Ron Maahs stood in a small room at Trilix Studio and clapped his hands. The sound of the clap was clear and crisp. 

Maahs smiled. “There’s nothing,” he said. “No echoes. Just the sound of the clap.”

Ensuring clear sounds in the room required building extra-thick walls with multiple layers of insulation and other materials and installing heavy doors and panes of glass nearly an inch thick.

“The level of complexity involved in developing a studio like this really surprised me,” said Maahs, CEO of Trilix Studio, which opened this spring at 555 17th St. in Des Moines.

Trilix Studio, described by its owners as a “one-of-a-kind creative production facility,” provides audio and visual recording services to a range of clients including local and national recording artists and producers of content for streaming services such as Netflix.

The studio includes top-of-the-line equipment typically associated with recording hubs in Nashville, Los Angeles and New York City.

Trilix Studio was designed by Russ Berger Design Group, a Plano, Texas, firm that specializes in acoustical and architectural design for recording studios and broadcast facilities. The firm has designed studios for the National Football League, World Wrestling Entertainment, numerous colleges and universities, and award-winning recording artists.

Most of the equipment in the studio is from Sweetwater Integrations, a professional audio and instrument retailer based in Fort Wayne, Ind. The company sells the latest audio equipment used by recording studios.

“A lot of people take a room and throw equipment in it and call it a studio,” said Brent Wirth, chief creative officer for Trilix. “In some cases, that works. But that’s not what [Trilix Studio] is. … It’s way beyond that. The way it is built. The engineering. The equipment that’s in it. How it’s being run. What it can offer. That’s why we can compare it to New York and Nashville.”

Trilix Studio’s beginnings

Trilix is a full-service marketing agency co-founded in 2004 by Maahs, the company’s CEO. The agency has 64 employees including web developers, account managers, video producers and editors, audio engineers, production managers and digital communication designers. In April 2023, Trilix relocated from its downtown Des Moines office to second-floor space at the renovated Crescent Chevrolet Building at 555 17th St.

In July, Maahs and Brett Adams launched Trilix Studio LLC, an entity separate from the marketing agency. Trilix will likely be the studio’s largest client, Maahs said.

Before the start of Trilix Studio, the marketing agency produced video and audio in makeshift spaces or other facilities, Adams said.

“It just made sense at a certain point to say ‘This is a service we know we can benefit from and others in the market could benefit from,’” said Adams, president of both Trilix and Trilix Studio. “The music side is an expansion of an opportunity we saw. … Content is never going to slow down needing to be created.”

The 3,400 square feet of space at Trilix Studio, located on the street level of the Crescent building, includes four recording studios, each with different purposes. Studio A, where the central control room is located, is flanked by two isolation studios that provide the ability to accommodate multitrack sessions. Studio B is a podcast and stereo listening room; Studio C includes a 5.1 surround sound video editing and coloring suite; and Studio D, a soundstage and video production.

The studios are interconnected, allowing flexibility in recording, Adams said.

Each studio includes state-of-the-art equipment from Sweetwater Sound, including a Genelec-powered 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos system. Also included is a Mara Machine 2-inch tape desk and a variety of analog and digital technologies.

Studio D was completed in October. Construction and development of the rest of the space was recently completed. “It’s all now functional and presentable,” Maahs said.     

It cost about $2 million to build Trilix Studio and purchase and install equipment, Maahs and Adams said.  

Designing the studio

Many of the companies involved with building Trilix Studio are from the Des Moines area. Most had never built a facility with details like six layers of material in the thick walls or air ducts that resembled rolling hills, Adams said. 

All of the design techniques were done with two goals in mind: Keep sound created in the recording rooms inside the rooms and keep outside noises out of the rooms. 

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“You can go into another studio in town but it will not be set up this way – to be soundproof and to get the most quality out of that audio,” Adams said. “That’s the unique part about this and it’s hard to show people.”

Studio D is Trilix Studio’s production auditorium that includes a nearly 1,000-square-foot soundstage. The room includes track-mounted white, black, green and blue curtains that can be used for various video-shooting requirements. The room can be set up to produce videos or record music.

A key component of Studio D is a cyclorama wall – a blank, modular walled background with curved surfaces and seamless corners that makes images look like they go on forever. 

“We thought if we were going to build this type of boutique-style studio … having a cyc wall would be something the market would be looking for,” Adams said. “People can rent it out to shoot video or record music. All of the latest technology is in here.”

Studio A, or the central control room, includes a Dolby Atmos system, the only one in Iowa, according to DolbyProfessional.com. The majority of the Dolby Atmos systems are in California, Nashville or New York City. The next generation technology, created by Dolby Laboratories, allows sound to come from all directions, including overhead.

The use of the sound system substantially increases the quality of audio and video produced for Trilix clients as well as recording artists, Adams said.

“Getting involved on the recording side of things with artists and others – it’s a whole different venture for us,” he said. “People that produce content for Netflix or Hulu have to score or mix their audio in Dolby Atmos. They can now send their [content] to us and we can mix it and send it back to them. … There’s a lot of things we can do now that we couldn’t before.”

Studio A is not a traditional rectangular- or square-shaped room. The room’s walls are angular, allowing noise to bound off of them in a way that creates quality sound.

“All of these intricacies are things we never thought about when we started the planning process,” Maahs said.  

Added Adams: “Everything is more advanced than what we were originally thinking.”

Trilix Studio will lease space to musicians or others who want to record video or audio. The studio also produces audio and video for clients of Trilix.

Adams expects the studio to help expand Trilix’s client base.

“We are finding that a lot of recording artists will come in and say, ‘We would love to rent the studio but you also have something else we want – access to the agency that’s upstairs,’” Adams said. Trilix will be able to help musicians and others create promotional materials, social media content, audio for podcasts or photos, he said.

The addition of Trilix Studio helps to future-proof Trilix, Adams said.

“People have been going to Nashville, L.A., New York – those types of markets, to do what now can be done in Des Moines,” Adams said.

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Did you know?

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Companies involved in creation of Trilix Studio

• Des Moines-area companies: 
• Slingshot Architecture
• Greiner Construction
• All Pro, First Interiors
• the Baker Group
• Basepoint Building Automations
• Blue Sky Cleaning & Demolition Services
• Des Moines Steel Fence
• Elite Glass and Metal
• Ideal Floors
• Midwest Automatic Fire Sprinkler
• Woodchuck Manufacturing
• Skold Construction Services
• Walsh Door and Security 

Other companies: 

• Russ Berger Design Group (Texas)
• Sweetwater Integrations (Indiana)
• Jumperz Audio (Michigan)
• O’Neill Engineered Systems (Wisconsin) 
• Pipe Grids (Missouri)