Long before vahik.am existed, long before I had any real client roster, my "studio" was a closet.
It started after I booked a batch of commercials for GEM TV and signed up on Freelancer.com in the early 2010s. Suddenly I had actual work coming in, and actual work meant I needed a home studio setup of some kind, however makeshift. I was skeptical about spending real money on it, so naturally I compromised: I bought a Sony PCM-M10, which at the time was a genuinely professional little handheld recorder, and I built myself a voice over recording booth using the one resource I had unlimited access to: my own closet.
I couldn't fit inside it properly, so I opened both doors as wide as they'd go, draped blankets over the frame to kill the echo, and created what I can only describe as a dead room built entirely out of stubbornness. It worked, technically. It also turned every summer recording session into a real struggle. Air conditioning makes noise, so it had to go off, and once those blankets went up with no airflow at all, that closet turned into an oven. I'd end up recording in as little clothing as I could get away with just to survive the heat, sitting half-dressed inside a blanket fort in the middle of July, sweating through a read, then climbing out, cleaning up every bit of extra noise from the recording, and sending it off to the client like nothing unusual had happened on my end.
It was hell. It was also, looking back, kind of hilarious.
Years passed. Clients multiplied. Eventually I graduated from the closet sauna to renting actual studio time whenever a project called for it, and my close friends Gevork and Annie let me use theirs too, and were a huge help along the way. That solved the comfort problem, but it never fully scratched a very specific itch: I wanted a real soundproof booth for voice over work, something that was mine, professional, and permanent.
Then, in June 2022, I came across a company called Studiobricks, and something in me lit up immediately.
Studiobricks builds genuinely beautiful, ready-to-use isolation booths for voice actors, musicians, and small studios, the kind you can install in the corner of a home, a company's meeting room for private calls, or anywhere else that needs real quiet. For someone as detail-obsessed as I am, discovering that this level of craftsmanship existed specifically for people like me felt like discovering that the thing I used to daydream about already existed, fully built, I just hadn't found it yet. I reached out and emailed them for a quote, half expecting a generic price sheet back.
Instead, I got a reply directly from Guillermo Jungbauer, the company's own CEO. Attached was a genuinely gorgeous 26-page PDF, full color, walking through every booth model in real detail: sound reduction graphs for each one, every material used inside the walls, every customizable option down to the panel colors, all laid out like something you'd expect from a design studio, not a quote email.
The version my perfectionist brain actually wanted came out to around ten thousand euros.
That number alone would have been hard for me to afford. Add in the reality of shipping something that substantial internationally, navigating customs, and the fact that my home simply didn't have the physical space to install it properly, and the timing just wasn't there. I let it go, at least for then.
Let me be upfront about one thing: I have no affiliation with Studiobricks whatsoever. Nobody asked me to write this, and nobody's paying me to say it. I just genuinely believe a company doing this level of craft for voice-over artists and musicians deserves to be known, especially by colleagues who might be exactly where I once was: tired of the closet, not willing to compromise on quality, and unaware that something this well-built even exists. The reviews I've since read from other voice actors and musicians who did take the leap only confirmed what that PDF suggested: this isn't just good marketing, people genuinely love these booths.
Studiobricks isn't the only company doing this either. WhisperRoom, Demvox, Vocal Booth, and many others all build similar vocal isolation booths, and if you're in the market for one, they're worth looking into as well.
Maybe someday, when the space and the budget line up, I'll get to install one of my own. Until then, I'll always have a strange fondness for that blanket-draped closet that got me through my early years. It wasn't pretty, and it definitely wasn't comfortable, but it worked, and it taught me that the craft matters more than the tools you start with. The tools just get to catch up later.