The story
For years I kept upgrading. Better speakers, better interfaces, gear that genuinely helped. But I still struggled with my own mixes and production decisions. I had also been in enough rooms with big systems that were just uncomfortable to be in to know something else was going on.
For a long time I thought that was on me, a mixing problem, or a listening problem. It probably was, plus my room.
Around five years ago I built my first acoustic panels, at a depth that was a bit past the usual recommendation, to see what it did for bass absorption. The change was extremely noticeable, and also a little hard to believe. For the first time I could hear bass, not the room resonating it. I had already tried thin treatment across the walls and ceiling, the usual fixes suggested everywhere online. None of it had done anything meaningful.
A mistake was not separating two different things: the sound coming out of a speaker, and the sound a room adds to it. Room correction EQs do not touch the room's physical response. It can only change what leaves the speaker. Once that distinction was clear, treatment stopped being an afterthought. It became part of the system.
Working with Qilla, and being around people who took sound just as seriously, pushed me further into caring about it. With Satori, we were among the first in the city to show what a well-tuned quality sound system does for a night, for performers and the room alike.
The Burrow became my first project at scale, with 77 panels, and the first time I had acoustic measurements to confirm what I'd been hearing.
Nothing like what I wanted existed in the market, and that's why we consult, fabricate, and install, end to end.
Saiko is what I wish existed when I was starting out.