We had a deadline problem. A client had booked three days of voiceover recording at our studio in Dubai Media City, starting that Friday. On Wednesday morning, our lead engineer flagged something we had been quietly tolerating for months: the flutter echo in the main recording room had gotten noticeably worse after the fit-out work we’d had done on the adjacent office.
Tolerable for music sessions where reverb can be managed in post. Not tolerable for voiceover, where a clean, dry recording is the entire point. We had forty-eight hours to fix it or reschedule a client we could not afford to reschedule.
A colleague at a nearby production house had used shaheenacoustic for their own studio treatment earlier in the year and specifically mentioned their turnaround speed. We called them Wednesday afternoon. By Thursday morning they were on-site.
What the room actually looked like acoustically
The recording room is roughly 28 square metres — not large, but not a typical home studio box either. Parallel walls on three sides, a large glass window to the control room on the fourth. Original treatment was foam wedge tiles installed when the studio opened four years ago. They had done the job well enough at the time.
The fit-out work next door had involved breaking through one shared wall to run cable management and then replastering. The replastering changed the surface density on that wall just enough to shift the room’s resonance behavior. The flutter echo — that rapid repetitive reflection you hear when you clap between parallel surfaces — had moved from barely noticeable to clearly audible on a microphone at normal speaking distance.
Our engineer measured reverberation time at around 0.4 seconds in the mid frequencies. For a voiceover room, you want to be closer to 0.2 to 0.25 seconds. Not dramatically wrong, but audibly wrong for the application.
The assessment and what they recommended
The Shaheen Acoustic team did a proper walk-through before recommending anything. They clapped at different points in the room, listened to how the echo behaved near each wall, checked the existing foam tile positions, and asked specifically what the room was being used for and what the recording chain looked like.
Their assessment was direct: the foam tiles on the replastered wall were no longer doing enough absorption work because the wall surface had changed. The solution was not to rip everything out and start again. It was to add a targeted run of fabric acoustic panels on that wall and the opposing wall to break the flutter path, and to add corner bass traps to address a low-frequency buildup we had not fully identified ourselves.
Targeted. Minimal disruption. Reversible if the room use changes. That framing mattered to us because we did not want to lock the room permanently into voiceover configuration.
The install: Thursday afternoon to Friday morning
Installation ran from Thursday afternoon through to early Friday morning. The team worked around our control room schedule — we had mix sessions running in the adjacent room and they kept noise to a minimum during critical listening periods without being asked.
What was installed:
- Eight fabric acoustic panels across the two parallel walls, positioned at reflection points mapped during the assessment. Not evenly spaced for aesthetic reasons — placed where the flutter path required interruption.
- Four floor-to-ceiling corner bass traps filling the two rear corners. These were custom-sized to the room’s ceiling height — standard off-the-shelf dimensions would have left gaps that reduced their effectiveness at the frequencies we needed to address.
- All fixings were into wall plugs with no permanent structural change to the room. The panels can be removed and repositioned without damage to the walls.
Total installation time from first panel to cleanup: just under nine hours.
The result we could measure — and the one we could hear
Our engineer re-measured the room Friday morning before the client arrived. Reverberation time in the mid frequencies had come down from 0.4 seconds to 0.22 seconds. Inside the target range for voiceover work, achieved in a single overnight install.
The flutter echo on the clap test was gone. Not reduced — gone. The room had the controlled dryness that voiceover recording requires without becoming the dead, over-damped sound that makes a room unpleasant to work in for long sessions.
The client recorded three full days without a single take flagged for room noise. Our engineer noted it unprompted at the end of the first session.
What the 48-hour turnaround actually required:
- Fast install without cutting corners on assessment. The site visit and measurement happened before any product was specified. Speed did not mean skipping the diagnostic step — it meant running it and the installation in the same tight window.
- Measurable result against a clear target. We had a specific RT60 number we needed to hit. The treatment was designed around that number, not around a general idea of “better.” The post-install measurement confirmed it had worked before the client walked in.
- Custom-sized panels that fitted the room, not the other way around. The bass traps in particular needed to be the right height to be effective. Standard sizing would have left a gap at the ceiling that undermined the low-frequency treatment. Custom dimensions closed that gap.
If you are running a studio in the UAE and you have a room that is not performing the way it should — whether that is a flutter echo problem, a low-frequency buildup, or simply a space that sounds wrong on a microphone — a proper diagnostic assessment is the starting point. Their Acoustic Panels Services in UAE include the site assessment as part of the process, not as an afterthought once the panels are already specified.
What we would do differently next time
Get the acoustic assessment done before any fit-out work that touches a shared wall. We knew the adjacent office renovation was happening. We should have had someone measure the room before it started and after it finished. The problem would have been identified immediately rather than months later when a client booking made it urgent.
Forty-eight hours was enough to fix it. It should not have taken a deadline to make us do it.
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