Arthur Noxon was an unemployed acoustic engineer fresh out of physics grad school when invented the TubeTrap back in 1983. He didn’t know it then but it would soon become the must-have acoustic widget in studios all over the world. He kept fiddling, testing and listening and soon realized that good engineers didn’t like the darkness they heard from the corner where his bass trap was located, so he brightened things up by implanting a treble range diffuser panel just under the surface. The TubeTrap as we know it today was born and this sparkling, corner-loaded bass trap quickly became the must-have acoustic widget for recording studio engineers all over the world.

Engineers were intrigued with the idea of TubeTraps. Put bass traps in front of the corner? Never heard of such a thing before. Rotate the trap to adjust the strength of its treble range diffusion? Never heard of that either. TubeTrap were tough, they could be transported, stored, handled, moved around, stacked on top each other, hung from the ceiling or mounted to the walls.

Engineers bought TubeTraps by the pallet loads to just mess around with them and they discovered they could not only dial-in existing rooms but convert just about any empty room into a full-on recording studio with just a couple days work. And best of all, when it came time to break down and move the studio. The entire acoustic package packed up in the back of the van, just like all the rest of the gear, instead of being left behind, in the walls.

The size and shape of the TubeTrap expanded from the original 9” diameter 3’ tall model to larger diameters up to 24” diameter and lengths up to 10’ and fractional rounds in addition to the full rounds, which include half and quarter rounds. TubeTraps were the world’s first factory build bass trap. Before TubeTraps the only bass trap was guru designed and contractor built behind the walls, ceilings and corners. Designers started using TubeTraps because they didn’t have to design bass trap blueprints and supervise construction to get dependable results.

Using the TubeTrap product line, nearly any quiet large room could be converted into a professional grade live room. Smaller rooms could be converted into into a vocal booth, isolation room, foley room, control room and even the sampling room. But, in the long run, it wasn’t using TubeTraps to fix or build studio rooms that ultimately mattered.

Those early engineers, working in the big studios of the world, kept fooling around with their TubeTraps, following where ever their ears led them. And they all ended up at the same place. Art always got a phone call from an engineer in a big name studio within a couple weeks after their pallet of TubeTraps arrived, usually very late at night. The engineer couldn’t wait to tell Art what he had discovered and it wasn’t how to tame a room. It was something more astounding and it was always the same thing.

Those pioneering engineers discovered how they could use TubeTraps to voice up a space inside the room. Because TubeTraps could be stacked and their diffusion could be adjusted they were used to create whole new acoustic worlds. This resulted in the Studio and Monitor Traps and what we now know as the Awall for mixing and the QSF for micing. But back then, it was a stacked fortress wall of TubeTraps set out in the middle of the live room, carving out sonic spaces that had never been heard before.

Ironically, TubeTraps were developed to fix the acoustics of any room. But in the world of recording studios, TubeTraps are also used to create free standing acoustic spaces that don’t even hear or care what room they are in.