio company Hexany Audio.

Hush has also designed his own unique acoustic panels, as well as Smart Legs for super simple installation.

During the interview, we talked about how Studio-in-a-Day works, why speaker placement in the room is so important, how cable degradation influences sound, how he developed his acoustic panels, and much more.

I spoke with Hush from his studio in Los Angeles. Let’s start here then...

Studio in a Day

Everybody wants to know about the one—the Studio-in-a-Day.

Well, the general idea started when I decided to piece together a company, and acoustics was one of the directions I went in. I won’t go into the back end at this point, since you’re asking about Studio-in-a-Day. I was just asking myself, What would it look like if this were easy?

How could I simplify the 10,000-hour headache—and the 100,000 decisions—that go into assembling a studio? That’s the biggest pain point, both for the designer and for the person who just wants a studio.

So I asked: What would it look like if it were easy? And the answer was always, Well, it's just there. It’s just right there, in the same day. Right?

If you're in your room and you’re like, “this or this,” you’ll go, I want that. But if you have to read about it, understand what they mean, visualize it, imagine it—and then make a decision for every decision—then it becomes a headache for the consumer.

So I thought: the easiest form of studio design is if it happens in your home, on the day. All decisions made for you. You’re handheld through the process—not just for an easy buying experience, but for an easy decision-making experience that matches your needs.

And then I reverse-engineered the entire company from there to be able to do just that.

The premise of it is basically try before you buy. Instead of reading about things, understanding them, figuring out what you need, consulting, getting quotes, revising quotes, then figuring out which fabric you need—because you’re ordering the thing and they have to make it—we just show up.

We bring the system that’s relevant for your room. We bring it in. We do a core speaker placement. We demo the system—if needed. Half the time the clients say, Just do what you think, and then we get to it. But if the client wants to hear and make decisions, then we demo it.

We set it up for them, with core speaker placement. We say, “This sounds like this. The panels are here. They look like this.”

And the client goes, Okay, yeah, good, or Okay… how much is that?

And I say, “It’s 10 grand.” They say, “Okay, what can we knock off?”

Then I’ll say, “Well, the lowest-priority panels are these—take them out.”

Then the client says, “I didn’t really care about that difference. That’s fine.”

Then I say, “Next panel I’d remove is that one.”

And the client goes, “No no no, put that one back!”

And now you’re making decisions with certainty, right there on the spot. They're not tasks. They're not draining. They’re clear.

Once we agree on what they want, the client says, “This is what I’m getting.” We commit it to the wall—install it on the wall if they want. If it’s on legs, it’s on legs.

Then we get to fabrics.

I essentially push the fabric decision to the end, to remove it from the manufacturing process. The way we do that is: we created Velcro-attached, removable covers. So the whole process happens with just black transport fabrics. You're not dealing with the visuals at all—just the sound, the design, the placement, the function.

At the end, I say—if I could put on an Arabic accent, I would, but I can't—Which fabric do you want?

And usually, I leave them for a week with it. Because that’s the hardest decision—what they want it to look like.

Then they tell us, and we order the fabric. We come back a couple of weeks later and redress the panels in an hour or two.

In the meantime, I finish the speaker calibration and collect any details about other things that need to be done—custom things that couldn’t be done the same day. Then I give the keys back to the user and leave.

Now, obviously, we’re just talking about acoustic treatment, not isolation.

So what happens with someone who wants isolation?

Isolation is not done in a day.

Isolation is construction. Isolation is a highly case-specific assessment—whether it’s the case of what structure you’re starting with, or what your actual needs are.

One guy with bass-heavy speakers has one set of needs. A drummer has a very different set of needs. I wouldn’t make the same decisions for those two cases.

It’s a highly custom, advisory, and design-oriented service. Then a contractor is needed to implement it.

I’m not a contractor. I’m not legally allowed to build walls. So now you’re dealing with a third party. And I really try to stay away from construction—better than the plague, apparently! But when construction is needed, it’s needed.

So, a lot of clients have a bedroom or something less than ideal to start with. There’ll be windows—like in my room, for instance—or doors, or closets, or whatever. Things that are suboptimal. What do you do then?

I make the decisions that are best for the geometry.

Sound is a geometric function. The way I run this company—and the way we’re able to make such fast decisions in a single day—is that I’ve formalized a positioning scheme and created classifications of decisions for typical cases.

So there’ll be a custom case—like a weird shape or a closet somewhere—yeah, I’ll need to be creative on that decision. That’s what I’m there for.

But most of the time, it’s like: the speakers need to be here. The geometry of the room dictates that the speakers go here. Maybe a little to the left or right, but that's your orientation.

That means we need panels here, here, and here.

I divide panel positions into three cases:

1. Bass-balancing positions

2. Modal-balancing positions – balancing the modal behavior of the room

3. Early reflection positions – also called first reflection points

Each of them serves a function. They somewhat overlap, but based on this hierarchy, I can prioritize the decisions.

So let’s say there’s a closet over there. The only potential for actual symmetry in the room is going to have to be here. So we take the closet doors off. Now it’s a strange shape acoustically, but the reflections are only seeing the back of the closet. Etc., etc.

We look for the most ideal decisions that will lead to the most symmetrical shape and best response I can envision for the room—as the client’s needs dictate.

If the client’s needs go beyond what the room can offer, I’ll advise them: “The best we can do in this room is probably under your needs. We should look for a different room.”

If that’s the answer, that’s the answer.

The best spot for your recording work?

I see it with my followers and subscribers. A lot of them have a room where they’ve basically just put in a workstation and a couple of speakers—and the placement of everything is less than ideal.

I keep telling them: At the very least, come out from the wall. Be equidistant from each side wall if you can.

But the pushback I get sometimes is, “Yeah, but this is the only place I can put it.”

Do you run into that?

I do. I disarm that very quickly.

I'd say, in any room I walk into—whatever the caliber—it could be a mega corporation doing post-production for Netflix, or some guy in his bedroom, or even a major studio—80% of the time, the position is wrong. Just wrong.

It doesn't matter how much you've spent on the room—if the position is wrong, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much you spent on your speakers—if the position is wrong, it doesn't matter.

The easiest, cheapest thing you can do to move toward your goal of having a room where it’s easy to make decisions—and those decisions translate—is to position your speakers where they goddamn should be.

Yeah. And position yourself where you therefore have to be. That’s like 80% of the work.

Your $1,000 speakers are absolutely meaningless in the wrong place. They’ll sound nice—they’ll still be impressive—but they won’t translate.

So just having the authority of a studio designer, I find that people don’t argue with me—unless it’s really important to them based on their actual priorities.

And in that case, that’s fine! That’s the correct decision for their needs.

If someone says, “I’ll sacrifice the holes in the bass, and the wrong panning image, and the fact that the mids-to-sides balance will be off—because I need this space for creative purposes, for writing, for vibing”—great. That’s what that room needs.

I just find that I don’t really get called to those rooms often. I’m not the guy for that—unless it’s a friend who just wants a quick word.

But if I’m being paid to provide an opinion, it’s usually because someone wants the room to translate.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Let’s talk about speakers… and the best ones for you

Let’s talk about speakers, then. Do you recommend certain speakers, or does it matter to you?

I’ve found that I’ve had to update my opinions of speakers constantly. I essentially learned that I can’t really bear much of an opinion about a speaker until I’ve had a chance to place it in a room.

So when I go into a room, and the client has whatever speakers they have, I begin speaker placement. I move them here, move them there—try different positions. Through that process, I get an averaging of the differences, and I’m able to put aside the influence of the room and be left with the speaker’s actual response. Only then can I actually have an opinion about the speaker.

It also gives me an opportunity to see how the speaker’s dispersion interacts with the room—as I move it around. Even more so if I get to place the same speaker in different rooms. Only when I’ve done that a few times—seen them repeat—can I say, this is how I feel about this speaker.

Any opinions I had before? Thrown out the window.

I’ve had the same experience with microphones. I used to feel strongly about certain models—until I discovered cable degradation, which was invisible to me. As part of formalizing my “fidelity formula”—everything that contributes to the sound result—I realized, Oh… I have no idea what a Royer ribbon mic sounds like.

Before, I hated it. Thought it was awful. Didn’t get the hype. But then I remembered the studio I had in London at the time—it had god-awful cables, and a Studer console with caps that should’ve been replaced long before. My opinion? Irrelevant. I hadn’t actually heard the microphone.

Same goes for speakers.

What I’ve found is that the differences between speakers are shockingly smaller than people think.

If you’re buying a pro-level monitor these days, you can expect to get something solid. Spend $1,000-ish? There are better and worse options, sure, but none of them suck.

I used to think KRK Rockets weren’t great. Then I did a tiny surround room for someone—they had Rocket 5s. I replaced them, and I was like, These go down to 40 Hz. The midrange resolution is consistent. The treble is nice. This is great. Completely surprised. They’re $150 speakers. Obviously, they don’t sound like ATC 45s—but placed correctly, with acoustics done? That room was easy to make decisions in. They would translate.

I still think you need a sub, but even without it, you could work.

So I’d say: most speakers are good, and the practical differences between them—when it comes to your ability to do your job—are much smaller than you'd expect. Almost insignificant compared to placement, acoustic response, and room shape.

Even with a naked room, you can lose with the wrong shape or win with the right one.

That’s not to say I don’t have preferences—I love ATCs. I love the new PMCs—the IB1s. I just got to place Dutch & Dutch for the first time—that was an experience.

There are speakers I don’t like—I won’t name them here—but I literally hate them, and it’s usually because of their functional dispersion. Not tonal character—just how they work in space.

That said, all of them are workable.

Some are surprisingly good. Like Kali Audio speakers. $400. Get their 2- or 3-way tops with a sub? You're at $1,300. Super light speaker—so fasten it to a stand or weigh it down. But once you do? Shocking resolution for the price point. I try to identify the stars in each price range, and those are what I send people to.

In the ~$1,000 range, Kali Audio is beating a lot of competition. Sure, some other speakers have a more luscious feel. But I will take consistent resolution across frequency and dynamic range over something that feels warm or rich in one range but inconsistent across others.

For me, if the mids sound soft and luscious, but the treble doesn’t match, or the subs don’t match the mids? That’s a problem. I’d rather have a speaker that feels a little flatter but is accurate and consistent.

In the $1,000 to $8,000 range, it’s a wild west. There’s tons of character, taste, tradeoffs, durability, workflow preferences.

Take Amphion, for example. It’s a simple design. No limiter. It’s passive. Whatever you send it, it outputs. That’s dangerous if you don’t know how to use it. You can push the speaker into compression, and it won’t tell you. The amp isn’t protecting it. If you don’t know how to use that tool, your translation suffers.

That’s not the speaker’s fault—it’s a user case issue.

You can’t do that as easily with most active speakers. Most have built-in protection. So again—in that price range, everything has a use case. It’s hard to generalize.

Now, the coaxial designs—like some of Genelec’s point-source models—are very impressive, especially for spatial configurations. Lots of benefits. Mechanically and statistically great speakers.

But putting those stats aside, I’ve mixed on them in different rooms, and I just find something a little off. Something in the dynamics or the punch—I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it hits me wrong.

That’s just my personal preference, though. The clients I’ve worked with who use them? They’re happy. Their mixes translate. That’s what matters.

They don’t have the softness of an ATC—I can geek out about that all day—but functionally, that doesn’t mean much.

In the $8,000+ range, it’s hard to go wrong. Nothing survives in that market if no one’s buying.

Yes, there are speakers I don’t like that others recommend. But I don’t think any of them suck.

Yeah, I get it. Okay—I use Amphions, by the way. So there you go.

Do you have the larger ones or the smaller ones?

I have the 118s.

With a sub?

No, no sub. I'm in a small room.

And you’re not going too loud?

No, not at all.

That being said, what’s your take on speaker cables for passive speakers?

How Hush became a studio designer

Tell me some of your background—how did you develop into a studio designer?

Well, I came into recording and engineering through music. I was a pianist, a bit of a musician—a teenager, really—drawn to music. I was always very technical. I took my dad’s stereo apart... didn’t piece it back together.

I’m from Israel originally, and this was around 2003. It was just the beginning of the rise of pro-consumer, accessible interfaces. Cubase 2 was around. My dad was a computer guy, so we had computers at home that he built from parts.

I had a little 10x10 room—carpet on the floor, egg cartons on the wall, two PA speakers, and a Behringer MXA8000 that I bought from our Apple bomb, if you know who that is.

Yeah, I do.

Back in the day! I used that space to rehearse with a punk band I was in, and then realized—wait, I can record. I had four channels, so I’d track the band live into two channels, drums into two more, then do vocals later. Kind of a half-live workflow. And suddenly I was in business.

It started with recording my own songs, but I couldn’t play everything well enough. So I brought in other musicians, and then they brought their bands, and it just grew. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was just me and maybe one other guy in town who had an audio interface setup. That became my world.

From there, I dove deeper into sound and production. A crew of musicians formed around me—they brought projects. I built a second studio when we moved: control room, live room, dead room. The bomb shelter—every house in Israel has one—was the amp room. It was convenient. I ran that for a couple years.

I was also an audio engineer in the army, doing live sound. I taught myself everything. YouTube wasn’t really around yet for this stuff, or at least it had nothing helpful. I searched for knowledge everywhere. I didn’t know about your book until university.

So I just ran experiments. Learned. Then moved on to the next thing. That was the story up through 2009.

In 2009, after the army, I hit a wall. I didn’t know how to get better. I didn’t know how to learn anymore. So I sold all my gear and moved to England to learn the fundamentals.

I did the Tonmeister course—if you know it.

Oh yeah.

I was there for the theory. Everyone else was interested in the hands-on. I didn’t care about that. I wanted to know how things work. I was front-row, always asking questions.

I gravitated toward acoustics. I’d already built two rooms by then and seemed to have some spatial intelligence—I relate strongly to space. My first rooms were filled with junk from the street—mattresses, foam, whatever. In England, I moved houses constantly, setting up new rooms every time. Still working, still engineering.

During my placement year, I worked at Dean Street Studios—until I got fired. That left me with 8 months to fill in London. So I thought, what’s my weakest skill? Mixing. So I decided to dedicate all 8 months to learning how to mix.

I bought your book, Mixing with Your Mind, and another I can’t recall, and read everything I could. I took on every project I could find. And I sat there, day after day, establishing my own mixing philosophy—a lot of which borrows from your book and that meditation list in Mixing with Your Mind.

When I returned to university and went back into recording, everything had changed. My approach was totally different—and so much better.

Back in London, I was still moving around, still building setups in new houses, helping friends. People started calling me that guy who does this. I tried to suck up as much knowledge as I could. At Tonmeister, the acoustics material was aimed at a certain level. I dug into papers, technical writing. It was all very dry.

I continued engineering. I rented a studio, produced bands, recorded them. That was the studio with the terrible Studer console and awful cables. That room... I remember going to the street, dragging back pallets to build diffusers. I had wooden floors installed that creaked (bad idea). I was working at Smokehouse Studios and wanted to modify the acoustics in one of their rooms.

At the time, I wasn’t aware of speaker placement. I wish I was.

The monitors I used had moved countries and were starting to die. One speaker’s surround was detaching—I didn’t notice until I moved to the States. My last room in London was terrible. Now I understand it was the geometry, but at the time, I couldn’t figure it out. Nothing worked. I couldn’t make decisions in that room. It was the worst kind of space—hard to mix and it didn’t translate. Every mix took two weeks. It had a huge, negative impact on my career.

Eventually, my visa ran out. I’d extended it under an entrepreneur visa, but it ended. At the same time, my U.S. green card came through. After 10 years of waiting, they said: Come to the States or lose your spot. You have six months.

So I moved to LA—no plan. It was a dead decade, industry-wise. I didn’t find my place. I worked here and there. I didn’t have a mixing suite the first year, so I lost all my clients. They moved on. I was stuck in NoHo.

I had a lot of sound skills to monetize: live engineering, whatever. I toured a bit. Worked at The Peppermint Club. But I wasn’t happy.

What I did notice was the stark difference between my business acumen and that of American musicians. Americans are very business-oriented.

At one point, I was living with a guy who was a manager at TDE—Kendrick Lamar’s label. I could barely participate in the conversations. I was too focused on content creation. I didn’t understand money.

So I decided: I need to figure out business. I need to understand money.

I was still engineering, but I decided to start a business. I was tired of artists. Tired of the inconsistency. I wanted control.

At some point, I went to an acoustics lecture—just out of interest—and met Ken Goerres and Bruce Black, both acousticians. I later joined the Sapphire Group, and I’m still a member.

That led to installation work. I started as just another pair of hands in garage builds, studio installs, etc. Most acousticians are older. Someone needed to build this stuff.

I ended up helping install an Atmos speaker system at the Nickelodeon studio. I asked, “What’s the placement tolerance?” They were like, “What do you mean?” I said, “Is it one cubic foot? One inch? What’s the tolerance?” They said one inch. So I calculated how to position 22 speakers in a non-rectangular room within one cubic inch of accuracy.

I found it incredibly intuitive.

A friend moved from London to LA. He bought a house and said, “I need a studio. Can you look at it?” I said yes. Then I came up with a plan. Then someone else asked. Then another person.

I think there’s one holy rule in America: Thou shalt not argue with supply and demand.

So I gave it a name. And I said, Okay, I think I’ve found my business.

I focused on it. While stuck in LA traffic, I kept asking: What problem hasn’t been solved? What should I build?

The answer kept circling back: the available products on the market weren’t doing what I needed them to do.

Working with Ken Goerres, I started building panels—using his garage, his methods, and adding my own. I discovered that 703 fiberglass sheets resonate. If you just put them in a panel whole, they have a sound. But if you slice them up—like a membrane—it changes everything. Suddenly, it balances the absorption across the frequency range.

This insight helped me get into the Sapphire Group. Ken called it passification—after my last name, Paz.

I presented it to the group. Got skeptical looks. Then I hit one full sheet of 703 and then hit a sliced one. Boom—big difference. Everyone was convinced.

So I kept going. Started designing my own panels. Building a product line.

And always asking: How do I make this simpler?

Panels needed to be installable in a day. Manufacturing needed to be efficient. The installation process needed to take seconds, not minutes. Decision trees needed to be binary: A or C—not endless "what if" conversations.

I began sketching. Building. And that brings us... kind of up to now.

Wow. That’s quite a story.

Sorry if I was too elaborate.

No—it’s great.

One last question

You mentioned along the way that you had to build your business chops. So, this is my last question for you—what’s the best piece of advice you’ve learned along the way?
It can be about business, acoustics, or anything else.

A good piece of advice I’ve seen play out again and again is this: it’s easy to get stuck in loops—not distractions exactly, but mental cycles that feel productive, yet pull you away from what matters.

That might sound unsatisfying, like I’m saying “Don’t get distracted.” But that’s not it.

It’s more like: leave it alone. Do the thing you originally set out to do.

I see this a lot. I’ll implement a studio for someone—beyond just the acoustics. We go deep: What outboard should you get? How do we design your signal flow so it supports your workflow? How do we reduce moment-to-moment tasks or remove degradation from the chain?

We tailor the whole space to support the person—their process. After that, the studio sounds great. The workflow is clean. What used to take three days to mix now takes one. It’s a huge win.

But then... they keep going. They start adding things, exploring new gear, swapping cables, trying new monitors. And I’m just like: Leave it alone. Make music.

You wanted to make music. Don’t make a studio. I make studios.

I rarely make music these days. I keep Saturdays open to engineer and produce for one client who became a friend. That’s for me. Obviously, there’s business involved, but it’s still music.

The rest of my time? I’m building a company. I’m figuring out marketing, handling cash flow, planning payroll, cutting manufacturing time from 90 minutes to 9, communicating brand values—none of that is music. And that’s fine. I chose that path.

But a producer or engineer who’s built a studio that empowers them to do their work—now put it aside. Do what you came to do.

It takes mental effort to switch out of studio-building mode. One day you’re thinking, My studio isn’t good enough, and the next you have to accept: This is good. This is the time. This is the place. Let’s go.

So, I guess my one piece of advice is:
👉 Keep your eye on the prize.
👉 Discern what’s necessary and contributory… and what’s just habit.
👉 Don’t get stuck doing something just because you’re used to doing it.

Is that a good answer?

That’s great.
That’s a good place to stop, I think. Thank you so much, Hush.

Thanks for listening and being in My Inner Circle.
Remember, if you have any questions or comments, you can send them to questions@bobbyoinnercircle.com.

You can also learn all about the latest in music, audio, and production news, and find out about openings for my latest online classes at bobbyowsinski.com.

This is Bobby Owsinski. I’ll see you next time.