NEW YORK – I'm sitting in a tiny post-production studio in lower Manhattan, watching a scene from the upcoming film, Winter of Frozen Dreams.

A menacing bass line throbs away beneath the soundtrack –- this is a murder story, after all – but something's wrong: The bass is so boomy that my head feels as if it's going to explode.

Then, composer Mark Garcia crawls underneath the console and plugs in something that looks like a small loudspeaker. The bass line instantly recedes into the background where it belongs.

Garcia has just powered up an E-Trap, the world's first electronic bass trap. Once turned on, it invisibly massages the studio's funky acoustics, eliminating the low-frequency pressure wave that threatened to blow my head off.

"It gives you the ability to sit anywhere in the room and hear exactly what you'd hear at the center, at the sweet spot," Garcia said.

Tiny little studios like this one are popping up all over the world, thanks to new technology and ever-increasing rents in cultural capitals like New York, London and Tokyo. As digital equipment becomes more compact, studios can fit into ever-smaller locations. Located in the heart of Manhattan's independent-movie industry on West 14th Street, the miniscule Ovasen Music & Tandem Sound studio is crammed into just 800 square feet – which costs $15,000 a month to rent.

The studio was built by the Walters-Storyk Design Group, which builds approximately 40 studios a year from Bogota to the Bronx. While most of these studios would once have been several times the size of Tandem Sound, up to 80 percent are now "small, compact and in strange places," says co-founder John Storyk, the architect who built Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios in 1970. That facility in a former nightclub in Greenwich Village occupied 6,000 feet – nearly eight times the size of the newest studio a few blocks away.

To compete with bigger studios, Garcia and his partner, Eric Offin, had to shoehorn two mixing rooms, a voice-over/foley room and a machine closet packed with digital-processing equipment into the conference-room-sized apartment. They even found space for a marble-tiled bathroom and a kitchen-cum-screening room equipped with both a Sub-Zero fridge and a giant flat-panel monitor.

"I figured we're competing against places that are palaces, so we had to cram perks into every square inch of this place," Garcia said.

Compression comes at a cost, however. As sound waves bounce back and forth between the walls of a room, certain frequencies are naturally reinforced at particular locations.

In a small space, these resonance modes can result in massive bass buildup and radically different listening experiences around the room.

Traditionally, studio designers have fixed such problems with "bass traps," absorptive panels or resonating chambers that dampen the troublesome frequencies.

But adding ordinary bass traps to Garcia and Offin's mixing rooms would have meant further reducing spaces that were already excruciatingly tight. "The thinnest one you can get is 5 or 6 inches thick. We didn't have it," Storyk said.

Enter the $1,600 E-Trap to muffle bouncing sound waves. The device is built around a 10-inch loudspeaker, two built-in microphones, tuning circuitry and frequency-measurement software.

By flooding a space with pink noise and analyzing the frequency response, you can "tune" the E-Trap to cancel two different offending frequencies in the 20- to 65-Hz range.

Storyk used two in each studio for even-better coverage. The result is pristine sound no matter where you happen to be seated.

But don't assume you'll be able to install one of these in your living room any time soon. It took an experienced technician most of a day to tune the E-Traps at Tandem Sound properly, and Storyk admits that he himself wouldn't have been able to do it at all.

"They would be great in home theaters, but they're not for self-installation," Storyk said. "You wouldn't even know where to start."