Portland, Maine (February 19, 2026)—When Bob Ludwig decided to retire in 2023 and shutter Gateway Mastering after three decades, mastering engineer Adam Ayan, who had been working at the facility since 1998, initially as Ludwig’s assistant, had his own decision to make.
Over the previous 25 years at Gateway in Portland, Maine, Ayan had developed his own high-end client list—Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, Madonna, Juan Luis Guerra, Marc Anthony, Journey and Queen, to name but a few—and had amassed quite a collection of Grammy and Latin Grammy Awards and nominations. With options ranging from buying out Ludwig to moving to another state, Ayan instead chose to build a new mastering room in Portland. In December, he celebrated his one-year anniversary at Ayan Mastering’s new location.
“The notion of buying Gateway was on the table,” Ayan confirms, but it was quickly discounted, not least because much of the facility was office space, an unnecessary financial burden for a one-man operation. He and his wife briefly considered relocating to New York, Nashville or Los Angeles. “But I’m a New England guy; I’m originally from Boston. My wife and I have put down roots and we love it here. We live in a really cool, funky, Bohemian city by the water.” So he set about finding a new spot in Portland.
When Ludwig officially announced that he would stop accepting work after June 30, 2023, Ayan was ready to jump. “I took the Fourth of July week off and moved to an interim space with all my gear from Gateway. By July 7, I was working in my interim space as if nothing had changed.”
Ayan had just left an established world-class mastering facility and was working out of a temporary space, yet his clients barely noticed the transition. “The overwhelming response I got from my clients in the first few weeks was, ‘Hey, if I didn’t know you’d moved, I wouldn’t have known; everything sounds amazing,’” he recalls. “I even found that I was getting fewer requests for revisions and more Version Ones were being approved.”
That was due in no small part to Ayan’s mastering abilities, of course. You don’t work alongside a legendary mastering engineer like Ludwig for a quarter-century unless you have some serious chops. But it was also due to Ayan’s adoption of a modular acoustic treatment solution from GiK Acoustics to help control the sound in his temporary digs. When he eventually found a permanent location, following an 18-month search and meetings with “every single commercial real estate broker in the state of Maine,” one of his first calls was to James Lindenschmidt, GiK Vice President, Acoustic Design, who, conveniently, happened to live near Portland.
“James had helped me get set up in my interim space, then he and I did the acoustic design of the new room together,” Ayan says. “It was great, because he could come and see the construction as we were building it.”
NEW SPACE, NEW ACOUSTICS
Ayan first stumbled across the new location while visiting friends at The Studio in Portland’s Arts District. “I said, ‘I’m still looking for that ideal space,’” he recalls “and one of my friends, an engineer at The Studio, said, ‘There’s a space across the hall; you should take a look.’ It ended up being perfect.”
With about 35 by 35 feet of open space available, he says, “I could plant the room that I wanted in the middle of it. No neighbors below, no neighbors above, and a huge buffer between the room and the outside world in terms of my office space.” It provided, essentially, a 10-foot air gap all around. What’s more, he adds, “It ended up being serendipitous because it’s all creatives—and mostly creatives in the music business—in the building. Unicorns exist! It just took a little while to find it.”
Recent project highlights from the new space have included Father John Misty’s latest, Mahashmashana. “I’ve been working with him for about 10 years,” he notes. “That album, especially the song ‘She Cleans Up,’ is one of my favorites to show the room off.” Other favorites include Shakira’s most recent album and a Christmas 2025 EP from former actress Taylor Momsen’s rock band, The Pretty Reckless.
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The finished acoustic design of his new room exceeded even Ayan’s expectations. “I wanted the acoustics to be modular so I could fine-tune things, because I can be really tweaky,” he admits. “After tuning the new room for just a couple of hours, I was like, ‘This feels better than our rooms at Gateway.’ We shot my room at Gateway before I left, and, sure enough, when we shot the new room, it had an even flatter frequency response.”
In total, he reports, “We have 107 of GiK’s SoundBlocks in the room, which are two feet by two feet by just over 10 inches deep,” providing a mix of absorption and diffusion. “We also have five Q7D [quadratic residue] diffusors on the back wall, plus 16 of their soffits for bass trapping in the corners.”
Ayan has been using Duntech monitors since his time at Gateway and sees no reason to change. “They’re my secret weapon,” he explains. “They’re so neutral with such a flat frequency response, and I know them so well that I’ve been able to plant them in two new spaces and just get going right away.”
MAINTAINING THE CHAIN
Ayan remains cautious about upgrading too much all at once, and adopting something as simple as a new plug-in or a new hardware device is a big step. “I still have a lot of analog gear but have been a real proponent of in-the-box for about 15 years,” he says. “If I put something new into my signal path, I need to make time and really understand it sonically, and understand any quirks it may have. Even with plug-ins, I don’t necessarily trust that they’re going to do exactly what I think they’re going to do without spending some time with them.”
Consequently, he says, the Massenburg MDWEQ remains his go-to plug-in: “I know I can get the job done with it and be really thrilled with the way it turns out. I generally couple that with a bunch of other types of EQs. I’ve always loved the Manley Massive Passive, and I use the UAD plug-in almost daily. I really like the iZotope stuff as well and have been using Ozone for probably 15 years now. I use RX every single day on almost every single record.”
There have been a few upgrades to his audio gear since leaving Gateway, though. “The biggest upgrade has been to an SPL DMC mastering console at the beginning of 2025,” he says. “I also got one of their Phonitor headphone amplifiers, which I absolutely love. They’re a really great company. I also upgraded my Pro Tools to a new M4 MacBook Pro and went all-native with Pro Tools Studio because it works so well.”
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With all that said, Ayan considers the biggest upgrade to be the improvement of his listening environment: “If any young engineer says to me, ‘I’ve got a little extra money to spend—what plug-in should I buy?’ I ask, ‘What speakers are you using? What’s your monitor path? What’s your listening environment?’ That’s where all my investment has been in the past couple of years, building out the room and making it just as great as it can be.”