Resolution V22.3 Autumn 2022

REPORT

/ Brighton post production: New Wave / CEDAR DNS 4: new noise suppressor / Audio@ IBC

REVIEWS

/ Antelope G32 Atmos monitor controller / CEDAR Adaptive Limiter 2 / DPA 4055 kick mic

REVEALED

/ Elliott Wheeler: Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS / Mendelssohn Orchestra: VR audio experience / Netflix streaming AMBEO 2-chan spatial audio

V22.3 | Autumn 2022 | £5.50

The

Interview

Nick Fry

Creativity unleashed Nail your sound with GLM 4.2 For over 15 years, GLM loudspeaker manager software has enabled sound engineers across the globe to utilise our Smart Active Monitors and dial in precise mixes that translate flawlessly to other rooms and playback systems. GLM automatically adjusts your monitor’s settings to counteract unwanted room-acoustic effects, ensuring that you hear the sonic truth, no matter where you choose to set up your system.

With the introduction of our powerful new GRADE report, GLM 4.2 offers you the unique possibility to completely understand and transform your entire listening environment – creating detailed readouts in a matter of minutes.

It’s time to mix faster and better.

Get to know GLM, visit www.genelec.com/glm

/ Contents

34 V22.3 | Autumn 2022

News & Analysis 5

Leader

6

News News, studios, appointments

12

New Products

32 CEDAR DNS 4 A look behind the scenes at the genesis of CEDAR’s latest dialogue noise suppressor 52 Audio@IBC Your guide to everything audio at RAI Amsterdam 54 Playlist Anniversary tunes!

Craft

34 Nick Fry Action audio from Formula 1: Drive to Survive — Mike Aiton talks to double BAFTA and RTS-winning rerecording mixer and head of sound at Picture Shop (UK)

Nick Fry

18

40 Elliott Wheeler The composer, music producer, and founder of Turning Studios explains the smoke and mirror techniques that brought ‘The King’ back to life on Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Presley biopic

32

44 The orchestra as an immersive experience Recording Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in Berlin with the MCO for a unique 6DOF (six degrees of freedom) immersive VR audio experience

40

Facility 18

Brighton post-production The post audio scene in the seaside city has expanded, becoming a vibrant hub as producers and talent moved southwards during the pandemic

Technology

49 AMBEO audio streaming on Netflix We explain how the Sennheiser technology adds exciting sound for viewers without the need for a surround system

REVIEWS 22 24 26 28 29 30 31

Nugen Paragon ST Bettermaker Stereo Passive EQ DPA 4055 kick mic Antelope Audio G32 surround monitor controller CEDAR Adaptive Limiter 2 Avid Pro Tools 2022 Reverb Foundry Tai Chi

44

49 Autumn 2022 / 3

4055 Kick Drum Mic

Transparent – picks up the true sound of the drum Versatile – allows you to shape the sound you want Tough – withstands rough use on the live stage Flexible – effortless placement inside or outside

dpamicrophones.com/4055

/ Welcome

Leader

Nigel Jopson

Editor/Content Manager Nigel Jopson nigel@resolutionmag.com

Contributors Mike Aiton, Dennis Baxter,

New challenges, new solutions…

John Broomhall, Simon Clark, Russell Cottier, Jay Dean, Gijs Friesen, Kevin Hilton, Tim Oliver, George Shilling, Rob Speight, Jon Thornton, Danny Turner, Phil Ward

Chief Operating Officer — Publishing, Sales & Marketing Jeff Turner UK/Europe: +44 (0)117 318 5041 USA: +1 415 307 7337 jturner@resolutionmag.com

Director of Production Dean Cook The Magazine Production Company +44 (0)1273 911730 dean@resolutionmag.com

Finance & Accounts Manager Judith Clegg +44 (0)7977 104648 judith@resolutionmag.com

Printing Gemini Print Southern Ltd, Unit A1 Dolphin Road, Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex. BN43 6NZ Published by S2 Publications Ltd info@resolutionmag.com 192 Longford Road Cannock Stafforshire WS11 1QN ©2022 S2 Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher.

Great care is taken to ensure accuracy in the preparation of this publication, but neither S2 Publications Ltd or the editor can be held responsible for its contents.

The views expressed are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of the publisher. S2 Publications Ltd. Registered in England and Wales.

REGISTERED OFFICE Gowran House, 56 Broad Street, Chipping Sodbury, Bristol, BS37 6AG Company number: 4375084

/resolutionmagazine

R

eturning to these pages as editor again is a great privilege, the more so as it marks two decades since I first wrote for Resolution. Reading pages from 2002, it strikes me how quickly this magazine showcased 5.1 and promoted surround techniques. “Multichannel music contains an absolute bomb of creativity that is simply waiting for the record companies to pull the pin on!” enthused Resolution founder Zen Schoepe on this page. With hindsight, it seems the fuse on that grenade was a little longer than the three seconds my instructor warned me of, the last time I pulled a pin!

We were ahead our time… and ahead of consumer technology. A key recent development has been the availability of very high quality spatial-audio earbuds with head-tracking. In-ears like the LG T90 have Snapdragon 24-bit/96kHz audio, and the new Apple AirPods Pro 2 are anticipated to support hi-res uncompressed immersive audio with an ‘H2’ chip. Bluetooth, goodbye. Over the last couple of years Dolby has steadily signed up streaming services to use its Atmos technology.

Apple Music, Amazon Music and most recently Tencent’s (with 70m Chinese users) QQ Music service have all adopted the technology. CEO of Dolby Labs Kevin Yeaman told us: “We have

two-thirds of the top 100 Billboard artists that have one or more songs available in Dolby Atmos. Also notable this quarter, we have Dolby Live at MGM in Las Vegas, which is a live venue where artists can perform in Dolby Atmos.”

MGM, and the announcement this July of Apple Music Sessions — exclusive live performances in spatial audio — are important, as they exemplify a return to high quality ‘appointment to hear’ audio events. Society is placing a value premium on good sound. The VR Berlin MCO recording of Mendelssohn for an Immersive 3D Experience, as described in this edition, is an example of how music can be leveraged to become something extra — fresh listening and additional performance revenue — in a digital space.

My tech antennae detect a change: future immersive productions may not be mixed in the DAWs we’re familiar with. Check out Henrik Oppermann’s innovative recording and mixing techniques explained in our article on the 6DOF (6 Degrees of Freedom) MCO recording.

And in October at the NY AES show, Mirek Stiles (Resolution V17.2), head of audio products at Abbey Road, will walk through the recording, mixing and Unity game engine 6DOF mixing process of a VR music experience. New challenges, new solutions.

Nigel

@resolutionmagazine

Autumn 2022 / 5

News

AES New York 2022 ‘Tomorrow’s technology’ will be revealed at the AES New York 2022 Audio Engineering Convention taking place at the Jacob Javits Center, October 19-20, with pre-and post-show activities on the 18th and 21st, followed by an online component, October 26-27.

In the workshop ‘Mixing Spatial Audio in the Game Engine,’ Mirek Stiles, head of Audio Products at Abbey Road, will walk through the recording, DAW mixing and final Unity game engine mixing process for creating a ‘gamified’ 6 Degrees of Freedom [6DOF] Virtual Reality music experience. A stem mix of an ‘in the round’ string quartet recording of a piece by film and game composer Stephen Barton will provide a proof of concept.

In the session ‘Human Machine Creativity,’ Nadine Raihani — head of UX at Native Instruments — will be joined by iZotope associate director of engineering Caroline Lacoste, for an exploration of how innovative assistive technology tools can unleash creativity.

Register now at AESShow.com.

Sennheiser acquires Merging Technologies

RAK go immersive with Genelec The legendary London studio, which has recorded a catalogue of iconic music, from David Bowie and Pink Floyd to Adele and Arctic Monkeys, has transformed its historic Studio 4 into a ‘gold standard’ space for immersive mixing, with a scalable 9.1.4 monitoring solution based around Genelec’s ‘The Ones’ Smart Active Monitor family.

The decision to rebuild rather than retrofit gave RAK the opportunity to work out exactly what it wanted to achieve, a process it went through with the support of Level Acoustic Design for the acoustics and Studio Creations for the build. “In a project like this, you either do it properly, or you don’t do it at all,” states Emma Townsend, Studio Manager at RAK. “We just had to tear the whole thing down and start from an empty shell.”

The resulting solution features nine 8361 three-way coaxial monitors in the front and surround positions, with three W371 woofer systems extending the low frequency LCR performance. Four 8351s serve as the height channels, with a pair of 7380 subwoofers handling system LF duties. GLM software was employed for the main system calibration, taking care of in-room frequency response compensation, distance delay and level alignment. “We already had three absolutely excellent tracking rooms. The one thing that we were missing was a really good listening, writing and mixing room, and that’s what we’ve got now,” reflects Townsend. www.rakstudios.co.uk

Amazon editorial in Avid AWS cloud Neumann.Berlin and Swiss company Merging Technologies will now be working together under the umbrella of the Sennheiser group. “We plan to strengthen Neumann’s offering, particularly in the area of digital workstreams. Merging Technologies’ products and solutions are an excellent complement to the Neumann product portfolio,” said Ralf Oehl, CEO of Georg Neumann GmbH. “Both companies share a passion for excellence and a commitment to always set new standards in audio,” added Claude Cellier, founder and CEO of Merging.

“We are very pleased to welcome Merging’s employees as part of the Sennheiser Group,” said Andreas Sennheiser, co-CEO of the Sennheiser Group. “As a family-owned company, we want to grow sustainably on the strength of our own resources in the coming years. We are investing significantly in our professional business.” www.merging.com www.neumann.com 6 / Autumn 2022

Avid and Amazon Studios have announced a three-year agreement to bring cloud-based editorial to Amazon Studios’ slate of more than 300 original movies and series. Editors need to access massive sets of media files that have traditionally been stored in the same location as the editing team. In collaboration with Avid, Amazon Studios will allow creative work to happen from almost anywhere. “Avid is delighted that our open technologies are being chosen by more customers who are innovating how content is produced in the cloud, on a global scale,” said Jeff Rosica, chief executive officer & president of Avid.

“We are on a journey to provide a best-in-class creative platform for our productions,” explains Ben Stanbury, worldwide head of technology for Amazon Studios. “Studio in the Cloud is our overarching vision for how we provide our creative teams with a cloud-based toolset that they can use wherever they are in the world.” www.avid.com

APPOINTMENTS

Tokyo concert hall installs SSL The Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre recently marked its 30th anniversary with the installation of a new Solid State Logic Duality Fuse console in the recording room of the theatre’s concert hall. ​Mr. Koichi Ishimaru, sound director of the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, comments, “Prior to installing the Duality Fuse, we had been using an analogue console that had been installed since the theatre opened. When we were considering replacing it, we thought about installing a digital console or a system without a console, but we thought only an analogue console would do.” For The Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, the combination of its SuperAnalogue microphone preamplifiers and mix bus, flat frequency response and exceptionally low noise floor made it an ideal choice. An important part of the theatre’s decision process was choosing a console that could capture its programming in an accurate and authentic manner.

Opened in 1990 by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government for the purpose of promoting arts and culture, the arts centre comprises four venues, including a concert hall with a separate control room and one of the world’s largest pipe organs, and also encompasses a variety of exhibition spaces and conference spaces. www.solidstatelogic.com

Lawo mc² consoles mix Bastille Day Lawo mixing consoles were a key ingredient to the live sound production and broadcast of a giant classical music concert in Paris marking the anniversary of the start of the 1789 French Revolution on July 14.

The Concert de Paris, followed by the City of Paris’ traditional fireworks display on July 14 remains one of the largest classical music events in the world. Approximately 150,000 spectators had the opportunity to attend the concert — with the Orchestre National de France, the Chœur and the Maîtrise de Radio France, as well as soloists — on site. The event was followed by millions of listeners and viewers on Radio France and France Télévisions channels and was broadcast live or recorded in many countries via the Eurovision network.

“It is a real pleasure to collaborate with Radio France for such a prestigious event and to see the enthusiasm deployed each year by the entire team to get a little closer to perfection,” said Joffrey Heyraud, Lawo’s sales director for France. “Radio France’s renewed trust is a tremendous confirmation of the company’s technological choices in a constant search for excellence and reliability.” www.lawo.com

The Audio Engineering Society has announced the incoming officers and governors following the 2022 board of directors and board of governors elections. The Society’s membership has elected Leslie Gaston-Bird, as PresidentElect. Also on the board of directors, Valerie Tyler has been re-elected as secretary and Marina Bosi re-elected as treasurer. In the AES Elections for the board of governors, Angela Piva has been elected vice president eastern region, USA/Canada, David v.R. Bowles has been elected vice president western region, USA/Canada and Jamie Angus-Whiteoak has been elected as vice president Northern Europe region.

Thomas Gmeiner has been named Stagetec CTO. Gmeiner brings many years’ experience in the fields of R&D, bringing expertise in product development and innovation to his new role. His leading positions have included a role in professional audio, consumer electronics and automotive at Harman/ AKG and Knowles. ‘Development is impelled by creative individuals who are often highly diverse,’ Gmeiner says. ‘As CTO, I will particularly enjoy the challenge of orchestrating a team, managing and focusing the expert knowledge of the best.” CEO, Wolfgang Salzbrenner added: “I am convinced that bringing in Thomas Gmeiner is essential to achieving innovative top performance.”

POLAR, established supplier of key industry brands to the installation, MI and professional audio markets, announced the the appointment of Mark Jennings to the post of business development manager, integrated solutions. Mark is a respected sales professional with a detailed understanding of the unique requirements of schools, further and higher education settings.

POLAR MD John Midgley commented: “The market in educational technology is strong and growing; Mark’s wide-ranging experience, and ability to communicate with clients to help them understand exactly what will work best in a given setting, make him an excellent addition to the POLAR team.”

Autumn 2022 / 7

/ News

APPOINTMENTS Eventide Audio announced that Joe Cozzi and Bohan Xie have been promoted to new sales leadership roles. In the new role of sales manager– Americas, Joe Cozzi will manage accounts in the Americas for audio and broadcast lines. He joined Eventide in 2015 as a national sales manager, where he has spent the last seven years traveling the US and Mexico supporting the dealer network. In his role as Sales Manager– EMAC & APAC, Bohan Xie is responsible for leading sales efforts for the company’s hardware and software products in these regions, as well as expanding the scope of distribution for Eventide products in those areas.

“We are extremely grateful to welcome so many bright and innovative minds to the DPA Microphones team,” says CEO Kalle Hvidt Nielsen.

“The experience these individuals bring will be a great asset to the company. We look forward to their contributions to the brand as we reinforce our commitment to the industry.” top row (l to r): Nikolaj Vejen, senior product manager; Richard Watts, regional manager — Southern UK; Konrad Majchrowski, area sales manager — Poland; middle row (l to r): Helga Somava, director of product management; Torben Ekenberg, head of R&D; bottom row (l to r): JC Bittence, area sales manager — Midwest US; Carlito Cobos — area sales manager, Southern US and Latin America; Tetiana Kulyk, digital marketing specialist.

DiGiCo has appointed RMS Proaudio as its new distributor for Portugal.

“RMS Proaudio have been consistently successful with the DiGiCo brand across Spain, so when the time came to appoint a new distributor for Portugal, they were an obvious choice,” says DiGiCo sales application specialist, Fernando Delgardo.

“We have been distributing DiGiCo to the Spanish market for more than 18 years and now we are excited to bring the same level of experience, support and technical service to Portugal,” says Miguel Angel Jiménez, general manager of RMS Proaudio.

8 / Autumn 2022

Calrec for EMG operations centre OB and technical services provider EMG UK has turned to Calrec to equip its latest Remote Operations Centre (ROC) in Stratford, London, a fully remote extension to the four current EMG UK ROCs located in High Wycombe. Stratford ROC offers full UHD, HDR and Dolby Atmos remote production for BT Sports’ Premier League football matches.

The Stratford ROC is designed with 8K in mind, so EMG opted for 12G for the video infrastructure. For the audio, it installed a 56-fader Artemis, alongside an IP-native Type R (handling music playback operations). Calrec’s Hydra 2 networking technology has also been installed alongside a Calrec AoIP Gateway. This ensures SMPTE 2110 is in place for the Type R sub mix console, but also has an eye on future connectivity. EMG UK is also using a Calrec RP1, the company’s compact remote production unit.

The audio workflow allows the ROC remote control of all presentation audio signals via the RP1. This allows the sound team to control parameters like EQ and dynamics remotely, and to provide IFB mixes in real time. Other signals are derived from the OB match truck and passed through the RP1 via MADI. Intercom signals are connected on the remote Dante network, to which the RP1 also is connected. Over 200 audio signals are processed and embedded at the OB, with all signals arriving at the ROC through diverse connectivity. www.calrec.com

Italian residential studio installs Genelec La Casamurada studio in Penedès, Spain, has expanded its monitoring capabilities with a pair of Genelec The Ones 8361 three-way coaxial monitors. The studio itself is located in the former wine cellar at the base of a defensive tower in a 12thcentury fortified farmhouse. In 2007, Jesús Rovira, bassist and composer for legendary Catalan rock band Lax ‘n’ Busto, decided that the acoustics made the cellar perfect for recording, and set about creating a space that would give musicians everything they need from a residential studio, while also respecting the original fabric of the building.

“We use the new 8361s for recording — their primary use — and mixing,” explains Rovira.

“We’re very satisfied with their performance; in fact, all the engineers who have been in the studio since the 61s were purchased have been very pleased and have told me so in no uncertain terms!” www.lacasamurada.com

mc 56 2

THE GLOBAL STANDARD IN

IP AUDIO PRODUCTION

Watch the video: Immersive Live Streaming from Tomorrowland, with Love.

www.lawo.com

See you in person at IBC 2022! #8.B90 | Free Ticket Code: IBC1621

/ News

Sweet Justice Sound Sweet Justice Sound, have recently updated their South-Coast based UK cinematic post facilities to include two new 7.1.4 ATMOS studios designed by The Studio People in consultation with Dolby Laboratories.

The larger 30m2 SJ Studio 1 is built around ProTools MTRX with Madi Atmos RMU, running JBLs M2s, LSR708i, and SUB18 (with Crown amps) for the main configuration, in parallel with a nearfield PSI A23-M / A225M Sub setup, with both being processed by a Trinnov MC Pro calibrated

by Dolby to meet home theatre standards.

SJ Studio 2 utilises a complete 7.1.4 PSI monitoring solution and is also calibrated through Trinnov with Dolby oversight to meet specification. The entire building is run on Dante, with a hardware central master clock aligning everything. The Sweet Justice team includes over a dozen movie and game industries award-winning production pros, including Ben Minto (Resolution V15.8) who told us: “All equipment was supplied and installed by HHB Communications Ltd (huge thanks to Oli and Andy for the late nights!) and by the fantastic Paul Mortimer at Emerging.” www.sweetjusticesound.com

Lawo upgrades manufacturing capabilities Lawo has announced that it has invested in a SMD production line purchased from Fuji Europe Corporation GmbH in preparation for increasing product demand for the company’s audio and video products. “As a manufacturer of top video and audio technology, we guarantee compliance with the highest production quality standards,” explains Andreas Hilmer, chief marketing officer at Lawo. Lawo develops, manufactures and distributes network, control, audio and video systems for TV and radio, industry, live sound and theatre applications. These IP-based products are manufactured at the company’s headquarters in Rastatt, Germany, where Lawo employs about two-thirds of its approximately 300 worldwide employees.

Lawo has invested in three new Fuji AIMEX-series pick-and-place machines, which can reportedly assemble around 30,000 components per hour of even the smallest component size, EIA 01005, equivalent to twice the diameter of a human hair. The new production line also includes an integrated vapor phase soldering furnace and automated component storage cabinets, which save working time and space and extend the shelf life of parts and components.

10 / Autumn 2022

Snarky Puppy record with Lauten mics Four time Grammy-winning Snarky Puppy’s upcoming album Empire Central was tracked live in front of a studio audience — tasked with capturing 19 musicians simultaneously, recording and mix engineer Nicolas Hard employed 26 Lauten Audio microphones for the group’s 14th album.

The list of Lauten microphones used on the sessions includes four LA-120, ten LA-220, five Atlantis FC-387, three Clarion FC-357, and four LS-208. The session setup included three complete drum kits, where each tom was recorded with an LA-220. Hi-hats were captured with LA-120, and a Clarion was used for the kick drum. Atlantis mics were chosen for percussion overheads and solo trumpet. “I find the extensive filters/roll-offs extremely useful for drums, and I had no EQs available to process sound on the way in, so I was taking advantage of the options available on the Lauten mics,” explains Hard. “I used a Clarion on a kick, and it sounded great!” www.lautenaudio.com

Quested for Marshall Studios Legendary amp-maker Marshall’s world-class recording studio in Milton Keynes (Resolution V21.5) — boasting a 273 sq m. live room and a 40-channel vintage Neve 8048 mixer — recently upgraded their control room with a Quested monitoring system.

“It was like fitting that last piece into a jigsaw, or getting the right key for a lock,” said Marshall studio manager Adam Beer. “The Quested Q212FS monitors are just perfect for the room, and for the type of music we record. The imaging is absolutely spot on, you can accurately pinpoint everything throughout the stereo field.”

The Q212FS free-standing system has been adapted to allow for the Q212 element to sit on top of the QSB118 sub-bass, and be at a perfect height for the mixing console. The Q212 element is a three-way monitor utilising dual twelve-inch radial chassis drivers, a custom soft-dome 3” mid driver, coupling with a soft-dome HF. Rock duo Nova Twins tracked their Mercury-nominated album Supernova on the Questeds, and British Blues Award-winner Laurence Jones has been in the studio mixing his new album. www.quested.com • www.marshall.com/recording-artists/the-marshall-studio

EVENTS GUIDE IBC, Amsterdam

9-12 September

Tokyo Game Show

15-18 September

Synthfest Sheffield

8 October

AFIAL Madrid SATIS Paris LDI Las Vegas

25-27 October 8-9 November 18-20 November

Broadcast India Mumbai

13-15 October

Reproduced Sound Bristol

15-17 November

BPM Birmingham

15-16 October

Interbee Tokyo

16-18 November

AES/NAB New York

19-20 October

Radio TechCon London

SMPTE Los Angeles

24-27 October

CES Las Vegas

28 November 5-8 January 2023

The Evolution Wireless Digital Series

Evolving with you.

Not all wireless is created equal. Audio professionals can encounter challenges using traditional RF technology, but with Evolution Wireless Digital, fundamental limitations of wireless systems are resolved using new technology that is nothing short of groundbreaking. With the EW-DX line, there will be even more professional features for nearly any budget or application.

Discover why EW-DX is the future of wireless. Visit sennheiser.com/ew-dx to learn more about the latest members in the Evolution Wireless Digital series.

New Gear

New products A guide to the latest new hardware and software Neumann

M 49 V reissue First created in 1949 (hence the model number), the M 49 became a highly-prized mic for classical and jazz engineers, delivering smooth and detailed sound across countless hit records through the years, including Miles Davis, Barbara Streisand, Duke Ellington, and Simon and Garfunkel. The incredibly rich, round, subtle tone is prized for female vocals — Norah Jones used one on her much-lauded first album, and it was a favourite of Aretha Franklin.

The M 49 V is a reissue ‘according to original specifications and design documents from the Neumann archive’. It uses the same circuitry as the last historical revision, the M 49 c, but with an even lower noise, hand-selected sub-miniature tube. “In our

field tests, even renowned microphone experts could not detect any difference in sound,” explains portfolio manager Sebastian Schmitz.

“In timbre and dynamic behaviour, the M 49 V is identical to a historic M 49 in top condition.

The circuitry and acoustic design have been adopted from the M 49 c. The classic K 49 large diaphragm capsule has been manufactured by Neumann with no changes since the 1950s.”

The pattern control unit now automatically adapts to the mains voltage and is also compatible with old M 49 microphones. Instead of the old bayonet connector, the M 49 V uses the RF-tight connector of the historic broadcast version M 249. The infrasonic filter, protecting the BV11 output transformer from unwanted distortion, can be lowered from 30Hz to 12Hz. Like the historical M 49 b model variant, the M 49 V can be set to fixed cardioid pickup pattern (a frequent ‘mod’), which improves the signal-to-noise ratio by about 3dB. The M 49 V comes as a set with remote pattern control unit, microphone cable, and the classic yoke swivel mount, delivered in a handcrafted case. The MSRP is €8,495 or $8,499. www.m49v.neumann.com

CEDAR Audio

Studio 9 for Windows Previously available only on the Mac, CEDAR Audio is extending the use of its CEDAR Studio 9 to the PC. This is the latest version of the company’s audio processing and restoration suite for AAX Native, VST2, VST3 and AU formats, and includes the latest version of Retouch with its machine-learning Matching and AI-driven Repair capabilities.

CEDAR Studio 9 is now iLok compatible on PC as well as Mac, making it quicker and easier for users to test and purchase processes, getting them up and running faster and with no need for the HSP dongle. Cedar Studio 9 DNS includes both DNS One and DNS Two, targeting all dialogue noise suppression requirements in post and elsewhere. CEDAR Studio 9 Restore incorporates eight algorithms — Declick, Decrackle, Auto Dehiss, Declip 2, Debuzz, Adaptive Limiter, as well as Manual Declick and Dethump — for all audio restoration needs.

Containing all 11 processes from the other CEDAR Studio 9 packages, CEDAR Studio 9 Complete is the unsurpassed plug-in suite for noise suppression and restoration.

CEDAR Studio 9 for PC is compatible with AAX Native on Pro Tools v11 onward, as well as VST2, VST3 and AU. Retouch is also supplied as a 12 / Autumn 2022

standalone application. Since VST and AU are streaming environments, Manual Declick and Dethump are available for AAX only. There is no charge to users for transferring from an existing HSP licence to an iLok licence. If the upgrade to CEDAR Studio 9 involves the addition of new processes, users can take advantage of the company’s upgrade prices. www.cedar-audio.com/products/cedarstudio/cedarstudio.shtml

Neve®

Mojave Audio

Using the same transformer-balanced technology as Neve’s flagship large-format 88RS, the Burnley-based AMS Neve announced their first dual mic preamp and USB audio interface ‘brings the legendary sound of AIR, Abbey Road and Capitol Studios into your home and portable studio setup’.

Chief analogue designer Robin Porter says, “We’ve developed the 88M as a faithful reproduction of the 88R preamp. It houses the same characteristics, enabling home studios and upcoming engineers to experience the clear and pristine sound quality found in the 88R”. The company says superior analogue and digital components are utilised at every stage, ensuring supreme quality throughout the entire signal path.

The £895 (exc VAT) 88M has two analogue inputs via the onboard preamps combined with eight digital inputs via ADAT optical connection, allow for tracking up to ten signals. In addition, there are ten available outputs, two analogue monitor sends and eight digital outputs via ADAT optical connection.

Designed by Technical Grammy Award Winner David Royer for an optimised full-frequency response, the MA-D is extremely versatile, able to perform on guitar and bass amps, drums, and brass as well as a variety of vocal styles for live sound, recording, and broadcast applications. It has excellent off-axis rejection, an integrated pneumatic shock-mount, and a built-in internal windscreen which gives it a focused performance with reduced handling noise and the ability to easily eliminate plosives. The $159 MA-D includes a flexible mic clip and a zippered bag.

“When we set out to create our first dynamic microphone, we wanted to avoid the harsh ‘presence peak’ common in a lot of well-known mics on the market and deliver a smoother-sounding alternative,” said Mojave Audio president Dusty Wakeman. “The MA-D has a rich, musical response that will make any vocalist happy, while working just as well on many other instruments in live miking situations. We’re proud to have a dynamic mic that we can put the Mojave name on.”

www.ams-neve.com/88m

www.mojaveaudio.com/ma-d

Solid State Logic

Waves Audio

SSL’s new $99 audio limiting plug-in enables engineers to increase the loudness of tracks and busses quickly and effectively ‘without clipping or changing tonal balance’.

Featuring four characteristics ranging from extremely transparent to colour and glue, variable release times with renowned SSL Auto release, and True Peak and Lookahead algorithms for precision processing. X-Limit can be used as an ‘invisible’ loudness enhancer or as a colourful limiter to add character and vibe. Its intelligent processing introduces minimal latency regardless of settings, making it suitable for tracking and live performance applications.

The unique steering and ducking meters indicate how the limiting process might influence the stereo image of your signal, and to provide feedback on minimising stereo degradation using the channel link control.

The all-in-one waveform and threshold display lets you easily set your threshold and ceiling against the incoming signal level.

A real-time vocal harmony plug-in capable of generating up to eight harmonies from a single voice, and suitable for both studio and live performance, Harmony provides a quick and easy way to complement solo vocals with multi-part harmonies.

Three modes of operation are available: an automatic mode allows users to choose from a bank of chord presets and have the plug-in instantly create harmonies for any vocal; a playable MIDI mode uses a keyboard input to pitch the harmonies, and a graphical mode allows users to draw in their parts. Pitch, formant, panning, delay, filtering and modulation controls are available for each individual voice. Waves say that aside from harmonies, these controls make the plug-in useful in creating doubling effects, layering vocal stacks and crafting creative voicings. Waves Harmony is available now, priced at $149, with an introductory offer of $39.99.

88M Dual Mic Preamp USB interface

X-Limit

www.store.solidstatelogic.com/plug-ins/ssl-x-limi

MA-D cardioid dynamic

Harmony

www.waves.com Autumn 2022 / 13

/ New Gear

Voyage Audio

Lectrosonics

“Since the release of Spatial Mic USB in 2019, the number one request from customers has been to build a Dante networked audio version,” said Voyage co-founder Colin Ritchie.

“Condensing an 8-channel professional networked audio device into a microphone body was very challenging, however the creative possibilities and opportunities this new design brings with it are very exciting.”

Included with Spatial Mic Dante is the new MicNet control app that enables remote adjustment of connected microphones on the network. Spatial Mic Dante key features include support for up to 32-bit/192kHz audio, AES67 mode up to 32-bit/48kHz. The capsules are individually calibrated to create a balanced array, and specified for 78dB-A SNR and 136dB SPL. The output is configurable for unprocessed, surround sound, ambiX and virtual mics with pattern controls (continuously variable from omni, to cardioid, to figure-8).

The DSR and DSR5P dual-channel and DSR4 quad-channel digital slot receivers are compatible with all the current Lectrosonics mono and stereo digital transmitters and are backward compatible with any of the Digital Hybrid Wireless transmitters made in the past 20 years. The DSR and DSR5P receivers provide two independent receiver channels and the DSR4 provides four independent receiver channels at the highest level of RF and audio performance available, with versatile feature sets and next-generation capabilities in the Unislot/Superslot form factor for ENG (Electronic News Gathering), field, and location production.

Both receivers are offered in several tuning ranges including A1B1 (470-614 MHz), B1C1 (537-692 MHz), 941 (941-960 MHz for use in North America) and 961 (961-1,015 MHz for use in the UK). Settings can be made from the front panels which feature high-resolution displays, making the units ideal for use in portable bag systems, mounted in or on cameras, and on sound carts.

Spatial Mic Dante

DSR Dual & Quad-Channel receivers

www.voyage.audio/spatialmic

www.lectrosonics.com

Warm Audio

AEA

WA‑CX12 is a largediaphragm tube condenser based on one of the world’s most sought-after microphones, the AKG C12. [A version of which, the C12 VR, is still available from the Harman-owned AKG brand for $6,989]. The microphone is based around a hand-selected 12AY7 valve, and features a CK12-style capsule paired with a TAB-Funkenwerk USA output transformer.

The second new addition is the WA‑47F which, as the name suggests, is a homage to Neumann’s U47 FET. Using a reproduction of the K47-style capsule used in the U47 FET, the manufacturer says the microphone recreates the expansive dynamic range, immediate transient response and detail associated with the original.

Capable of handling SPLs of up to 137dB (147dB with the 10dB pad), Warm Audio say the WA‑47F is ideal for capturing drums, horns, and amps. The WA‑47F is priced at £759 inc VAT, and the WA‑CX12 is £999 inc VAT.

Audio Engineering Associates, manufacturers of high-quality ribbon microphones and preamplifiers, released the first product in their 3rd-generation of microphone preamps, the $599 TRP500. “At AEA, we put the same thought and care into our preamps as we put into the development of our microphones: sonic quality comes first,” said Wes Dooley, Founder of AEA. “We hope the TRP500 helps you capture many magical musical performances.”

Based on the circuit and topology of the company’s original AEA TRP preamp (Resolution V16.4), the £699 TRP500 has the low noise, musical sonics, and ultra-high gain and impedance (100,000 Ohms) that AEA is renowned for. The TRP500 excels at drawing out the warmth and lush sound of ribbon mics as well as other top-level microphones. With up to 85 dB of quiet DC-coupled gain, minimal path architecture, and a gentle 115 Hz or 230 Hz high pass filter, this preamp aims to put as little as possible between you and your audience.

WA-CX12 & WA-47F

www. warmaudio.com/microphones 14 / Autumn 2022

TRP 500 mic preamp

www.aearibbonmics.com

8 channel microphone preamplifier The attention to detail in the design of this preamp shows. No electrolytic capacitors in the signal path, true differential amplifier circuitry, and a transimpedance (current feedback) gain stage result in all the detail of my many microphones coming through. And the pre comes with a 20 year warranty (no joke). I could work with two or three of the m801mk2 units as my only preamps at Jackpot! and I’d be totally happy for the rest of my career. And I could stop worrying about which mic preamp to use...”

— Larry Crane, TapeOp Magazine, Jackpot! Recording Studio

www.gracedesign.com

/ New Gear

Focal

sonible

The Solo6 and Twin6 are new versions of the powered speakers that made their debuts some 15 years ago, with the new models designed to offer more detail and greater transparency. These improvements have been enabled by improved transducer designs, new amplifiers, and a structurally enhanced cabinet, with the monitors also incorporating features from Focal’s Trio11 Be monitors. These include a new version of Focus Mode, which enables you to change the configuration of your monitors with a footswitch.

Focal says that this is like having a second pair of monitors with reduced dynamics that you can use for checking mixes and balance. The Solo6 has a 1-way single-driver Focus Mode with no tweeter, while the Twin6 Focus Mode uses a 2-way arrangement with both drivers, but again with no tweeter. The two new Focal monitors, renamed Solo6 and Twin6, have MSRPs of Solo6 $1599, Twin6 $2299.

The latest update to sonible’s line-up of intelligent plug-ins, smart:comp 2, combines a multidimensional compression approach with a wide range of soundshaping options in a versatile compressor. The compressor’s spectral processing ensures a dynamic balance at all times, with up to 2000 bands constantly working to enhance transparency and also driving smart:comp 2’s unusual ducking abilities. Potential spectral clashes between the input and the sidechain signal are automatically corrected to give the sidechain signal exactly the space it needs.

This AI-powered €129 compressor plug-in features a range of completely new controls giving users maximum creative freedom. Among them is a free-form transfer function for achieving sophisticated compression goals, such as selective boosting of signal levels or parallelstyle compression. The temporal attack and release behaviour of the compressor can be freely designed, and ‘Color’ and ‘Style’ dials to change the character of the compression results.

www.focal.com/en/pro-audio

www.sonible.com/smartcomp2

Steinberg

Dolby

Steinberg’s spectral audio processor receives an update with a more user-friendly UI, improvements to workflow and processing tools, and a key new feature: real-time auditioning. Sounds are displayed as visual objects and layers, enabling ultra-precise editing that will suit a variety of applications from music and post-production, sound design and audio restoration. Finally users can hear changes in real time while updating parameters, instead of the antiquated two-step process of its predecessor.

The dialogue boxes are now non-modal, meaning users can work freely anywhere in the interface, even when a process dialogue is open.

Complementing the Unmix Stems and Unmix Components processes is the much-requested Unmix Level process. Users can now divide one layer into two from a user-selected amplitude split point, and preview changes made to the two layers independently. SpectraLayers Pro 9: €299 / Elements 9: €79.99

Engineers sequencing and mastering albums in Dolby Atmos face challenges due to the complexity of applying processing to an entire album, and maintaining proper metadata settings for each song before delivering it to a streaming service.

Dolby Atmos Album Assembler works as an add-on to the Dolby Atmos Renderer application, purchased separately via the Dolby Atmos Production Suite or Dolby Atmos Mastering Suite, to provide a straightforward way to sequence album tracks and apply final mastering touches to the complete record. Specifically, users can align songs on the timeline to sequence tracks, edit song durations, apply fade ins/outs, apply final EQ and dynamics, and measure loudness before exporting mastered Dolby Atmos ADM BWF files.

The tool is available for purchase for $99 through the Avid Marketplace and is also available as a free 90-day trial through Dolby.

www.steinberg.net/spectralayers

www.avid.com/plugins/dolby-atmos-album-assembler

Solo6 and Twin6

SpectraLayers Pro 9

16 / Autumn 2022

smart:comp 2

Atmos Album Assembler

OPTIMIZE YOUR MONITORING

PROFESSIONAL AUDIO MONITORING REDEFINED • • • •

Unique room correction /speaker optimization solution Complete monitoring section with multiple speaker sets & talkback Integrates easily into the most complex studio environment (Eucon) Control every function of your Trinnov at the press of a button

TRINNOV’S UNIQUE OPTIMIZER Our world-renowned room correction Optimizer Technology is recognized as best-in-class by users and reviewers across the professional, commercial cinema and high-end audio worlds.

www.trinnov.com TRINNOV AUDIO - 5 Rue Edmond Michelet, 93360 Neuilly-Plaisance / France Email : sales@trinnov.com / +33 (0)1 47 06 61 37

Facility

The New Wave: Soho-on-Sea

W

hen you think of the UK south-coast seaside resort of Brighton, what does it conjure up? Crashing waves, sticks of rock, burning piers? Whatever springs to mind, Brighton is emerging from the fog of the pandemic, and as the sun filters through, it is slowly revealing a brave new world containing a rapidly growing audio post production scene.

That being said, post production audio is nothing new in Brighton. I personally ran a post facility for nearly ten years in the not so salubrious north edge of the city, Hollingdean, between 2003 and 2013. If you look at it one way it was incredibly hard work trying to build relationships between TV producers, film-makers and games companies when they were accustomed to going to London for everything. If you look at it another way, Outpost Sound was one of the O.G. audio post companies in Brighton. Pioneers of a brave new world (at least that’s how I like to think about it!). Truth is, like a prime minister after a party, the champagne buzz quickly wore off as people continuously questioned the validity and professionalism of a facility outside of London [you were too ahead of your time! — Ed].

expanded or re-branded, while others have changed their focus. One of these is Pier Productions, better known over the years for it radio productions. More recently Dubbing Mixer/ Sound Supervisor Matt Snowden and Sound Recordist/Designer/Dubbing Mixer Paul Weir have become deeply involved with the company and have subsequently converted two of the studios of

Pier Productions

More recently the post audio scene in the seaside city has rapidly expanded, becoming more of a vibrant hub as greater numbers of producers and talent moved southwards during the pandemic.

New facilities have popped up, others have 18 / Autumn 2022

/ Pier Productions

the Regency townhouse into facilities for film and video post. I first asked Matt what changes they had made to the studios: “Before they had two studios there. They’d been in that building quite a few years, mainly doing radio stuff. A few years before that, Andre Chapman who did a lot of the Monty Python stuff was there. He was a really, really fascinating guy.

Photo credits: Respective studios • Brighton image: Ben Guerin, Unsplash

ROB SPEIGHT checks out the Brighton post production scene

He was their sound engineer since the seventies and did a lot of composing for their songs and worked with Terry Gilliam on a number of films.

He had Redwood studios in London for quite a few years and he moved a lot of his gear into Pier. I’ve taken that over as he has semi-retired, and also added my own gear.

We’ve swapped the rooms over to how it was originally. They had two very large live rooms for the radio recording with lots of cast members. But it meant that both of the control rooms were quite small. So we swapped the bottom floor round. Now that’s got the big control room and then a smaller booth that you can still fit about four people in comfortably, and the box studio has still got the big live room and smaller control room. You can get eight people in there if you’re doing drama and group ADR.” In addition to these new configurations, a studio used for practical effects for radio plays is being converted for use as a foley studio, “It is already basically a foley room. It just needs a bit more stuff in it!” he said.

Brown Bear Audio

In downtown Brighton sits the recently expanded home of Thomas Dalton’s Brown Bear Audio: “We’ve recently expanded our facilities. We upgraded our, suite to Dolby Atmos and then we also have a self-contained podcast studio, which also doubles-up as my ADR voiceover room. We do work across the board, including long and short

/ Brown Bear Audio

form and branded content, as well as recording VO and ADR. We work with production companies across the UK and further afield, with myself and a network of engineers. They’re all working remotely. We also have myself and another sound

designer and a composer based at Brown Bear.

Augmenting that we have a network of freelancers who are all connected remotely — so we can service larger projects or expand our capacity when needed,” he said.

14 × 20 Thunderbolt™ 3 & USB 2.0 audio interface The Discrete 4 Pro is the new generation of a modern classic. This versatile interface embodies a zero-compromise approach to hardware – made readily accessible via its redesigned software control panel.

• • • •

What’s new Ultra-low latency Thunderbolt 3™ Latest generation A/D converters Enhanced FX processing capabilities Advanced virtual routing patch-bay

antelopeaudio.com

Autumn 2022 / 19

/ Brighton Production Hub network on the beach (remains of torched West Pier in background!)

/ The Edit

The Edit

The rapid growth of work available in Brighton has also been noticed by some London facilities, several of whom have also setup small facilities in the area such as Coda; but leading the field locally — just in terms of scale is — The Edit, where Head of Audio, Karl Mainzer is also a transplant from London. “I joined The Edit a couple years back when the facility was expanding into a much larger facility. Originally it was a small unit up at Fiveways. Because the amount of production that passes through Brighton has been increasing exponentially over the last few years, we felt that we needed a bigger facility. That was the main reason for taking the punt on building the bigger facility. People have tried it before and it’s never quite come off!”

Mainzer also sighted the pandemic as a driver of new business: “With Covid, there’s been a lot of people moving out of the city and down to Brighton. More producers, more execs that have the control over the budgets to determine where their post goes. I’m seeing a lot of that. Several long-time colleagues came down to Brighton, people that have been in my network for quite a few years. Now they’ve landed in Brighton it’s like — they know me, I know them — and they realise they don’t have to go to London Soho anymore to get their post done. It’s all here.”

The Edit now houses two purpose-built dubbing theatres including a Dolby Atmos theatre for feature docs, dramas, art installations and theatrical pre-dubs and a 5.1/stereo theatre, suitable for TV, commercial mixes and ADR. As Mainzer pointed out, it’s not just the gear that creates the work, it’s the people, the culture and the location that has just as much influence when it comes to encouraging productions to spend their money. It seems that now, productions are starting to realise that Brighton has the culture and the professionalism to equal that of London.

20 / Autumn 2022

Virtual Post

Jon Grey, Head of audio post production at Virtual Post, another full service facility located in Brighton, detailed how the city has and continues to develop a shared community; “I think it’s just being built. I think it’s still in the early days for this boom. A lot of production companies have moved down to Brighton and we are now beginning to reap the hard work that’s been put in to this by Production Hub, which is a Brighton based community.”

/ Virtual Post

Brighton Production Hub

Brighton Production Hub, is a charity-based organisation that promotes and represents the television production community in the Brighton, Hove areas. Additionally, the organisation runs networking events, briefings, presentations from commissioning editors at major television networks and provides support for health and well-being in the industry.

Snowden (Pier Productions) explained why he

/ Facility

But where next for the industry in Brighton, the future of the industry as a whole and many like it?

With working practices changed and the ability to work anywhere for the most part, are production hubs becoming a thing of the past, especially for post-production?

“We’ve got clients reviewing programs remotely, losing the need to come into the suites.

So we’ve got about half and half now. People still have carried on the trend to work remotely after lockdown, and some people are really enjoying coming back to us and being in our dubbing suites,” Virtual Post’s Grey concluded.

Will this new wave of Brighton facilities

continue to thrive? With increasing production across the UK it would seem they’re in with a very good chance. I’ll definitely be back as soon as someone can point me in the direction of a donut shop that’s not on a pier!

Virtual Post: www.virtualpostproduction.com Pier Studios: www.pierstudios.co.uk The Edit: www.theedit.co.uk Brown Bear Audio: www.brownbearaudio.co.uk Brighton Production Hub: www.brightonproductionhub.org

thought Brighton was unique when it comes to post production, “The talent pool is very unique. There’s so much more voice talent down here that have exited from London, and people want to travel here more. At the beginning of last year we did a really fun comedy podcast project called Curl Up and D.I. written by Tony Pitts.”

The show which starred Katherine Kelly, Vic Reeves, Morgana Robinson, Mark Benton, Burn Gorman and Tony Pitts — to name a few — was recorded at Pier over eight days and Pitts was able to encourage all but one actor down to Brighton in person to do the sessions.

But the ‘only an hour from London’ reasoning is only part of the battle according to Mainzer (The Edit), “We try and keep things very high standard here. We don’t want our clients to think that they’re getting anything less than if they were going to Soho. That’s the danger for Brighton because we say to our clients, it’s only an hour from London to Brighton. They’re like, okay, but equally it’s only an hour from Brighton to London. So, we’re constantly trying to keep the high standards and improve, to keep the work here.”

This is not the only challenge, as Pier Productions mixer Paul Weir commented: ”You know in every other city there is a post-production hub there are sound stages and facilities and actual industry. In Birmingham, Manchester or Cardiff, but in Brighton there isn’t. It is lacking that. So, we’ll always be trying to wrestle stuff away from the other cities. I’d say it’s been a good, hard slog for post-production companies in Brighton. And it finally feels like things might have turned recently, which I think has possibly got more to do with Covid. I feel that that Brighton always had a problem that say Bristol, Birmingham or Manchester didn’t have, which was they all had their own film communities, whereas Brighton doesn’t have a television hub. It doesn’t have BBC Brighton. Whereas Bristol, Cardiff and Birmingham all do.”

Autumn 2022 / 21

Reviews

Nugen Paragon ST NIGEL JOPSON resynthesises his impulses Switching from the Main panel with its circular radar type display to the IR page takes you to where the sound really begins in this plug-in — in more ways than one. There are a series of test sounds (Singing, Harmonica, Jangling Keys) which can be triggered from within the plug-in to test settings — this is definitely going to be some engineer’s idea of a wind-up for a late-night vocal session!

Nugen supply 65 ready-made presets, selected using the extremely small document icon to the right of the central preset window at the top. If you’re being creative, you may as well just dive straight into the IR page, and choose one of the 19 supplied responses, which range from Summer Forest, through Cave and Church to Small Theatre. It’s easy to see from the Spectogram plot which IRs have a rich spectrum (such as the Church) and these are tailor-made for further tweaking. Clicking the Modifier button (top left) opens up a panel to tweak the frequency response by EQing the reverb model and altering the frequency-dependent decay rate.

Up to four parametric EQ points can be added and adjusted.

Versatile

N

ugen Audio have followed-up their immersive Paragon reverb plug-in (reviewed Resolution V21.3, £419) with Paragon ST — a stereo version at £209. Paragon is a true convolution reverb ‘with the flexibility and control of a classic algorithmic reverb’. Via re-synthesis, Paragon offers full control of the decay, room size and brightness of reverbs modelled on recordings of real spaces — with no time-stretching. The technology is based on research undertaken by Dr. Jez Wells at the University of York.

As an industry-veteran, I can recall how impressed I was when I first heard convolution reverb: the Sony DRE S777 hardware reverb had the most realisticsounding acoustic space simulation I had ever heard — even if it had the look of a walnut Mercedes dashboard — and cost the same as a Merc C-Class back in 1997. I was less impressed to learn I couldn’t just reach out and dial up a much shorter or longer reverb time! Paragon circumvents this inherent limitation by resynthesising the IR (impulse response) based on user adjustments, before applying these to audio to generate reverb.

Impulsive tweaking

Firing up a guitar-heavy track, I decided to put Paragon ST to the test in generating some ambience. I loved working in classic 22 / Autumn 2022

recording rooms like Sunset Sound, and that’s what I’m trying to generate virtually when I instantiate a reverb plug-in on a dry guitar track. As I twiddled the sliders on a church IR using the no-nonsense interface, my first reaction on grabbing the Size and Mic Distance adjusters was — serious tonal interaction going on! The Mic Distance control, which the manual soberly defines as “Adjusts the balance of early reverb reflections to late reflections” — in fact has a dramatic timbre and tone effect, which interacts beautifully with smaller Size settings. I got an amazing amount of grit and attack (and a level increase) on a distorted guitar by pulling back the Mic Distance to around 25% with a room size around x0.35. You can play with the two controls in the same way you can balance in/out of phase guitar pickups. And the “oomph” on that room is super realistic.

I’ve noticed that many production pros treat reverb plug-ins as one-trick ponies — one preferred for snare — another for vocals.

Nugen Paragon is unusually versatile, possibly because of the real IR spaces at its heart. The Car Interior IR was weirdly beguiling on Tablas, and a touch of added modulation gave a ‘Roland Dimension D’ feel to the sound. The modulation effect includes individual controls for Rate, Depth and Mix, with the ability to lock the effect to the project tempo.

The Cave Mouth IR really brought out the sparkle on some percussion, and I liked a touch of Small Tiled Room on fretless bass. I found the Hotel Corridor IR suited some backing vocals which I wanted to add a touch of ‘gang’ vibe to, although they’d actually been sung quite cleanly. And finally — a ‘Zeppelin Drums’ reverb preset (using the Stairwell IR) — that somewhat lives up to the promise of its name!

When adjusting Decay time, and twisting and turning Stereo Width and Mic Distance, the Paragon can sometimes sound a bit tonally odd, especially with vocals and acoustic instruments which have already been EQd and compressed extensively. I found I preferred to choose a suitable IR, and then play with the Size and Mic Distance controls, while leaving the Decay time control alone.

I eventually discovered the Small Theatre IR (used on the Slapback Long preset) was nice for adding depth to vocals without making them too boomy.

The Paragon reverb is obviously going to be fantastically useful as a post-production reverb, adding tuneable natural ambience to foley and sweetening location sound. I set out to test if it was useful for music as well, and it shone as an incredibly versatile reverb for music mixing — especially on percussion and electric guitar.

VERDICT PROS Quality sound, incredibly versatile. The realism of convolution but infinitely adjustable CONS

It would be great to have the ability to import IRs

www.nugenaudio.com

JOSHUA FAULKNER

ON USING THE MUSIC MISSION “One day you could be recording a string section, the next you could be recording a Skepta vocal or a soprano. So having something as solid and easily portable as the Anubis interface, which sounds amazing every time, is priceless.”

merging.com/anubis

Merging Technologies SA, Le Verney 4, CH-1070, Puidoux, Switzerland

T +41 21 946 0444

E anubis@merging.com

W merging.com

/ Review

Bettermaker Stereo Passive Equalizer A Pultec replica with plug-in control: GEORGE SHILLING controls himself

B

ettermaker set out their stall a few years ago now with digitally controlled analogue hardware. They continue to refine that niche with ever-improved designs. In a Matrix-like scenario, there is now even a Plugin Alliance version of their EQ232D, so you get digitally controlled digital pretending to be digitally controlled analogue. Although the EQ232D combines Pultec-style EQ with a couple of parametric bands, this latest model is a simpler, improved Pultec EQP-1A replica, with a more authentic layout, allowing control from the front panel or a plug-in, aiming for all the sonic goodness of an original Pultec.

It Clicks

The Stereo Passive Equalizer is a lightweight 2U box. It is fairly shallow, and weight is kept low, helped by a wall-wart power supply. This will run off any voltage from 100-240V and the unit only uses 15W. A B-type USB socket is the route to computer control, and a generously long, thin and flexible B to A cable is provided. Audio connections are on two pairs of XLRs. The front has a matt powdercoat finish. A long push on the On/Stby button fires up all the LEDs. Nudge buttons set the EQ frequencies. An Engage button causes a reassuring relay click to put the EQ In or out of circuit. The five encoders follow the original Pultec layout. The aluminium coloured knobs are a bit ‘plasticky’ but a nice size for twiddling. They have a lightly ‘clicked’ feel to them, with 17 red LEDs around each, giving a rough indication of their position.

There are in-between settings when using the knobs: several clicks round (the exact number varies) equate to one LED jump. The LED blinks off briefly on each single click though — for useful feedback that you have actually changed something!

Although the front panel controls work well for 24 / Autumn 2022

grabbing and tweaking, finer fiddling is available through the plug-in. And most importantly of course, instant recall and automation.

An extra knob

The plug-in looks similar to the front panel — with a few nice extras. The window is continuously resizable; you simply grab the bottom right corner and stretch it to make it tiny, huge, or anywhere in between. As soon as you hover over any knob, a value display pops up. Each is scaled from 0.0 to 10.0 so this affords 100 settings with no uncertainty regarding the knob position. Oddly, the LED ‘jumps’ happen at slightly different spots when comparing the plug-in to the hardware, but it doesn’t really matter — they give you a good enough indication. A panel opens to reveal 32 instantly recallable snapshot memory buttons, and of course you can utilise DAW automation on all controls — including those.

An extra knob on the right of the plug-in controls Output Gain with a range of +/-8.0dB. This can be adjusted on the unit: pressing Gain turns the Hi Cut knob into a Gain knob. It is also a Reset button: pressing Gain for a couple of seconds also usefully flattens all EQ settings. Control is bidirectional, and adjusting anything either the plug-in or the front panel is instantly reflected in the other, although instantiating the plug-in will reset the EQ on the unit.

250.0Hz, with its own little Engage button, with a 24dB/octave slope. It’s a handy little bonus, and sounds good.

The EQ itself is peerless. Bettemaker claim this more accurately replicates the original Pultec curves compared to their 232D model; it has a quieter noise floor, and better coherence in L/R channel tracking. It certainly does all the stuff you expect a Pultec to do in terms of EQ sculpting. It’s quieter than an original unit, and sounds extremely sweet in the high end. And certainly very powerful in the low end. But with no valves, it doesn’t possess qualities like the power sagging you might encounter with an original.

Tight sound

It tightened up a slightly flabby low end on a mix bus with ease, using a tiny bit of low boost alongside a larger low cut at 60Hz. The High Boost band is enhanced with frequency selections from 3kHz all the way up to the usual 12kHz and 16kHz, with the bonus of 20kHz and 28kHz available. This adds a kind of ‘air band’ effect to open out the very high frequencies beautifully.

Many still love the Pultec character, and the Bettermaker Stereo Passive Equalizer is a very sweet sounding version of that. And why wouldn’t you want plug-in control and recall? It’s a very neat thing; it looks great, and sounds marvellous.

VERDICT

Not just a dumb controller

Of course, the plug-in can be placed anywhere in the currently open session in order to control the hardware unit, which would most likely be inserted with Hardware Inserts in Pro Tools. This means you’ll occupy two plug-in slots of course.

However, there is one advantage to the plug-in which does affect its placement: an included Digital HPF. So it’s not just a dumb controller.

This can be continuously varied from 20.0 to

PROS

Sweet sounding Pultec-style EQ, elegant operation, plug-in is neat and includes bonus HPF

CONS

Instantiating the plug-in sends the default EQ to the unit wiping out any alreadytweaked physical control setting

www.bettermaker.com

/ Review

DPA 4055 Kick Drum Mic

JON THORNTON test a condenser mic capable of taking the SPL of an aircraft carrier take-off deck User-friendly design

T

he latest addition to DPA’s instrument mic range makes no bones about its intended purpose — it’s badged and promoted as a kick drum microphone for both live and studio applications, and therefore enters something of a crowded marketplace. What makes it distinctive though are two qualities. The first is that unlike many competitors, it majors (as you’d expect with DPA) on a natural, flat response rather than a ‘pre-voiced’ sound. And the second is that, unlike many other dedicated kick drum microphones it’s a capacitor rather than a dynamic design.

It’s worth a bit of historical context here. Perhaps the first ‘standard’ for kick drums was the venerable AKG D12. But at launch, the D12 was marketed (and used) as a general-purpose instrument and vocal microphone, and apart from the usual slight bumpiness typical in dynamic mics, its response was pretty flat in its range. It didn’t take long though, for engineers to discover that its good low-end response and high SPL handling made it eminently suitable for bass instruments and kick drums, and it found its niche. Fast forward several decades, and the D112 (aka the ‘egg’) was launched. In response to changing musical tastes, this time the response was specifically tailored to scoop out the low mids and emphasise the ‘click’ of the beater with a presence peak — add a healthy dose of compression and you get an instant 1980s kick drum sound. That trend to ‘voicing’ kick drum microphones continued thereafter, with the now ubiquitous Audix D6, Shure Beta 52A, Beta 91A and many others all bringing their differing takes and sounds.

The 4055 is supplied with both a hard shell case and a soft pouch, and comes with its own specific clip. This in itself is worth a mention, as it slides over the body portion off the mic and clamps firmly by twisting a knurled ring. In conjunction with the slightly asymmetrical shape of the body, this means that the overall cross-section of the assembly is reduced, making tricky positioning through holes in the resonant head remarkably easy. It’s the first sign that DPA have really thought about the end user here — and the good news carries on in terms of overall solidity and build quality. It certainly looks and feels like something that will withstand the rigours of life on the road as well as the studio.

Internally, the 4055 features a prepolarised capacitor capsule with a 17mm diaphragm. Polar pattern is fixed, with what DPA describe as ‘open-cardioid’ which is properly wide, almost hemispherical up to about 8kHz. Quoted frequency response is flat up to about 5kHz, with a gentle lift above that to +6dB at 10kHz. Sensitivity is, as you’d expect, on the low side at 2mV/Pa, but this is unlikely to be an issue in this particular application, and helps towards achieving a maximum SPL handling of 164db SPL — or a more useable figure of 159dB with less than 1% THD. Unscrewing the windshield reveals what looks for all the world like the business end of the company’s 4011 or 4015 instrument microphones, mounted in a flexible shock-mounting assembly.

There’s plenty of space between the capsule and the windshield assembly for it suppress air blasts effectively — and it is very effective. Even in the worst case scenario (just outside of the port on the resonant head) there’s no trace of wind induced overload in most cases.

Warm to the sound

And it’s in that position that I first open up the mic. There’s good news and bad news here. The good news, and perhaps slightly unexpectedly, is the sound. Without any excessive voicing, you would expect that you wouldn’t get an ‘out of the box’ sound.

The reality is that it sounds just fine out of the box. It’s different, for sure, but there’s a weight and, dare I say it, a warmth to the sound that takes you by surprise.

26 / Autumn 2022

Certainly there’s scope to sculpt the sound with some EQ, but surely that’s better done by you than the mic’s designer? The bad news is that you might need to pay far more attention than ever to tuning and damping the kick. That’s not to say that the 4055 is ruthlessly revealing, but it will reward the effort to get the best sound at source you can.

Changing tack and moving to the inside of the shell (delightfully easy to poke through by the way), and the 4055 continues to impress. There are two takeaways for me here. The first is the low mid attack you get to the sound, backed off about three inches from the front skin and angled toward the beater. Coupled with a very useable proximity effect, the overall sound is incredibly solid but still natural. The second is just how tuneable the mic is simply in altering working distance and angle — it seems far less susceptible to accentuating odd little in-shell resonances as you move it — in part I assume to that smooth off-axis response.

In all, the 4055 is something of a revelation — although so is the price (MSRP €560 ex VAT). I dare say that for some, the speed of simply slinging a Beta 91A on the kick drum pillow and taking that sound will still win the day. But DPA have succeeded in redefining exactly what a kick drum mic should be — and what you get for the money here is a mic that is supremely adaptable, and equally capable of working in pop, rock, jazz or acoustic contexts. And all wrapped up in a thoughtful, sturdy package that will earn its keep in any environment for many years. There will be at least one in the mic cupboard shortly…

VERDICT PROS Sturdy ‘tour ready’ design; neat useability design touches; great wind / shock suppression; solid, open and dynamic sound; takes EQ well; no pre-voicing CONS

If you only think of kick mics as dynamics, then price… but as a condenser, the 4055 is around a sixth the price of a U47FET!

www.dpamicrophones.com

MASTERING... SOLVED. Michael Romanowski, Coast Mastering (Alicia Keys, Too $hort, America...)

· BDA4M 4 CH DAC with switchable BX5s · BAD4M 4 CH ADC with switchable BX1s · B16-BMB3 Dante

“It gives me flexibility...and clarity that I need in my work.”

Bill Skibbe, Third Man Mastering (Jack White, The Black Keys, The Kills...) · BDA8 8 CH DAC with BOPA14s · 2 BAD8 16 CH ADC with BX1s · B80-BMB1 Digilink

"We did a shootout between 6 different manufacturers and the BURL was the clear leader...Great bass and perfect top end."

GET IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME. BURLAUDIO.COM/MASTERING

MADE IN THE USA

/ Review

Antelope Audio Galaxy 32 Synergy Core update ALAN SALLABANK tests a new surround monitor controller with speaker tuning

W

ith the release of the latest v1.1.58 software for the Galaxy 32 Synergy Core (reviewed Resolution V21.6), Antelope Audio has added full monitor control up to 9.1.6 and 8 band parametric EQ, delay and level for each speaker output.

There are some new additions to the routing panel, in particular a Surround option, and when you select the Monitors option, a multichannel meter and a variety of options appear. You can control the overall surround monitor output and the stereo output independently, dim, mute and control. You can control the amount of surround delay to adjust for Lip Sync (screen delay) and change the metering between Pre and Post Surround Panel.

When you select the Surround Panel, monitoring may be configured anywhere from 2.0 up to 9.1.6.

You are also given the choice between Film layout — L, C, R, Ls, Rs, LFE for example in 5.1, or SMPTE layout — L, R, C, LFE, Ls, Rs in 5.1. The latter is most commonly used, apart from in Dolby accredited rooms, and also brings the advantage that most software better understands having the first two channels as Front Left and Right, rather than Front Left and Centre. In my studio I have 7.1.4 monitoring. Selecting a monitoring option also brings up extra controls for each speaker output.

Loudspeaker control

Here you are able to control the individual speaker level trims, the delay — to compensate for smaller rooms and to allow for timing alignment — bass management, with adjustable crossover point and 28 / Autumn 2022

filter type, and also an eight-band parametric equaliser. At present, this is manually adjusted, although it would obviously be a desirable feature to automatically import room profile information from external measurement software. You could use your own choice of measurement device and analyser display (such as the brilliant RME Digicheck), but I tested this feature with Sonarworks, manually inputting the channel calibration data.

I generally find that even the best speaker management or room correction software can overcook things slightly, maybe in a quest for ‘perfection’. In my opinion, perfection is overrated.

Your best ideal is to aim for consistency between your mix rooms, and also to try and maintain a realistic approach to how the average playback system actually sounds. In this respect the Galaxy 32 Surround Panel has the advantage of being very easy to override or manually tweak to taste. The interface is very easy to navigate: you can copy and paste EQ settings between speaker channels and save your Session. There is also easy bypass control over different aspects, such as delay and bass management.

Another excellent feature is that the Antelope control software does not have to be running on the host computer. It can be controlled from any Windows or Apple computer attached to the same network as the Galaxy 32.

Can this replace my existing monitor controller?

In a word, yes. Up until this free software upgrade, I was using a JBL Intonato controller, with the Intonato app running on an iPad. The

limitations with the Intonato were that it was essentially a full Linux computer with lots hardware IO, with all the noise, power consumption and heat generation issues yet another computer in the control room brings. It could only input and output on Analogue, AES or BluLink, with Dante connectivity only available via an extra £1000 BLU-DA BluLink - Dante/AES67 Bridge. JBL are not alone in this aspect, as most room correction hardware is based around a core computer.

The brilliant aspect of the new Surround Panel on the Galaxy 32 is that it can be sourced from, and output to, any of the Galaxy 32’s connectivity: Analogue, ADAT, Dante, HDX (Digilink), MADI or Thunderbolt. It doesn’t even have to control audio from the host machine. This allows for external sources, such as a Dolby Atmos decoder or DVD player to be able to route through your room and monitor correction.

The incredibly powerful Galaxy 32 has been turned from an already very versatile interface into an all-in-one studio hub. It’s easy to use, and hours of tutorial videos with excellent advice for setup are linked from the Control Panel. It’s very much a ‘V1.0’, but it shows huge potential already.

Antelope have very much done their homework and taken onboard user feedback — I was contacted several months ago to discuss the potential, and it seems that the one feature I very much wanted has been delivered.

For a free upgrade, this is an absolute nobrainer, even if you’re just using stereo. If you’re considering an external room correction device or monitor controller, this would save a ton of money, both on equipment, but also on electricity consumption and air conditioning. And it sounds a lot better!

VERDICT PROS

Full monitor control, with snapshots to change between speaker options; 32 Analogue outputs and flexible routing (more than any other room correction hardware); Low noise, low heat and low consumption hardware. Sample rate support up to 192kHz

CONS

Obviously version 1.0, but shows a lot of potential. No hardware remote and no auto-import of third party room profiles (Yet!)

www. antelopeaudio.com

/ Review

CEDAR Adaptive Limiter 2 NIGEL JOPSON tries a natural-sounding maximiser with an unusual algorithm discuss the finer points of inter-sample peaks (and we have, in Resolution V18.3 — Understanding the Loudness Penalty) but sometimes audio wranglers just need a tool to do the job. In this respect CEDAR delivers. If you set the ceiling control to -0.02 or -0.25 …then nothing in excess will pass, whatever occurs program wise, and whichever metering is used to check later. Thank you!

The ability to add 16-bit or 24-bit dither also makes Adaptive Limiter a flexible final plug-in for use in a non-DAW host.

Multitrack mixing

F

or years CEDAR Audio has been the gold standard for software and hardware products for audio restoration, dialogue noise suppression, speech enhancement and mastering. Previously only available as part of their CEDAR Studio packages, CEDAR has made the Adaptive Limiter available as a separate plug-in for both Mac and PC platforms — available via its dealers and directly from CEDAR’s website for £360/$440/€432 and licensed via iLok.

Spectral & Temporal

Adaptive Limiter has an unusual feature: an algorithm that calculates a continuingly varying EQ profile which “constrains the amplitude of the output while retaining the integrity of the input signal”. This is controlled via the green Spectral knob, and the LF and HF purple Temporal knobs.

Turning the Spectral knob all the way up, with the Temporal knobs low, the attenuation is allowed to vary considerably across the spectrum, but varies slowly in time. The difference between the peak and minimum attenuations at any frequency will be small. CEDAR say “this is similar to the action of a multi-band limiter with a slow release”.

With all three knobs turned up, the attenuation profile varies considerably across the spectrum and can change quickly in time. The difference between

the peak attenuation and the minimum attenuation at any frequency will be greater than if the temporal knob was turned down. I found these higher settings to be useful on instruments in a multitrack — the perceived loudness is definitely maximised — but sometimes with a change in tonality. Obviously not the sort of processing to use heavily on a vocal, for instance, but useful on a bass or keyboard part that needs lifting in the mix.

If you crank up the Temporal LF and HF knobs but keep the Spectral green knob low, then the limiter starts to behave a bit like a frequency-conscious limiter.

Control interactions are hard to rationalise because the concept is a bit unusual, but the cyan and turquoise moving frequency plot soon guides you in the correct operational direction.

I’ve found myself dealing with a mixed bag of sound over recent years. Audio for video with crowd noise and gunshots, musician’s home recordings — galloping horses. I have a supply of platinum bundles and several ‘true peak’ limiter plug-ins, but sadly many limiters cannot guarantee an output which will not illuminate someone’s clip lights somewhere down the line. On a 90 minute audio-for-video mix it’s infuriating. There really ought to be some sort of international body to certify so-called true peak limiters for ‘no overs’! We can

I had been expecting the CEDAR Adaptive Limiter to be very effective as a mastering tool — which it is — but I’d not anticipated quite how powerful it would be at treating individual instruments in a multi-track mix. This plug-in had the ability to bring up a rather limply-played Fender Rhodes so that every chord bulged with energy and sparkly tine sounds — and maintained a consistent level to sit back in the mix. Music engineers should bear in mind that this is the sort of plug-in CEDAR anticipated being used to elevate complete mumbling or thin vintage recordings to audibility!

I selected a few instances of normal music production limiters — McDSP, sonible, Waves and Sonnox — and set them all up so as to ‘bring up’ the musicality of each track in a multitrack. I then bypassed them all and set up an instance of CEDAR Adaptive Limiter to do the same job on the same tracks. I took a break and then A-B compared the setups. Wow. The CEDAR is a powerful tool, and especially so when tailored to specific instruments, as the temptation is to be a little more radical in control setting than on a full program mix. CEDAR’s Adaptive Limiter is certainly a more useful addition to the music arsenal than I’d anticipated; it’s an order of magnitude more capable of ‘fattening’ a sound than something like the Sonnox Inflator. It’s the type of tool which a music engineer has to make a rule to be sparing with, because it can make quite radical dynamic transformation.

The question readers may ask is: do we need another limiter or maximiser plug-in? The Adaptive Limiter’s UI-look harks back to Pro Tools 6, and the price reflects CEDAR’s high end niche. Here’s my answer: do you mix audio for video, where you’re faced with unpredictable sound, plus a long mix program which you can’t always plough-through in real time? You need it. Do you mix music? Then ask yourself if you’re actually happy with your current peak limiter… or do you sometimes scream: “Bring back my TC Electronic System 6000!” If the latter, you know what to do…

The CEDAR Adaptive Limiter 2 brings some unusual but easy to use temporal features to limiting, with a truly professional approach to limiting peak output. It is capable of radical dynamic enhancement, making many so-called ‘maximisers’ sound a bit feeble.

VERDICT PROS A remarkable ability to maximise audio without changing character — beyond the bounds of what seems possible CONS

UI looks a bit basic! (but of course does the job)

www.cedaraudio.com

Autumn 2022 / 29

/ Review

Avid Pro Tools 2022 This year heralded a product line refresh GEORGE SHILLING avidly downloads and installs…

S

ince we last looked at Pro Tools in early 2020 (Resolution V19.2), there have been some significant updates, and earlier this year a complete revamp of the product line.

There are now three distinct versions, each with a different subscription rate. New users can no longer buy Perpetual licences; they must subscribe. The standard version of Pro Tools is now named Pro Tools Studio — a sensible move to avoid confusion when referring to ‘Pro Tools’. A new entry-level version is named Artist. And the top level version which is needed for HDX-based systems is still called Ultimate, but — slightly confusingly — the package needed to obtain it is called Flex.

Inspiring new MPC-style sampler and analogue synth VIs (GrooveCell and SynthCell) are included with all versions to entice music makers. The names are reminiscent of the ancient SampleCell sampler from the Digidesign days. Also reminiscent of Pro Tools LE (and perhaps less welcome) are the track count limits in the Artist version including only 32 tracks of Audio.

But for professional users, the Studio version provides pretty much all you need unless you already own HDX hardware — even including new Dolby Atmos capabilities.

Here are some of the improvements since our last review: 2020.3 finally brought folder tracks to Pro Tools. These ‘Basic’ or ‘Routing’ flavours are a great bonus to keeping big sessions organised. These are useful with certain mixing projects, enabling visual categorisation, and with Routing Folders you have similar functionality to audio subgroups along with that useful organisation.

2020.9 added handy options for Record enable latch/cancel behaviour between audio and MIDI/ Instrument tracks, usefully added support for Ableton Link, and reintroduced support for 30 / Autumn 2022

SDII files, allowing conversion and importing, along with the BW64 file format.

2020.11 added the new Dark Theme.

Melodyne Essential was now included with subscriptions and support plans, adding slick conversion of audio to MIDI, simply by dragging audio to a MIDI track. The Hybrid Engine allowed offloading of AAX DSP processing to the Carbon interface for low latency monitoring while recording.

There was a new Bounce window with added functionality, the return of QuickTime, and the ability to export Dolby Atmos ADM files directly.

2021.6 added support for M1 Macs via Rosetta. Hybrid Engine was implemented for HDX cards so that native and DSP processing could be used “more harmoniously”. This makes better use of the host computer’s processing, with more voices available, but allowing use of the HDX DSP when low latency is needed.

Voices, Tracks and I/O limits were increased. The latter especially was long-awaited and much requested, enabling third-party interfaces to now access 64 channels of I/O (previously limited to 32).

Track count was also doubled, and doubling sample rate no longer meant halving track count. The Dark and Classic UI Themes were comprehensively enhanced with customisable brightness and saturation of different parts of the interface, using an expanded Color Palette window. And you no longer had to restart to switch themes. And finally, from 2021.6 Pro Tools adds correct delay compensation for side chains — great for your EDM bass drum pumping, or TV dialogue enhancement where you need to dynamically EQ music or atmosphere pads.

2021.10 added further customisation to the UI themes and colours.

Routing multichannel audio was simplified with automatic down-mixing and mapping without creating sub-paths.

And you could now control your Carbon preamps from within Pro Tools. Support was also added for Komplete Kontrol MIDI keyboards, with automatic sync with the

selected track, and control Pro Tools functions with buttons, knobs and the 4D encoder.

2022.4 introduced the revamp of Pro Tools with three distinct subscription tiers.

Additionally, Soundflow Cloud Avid Edition provides shortcuts and 1,600+ pre-built macros and commands that can be triggered various ways. And 2022.4 brought custom keyboard shortcuts. A number of menu items without shortcuts can finally be assigned a time-saving keyboard command. There is also a separate new Search window for finding commands, tracks, clips, AudioSuite plug-ins, memory locations and Track Groups within Pro Tools. There were also further Dolby Atmos enhancements, and increased Video Color Space options and automatic detection.

2022.6 added more Dolby Atmos improvements including offline bounce re-renders. Sends can now be pre-set to default to a useful setting (rather than off or 0dB). MIDI improvements include a setting to quantize to the grid setting (with a new shortcut to do this).

The many enhancements and improvements are welcome. However, with Apple Silicon being available for more than a year it is disappointing that there is no native support, even if Rosetta allows Pro Tools to run smoothly. And there are long-standing bugs not fixed. The Score editor feels forgotten, with limited functionality, and still doesn’t correctly display certain note lengths. And the ‘Select Assignments to…’ [a particular output] command still annoyingly un-hides hidden and inactive tracks that have that assignment. But although changes seem to come slowly, new features are usually extremely well thought-out, and the latest revamp of the range seems targeted to bring new users to the fold while keeping the pros happy.

VERDICT PROS Dolby Atmos support, folder tracks, MIDI improvements, customisable keyboard shortcuts, many small but useful enhancements CONS

Some old bugs not fixed, no Apple Silicon support

www.avid.com

/ Review

Reverb Foundry Tai Chi NIGEL JOPSON’S mix is in slowly evolving motion

L

iquidSonics — whose products include Cinematic Rooms (Resolution V19.5) and Bricasti homage Seventh Heaven (Resolution V16.4) — has announced the addition of Reverb Foundry to their portfolio, adding three additional plug-ins. The most recent release Tai Chi, ‘blends the design styles of multiple reverb houses in a fantastic new creation fit for the modern Atmos-equipped workflow era’.

Reverb plug-ins broadly fall into two categories: the simulation of actual acoustic spaces as realistically as possible, or artistic audio enhancement. Of the latter category, we’re used to seeing either attempts to emulate vintage hardware, or software which aims to bring a bit of digital magic to reverb design. Tai Chi definitely belongs with the latter concept — although bearing in mind developer Matt Hill’s programming of Seventh Heaven, and his work on what is now Slate Digital’s VerbSuite Classics, there are certainly times when you’re going to think: “damn, Tai Chi sounds like a Lexicon.” There is good reason for the popularity of hardware emulations — synthetic though the old boxes may sound in isolation — the digital reverbs I used as a young engineer had a way of sitting comfortably in a mix.

Creative flexibility

If you want a slap-back reverb on an electric guitar, with a bit of an SPX90 flavour, a very short decay but no low end on the actual reverb and an HF roll-off, you can dial it up in a trice on the Tai Chi. It will sound way better than an SPX90 because with Tai Chi you can trim the Diffusion, Spread, Chorus, Modulation Rate, Damping… until everything is just how you want it, and the guitar part keeps out of the way of other instruments.

This is not really a plug-in for the neophyte. The interface has all the adjustments an engineer might need, but you need to know what RT Multiply means. There are no simple ‘press here for a long reverb’ buttons, although a huge catalogue of 220 factory presets provide useful starting points. The UI is very logically arranged, with Output Mix, Treble, and Bass Contouring sections to the right. The lower central section of the interface displays Reverb Time Multipliers as a frequency plot, with three adjustable crossover points and individual multiplier control for each of four bands. Above the RT Multipliers is a 6-rotary control panel with five switchable tabs: Master, Advanced, Dynamics, Fidelity and Equaliser.

I’ll highlight some unusual or interesting controls on these panels.

Master tab: the pre-delay can be locked to song BPM by selecting the tempo-sync button. The Width control works via a mid-side boost/cut approach. Spacing will alter the space between individual reflections, and reflection timing can be set relative to the reverb pre-delay or locked to the dry signal. Reflection patterns can be selected using the tiny chevrons (not so obvious to notice!) above the Roll-off control, with options of Room, Hall, Church, Garage and Stadium. Advanced tab: there’s a very comprehensive Chorus, which has a great effect, especially on longer reverbs. The spread control affects the way signals are injected into different delay lines within the reverb loops. You can control how quickly reverb builds to its highest level, and how smooth it sounds during onset and decay.

Duck the reverb

Using the controls in the Dynamics tab you can compress either the reverb alone or the summed reflections plus reverb signal (Wet setting). A key feature, which I really liked, was the ability to Duck the reverb until the source is silent/not playing. This is especially effective on a vocal or a strident guitar chord, where you mainly want the reverb to swell up as the chord is decaying, or the singer is tailing off. The compressor Release control is adjustable up to a generous 2.5 seconds, so just about any musical instrument can benefit, with a high degree of control possible. Manual rides may still be preferred for a lead vocal, but once you start using ducking on instruments with a reverb insert, you won’t want to go back to ‘full on all the time’.

Even a tiny amount of ducking on instrument parts seems to clean up a mix.

Fidelity controls: if I want to return to the ’80s 12-bit crunchy sound, I can! A selection of bandwidth limiting and bit-reduction controls can get audio fuzzing, and even cutting out if bit-depth is set low enough. Equaliser: handy Low and High shelving, with adjustable turnover frequencies, plus low pass (6dB) and high pass (24dB) variable filters.

The way Tai Chi allows up to three crossover split points to be defined means there’s a huge amount of tonality tinkering available, and if you don’t use this feature then leaving the multipliers section in the Off position will save CPU cycles.

Tai Chi is a super-flexible digital reverb

which will suit engineers with a clear idea of what they want to achieve with a reverb.

There’s something for every application in Tai Chi. For me, a killer feature is the dynamic ducking. If you’re working on atmospheric music or SFX developing ‘unique soundscapes’, then the chorusing and modulation effects will be invaluable.

Tai Chi is also available as a $99 Lite version (which can be upgraded), lacking the 7.1.6 outputs and multi-band decay contouring available in the full $199 version.

VERDICT PROS Tuneable reverb that will sit well in a mix, rich chorus and deep modulation, 7.1.6 capability, ducking CONS

A UI scaling smaller than 70% would be useful. Fidelity (bit-depth) section could do with an Enable button like the EQ section

www.liquidsonics.com

Autumn 2022 / 31

Technology

CEDAR DNS 4 RESOLUTION takes a look behind the scenes at the genesis of CEDAR’s latest dialogue noise suppressor

F

a minimum of physical controls, but which were capable of producing results that were often superior to those obtained by a human.

The 8-channel rackmount DNS 8 Live was a breakthrough for several reasons. Firstly, Learn made it possible for non-expert users to obtain high quality results, avoiding the artefacts that occur when noise reduction is incorrectly applied.

Secondly, by removing the need to ride faders and find sweet spots for each of its controls, setup times could be greatly reduced. Thirdly, a ‘Detail’ mode allowed experienced users to set up specific and independent noise identification and noise reduction characteristics for each channel, which is ideal in situations such as studios where the ambient noise differs from microphone to microphone. And finally, CEDAR’s DNS products have always had near-zero latency, which makes them uniquely useful where lip-sync has to be maintained. Consequently, the DNS 8 Live was quickly adopted worldwide by news and sports broadcasters as well as companies producing content such as reality TV and games shows.

By removing the need for anything more than a knob to dial in the desired amount of noise attenuation, Learn also made it possible to design a smaller dialogue noise suppressor for applications such as production recording and live

interviews in noisy environments. So perhaps it was no surprise when CEDAR announced the DNS 2, a two-channel unit that was small enough to fit in a kit bag, yet offered a pair of ultra-low-noise microphone preamps with optional phantom power, and could be powered using industrystandard 12V supplies. Within a few months this had become CEDAR’s most successful product, and it remains a vital component of many sound recordists’ kits, whether working on the latest blockbuster movie or broadcasting from a war zone somewhere in the world.

More channels requested

Nevertheless, almost as soon as CEDAR launched the DNS 2, they were approached by customers who wanted more channels of dialogue noise suppression in the same footprint. There was another rackmount product in development at the time, the CEDAR DNS 8D but, once this was Photos: CEDAR, Jakob Owens (top right)

or some people, CEDAR Audio and its products are still synonymous with audio restoration, whether for sound archives and libraries or remastering content for re-release on high quality digital media. Others know CEDAR exclusively in post. But for many years, the company’s largest market has been in the area of noise suppression for production sound, broadcast and live sound.

CEDAR’s dialogue noise suppressors started out as replacements for analogue noise reduction units in postproduction studios, and early units such as the DNS1000 and DNS 1500 sported faders that allowed users to control the amount of signal identified as noise and the way in which this was then suppressed. These were highly successful, and an Academy Award testified to the importance of the DNS1000 in film and video production.

These products — as well as the Pro Tools oriented DNS2000 and DNS3000 — used what would now be viewed as a basic form of machine learning to perform noise recognition. But in 2012, the company released a DNS product that used a more advanced ML algorithm, taking control away from the user and handing it over to the machine.

Often referred to as a form of AI (although erroneously so) the Learn algorithm made it possible for CEDAR to manufacture products with

After CEDAR launched the DNS 2, customers wanted more channels of dialogue noise suppression in the same footprint

/ Phantom power is available on mic inputs

32 / Autumn 2022

/ Mini XLRs are preferred by CEDAR’s customers

released, the company was able to turn its attention to the concept of a functionally larger DNS 2. It soon became apparent that marrying two of the existing units in as small a box as possible was not the right way forward. For example, once the channel count exceeded two, a different type of GUI was needed. Furthermore, there were many possible I/O configurations with different combinations of mic, line and digital inputs as well as analogue and digital outputs. There were other decisions to be made that would influence the size of the unit. The DNS 2 uses a standard XLR4 as its power connector, but many potential users expressed a preference for the smaller connector used by many battery packs. Then there was question of audio connections. The DNS 2 used fullsized XLRs for its inputs and outputs but market research showed that, to minimise the space needed, mini XLRs were now preferable. Armed with this and various other items of information, the team was ready to design the latest portable DNS, which they decided should have four channels so users could record up to four channels of noise suppressed audio, or two channels of processed audio and two ‘isos’ without having to jump through any hoops. For obvious reasons, the new product was named the DNS 4.

With the specification and physical parameters decided, development began. All was proceeding well… and then the global silicon shortage hit. The original design of the DNS 4 used components that initially had delivery times of 12 weeks, which then became 26 weeks, and then a year, and then two years, until eventually some major components became unobtanium. At this point, CEDAR must have been tempted to become a pure software company, but there are some jobs for which software isn’t a solution, especially when latency is an issue. So a redesign was undertaken, boards were laid out again, wheels were reinvented, and the project moved forward. Of course, every time that the processors or microcontrollers within a device such as the DNS 4 are changed, the firmware also has to be rewritten, and this can take as long as — or even longer than — the changes to the hardware. But here we are in September 2022 and, despite the challenges, the DNS 4 has arrived.

Announced on 1st September and shown for the first time at the IBC2022 Convention, it’s the planned four channel unit that uses the smaller power connector and mini XLRs preferred by CEDAR’s customers. It offers four input channels — either two mics and two line inputs, four line inputs or four digital inputs, four independent processing channels, and four line level or digital outputs. Its dual mic preamps have an admirable dynamic range of better than 102dB and, if they share the performance of the DNS 2’s mic pres, they should sound very good indeed. Their +48V phantom power also offers up to 10mA per microphone, so should power most if not all of the mics that you may want to use with the unit. Analogue to digital conversion is driven by an internal 48kHz clock or can be synchronised to external equipment in the range 40kHz to 100kHz, and produces a 24-bit signal at the chosen sample rate. The processing resolution is 40-bit floating point, and both 24-bit digital and analogue outputs are provided.

/ The DNS 4 will be much in demand for location sound

At just 185 x 130 x 45mm and weighing in at a very manageable 750g, the DNS 4 is not much larger or heavier than the DNS 2 and will drop just as easily into a kit bag as its predecessor — maybe even more so thanks to the need for smaller connectors. But production recording and broadcasting isn’t its only use, and there’s little doubt that some units will find homes with broadcasters who have no need for the eight channels and remote control capabilities of the DNS 8D, and perhaps some smaller studios who will benefit from the flexibility of a hardware unit that can be used in-house for interviews and voice-overs as well as on the occasional trip into the field.

Simple, compact and portable

Operating it couldn’t be simpler. When using the analogue inputs, you can determine the gains for each channel independently and whether the optional 18dB/oct high-pass filter for each is engaged. You can also group channels to use the same setup and processing parameters if you wish, and an optional split mode directs input 1 to internal channels 1 and 3, and input 2 to internal channels 2 and 4 so that you can process each signal in two ways, including passing the audio ‘unmolested’ as an iso. Having set the unit up as needed, there are then just two processing parameters for each channel — its Attenuation and its Bias. These have the same meaning as on previous DNS products, with the Bias predisposing the algorithm to detect more or less noise at any given moment, and the Attenuation determining how much of the noise is removed. An OLED displays all of this information on a single page as well providing level and performance metering.

As for the processing itself, CEDAR is always seeking to improve upon its noise reduction technologies. The version in the DNS 4 is a further refinement of the DNS 2 algorithm and, having listened to the production prototype, it’s clear that the performance is at least as good as that of its

predecessor, providing a significant amount of noise suppression without introducing any of the artefacts associated with traditional dehissers and denoisers. You can, of course, over-process, but rather than obtaining the twittering and underwater artefacts that engineers have come to know and hate over the years, the worst that happens is that the signal becomes a bit dull and lifeless. But when it’s used correctly, voices retain their quality while the noise is pushed back to a degree that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. And all this happens in a box that you stick in your pocket and power from a battery.

When working in a studio or on location, noise is an almost unavoidable problem and — whether broadcasting live or recording — there are many occasions when it’s impossible to go back and ‘do it all again’. By providing the ability to suppress noise with minimal setup effort and no unpleasant artefacts, the DNS 4 can be more than just a noise reduction unit; it speeds workflow and can save on costs. But those of us working in post needn’t worry. CEDAR is always mindful that superior results might be achieved elsewhere if the time and the budget allows, which is why the spilt mode is such a fundamental feature of the product’s design.

CEDAR Audio is now approaching its 34th birthday, and it must seem to younger sound engineers that the company is part of the permanent furniture of the pro-audio industry. It still works with the libraries and archives that numbered among its earliest customers, and its CEDAR Cambridge systems remain at the forefront of their field, processing vast amounts of audio for clients ranging from film companies to government security organisations. But its DNS products — both in hardware and in their Emmy Award winning plug-in form — are by far its most widely used, and the DNS 4 fills the gap between the DNS 2 and the DNS 8D very nicely indeed. www.cedaraudio.com

Autumn 2022 / 33

The

Nick Fry MIKE AITON talks to double BAFTA and RTSwinning Re-Recording Mixer and Head of Sound at Picture Shop (UK)

We must always be cognisant of which format we are mixing for

Nick Fry photos: Mike Aiton DTS posters, courtesy of Netflix Studio shots: Picture Shop

Interview

/ Genelec 8040Bs are used as surround monitors

F

ry first caught the sound bug while doing work experience at the BBC, and after an electronic engineering diploma, scored his first job in the industry as a runner at Molinare. After an apprenticeship track-laying and syncing rushes, he graduated to mixing and built a name for himself in comedy, including shows The League of Gentlemen and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, to name a few. In 2000 he moved to The Farm Group — (now part of Streamland Media’s picture division, Picture Shop, for Scripted picture and Unscripted picture and sound) — a very forward-thinking post house for the time with a totally Pro Tools audio department, whose vision was Nigel Edwards. Fry has subsequently mixed a long list of TV hit shows including, Grayson Perry’s Art Club, The Ripper, Spitting Image, 9/11: Inside the President’s War Room, Louis Theroux’s LA Stories, The Most Hated Man on the Internet and the BBC’s poignant documentary The Last Igloo — a narrative about following the traditional Inuit way of life in Greenland — for which he won an RTS Craft & Design Award. In 2008 Fry won a Best Sound BAFTA for Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, and in 2021 he won again (in addition to scoring an RTS Craft & Design Award and Broadcast Tech Innovation Award), for Netflix’s much lauded Formula 1: Drive to Survive.

What do you enjoy the most in your current job?

In a documentary series, I love putting the pieces together and making the final mix. It’s a bit like

/ Fry in the machine room

decorating at home, there’s a sense of achievement in saying ‘I made that’. I love the process of mixing it all together, and then seeing the clients enjoying it. It’s a team process with all the sound crafts

coming together, blended in the final mix. Scripted shows are terrific fun too — to build upon the original sync and develop a storyline through sound is so enjoyable.

Autumn 2022 / 35

/ Fry keeps an eye on the LUFS

Do you prefer mixing or editorial?

I do both but prefer the mix. I sometimes track-lay for junior mixers here and ask for feedback — it’s collaborative and I like getting feedback, it’s how we all get better. It doesn’t matter what you are doing or who it’s for, it must be the best you can make it.

How many audio studios does Picture Shop now encompass?

We have 13 studios in London, in Manchester there are six (plus sound editorial), Bristol has two (plus sound editorial), and we have two managed audio suites at UKTV, two at Channel 4, and two for BBC Creative in Soho. Across the

regions we have eight Dolby Home Atmos studios. All of these audio studios were formerly part of The Farm Group.

That’s a lot of faders! As Head of Sound how do you manage that many suites?

We have a carefully curated plug-in list and choose very specifically. It was an early conscious decision to make every room identical, and any mix able to open and play in any room. This standardisation made our suites very adaptable across all TV genres.

We are rolling out DAPS (Dolby Atmos Production Suite) into every studio to be able to listen to Atmos mixes ­— via a live downmix re-render — in non-Atmos studios 36 / Autumn 2022

/ Interview

Having different equipment in every room would be a nightmare.

Yes, we have a core base-build with stock plug-ins and a few carefully chosen extras, such as Altiverb and iZotope RX. Recently we have been working with some more specialised plug-ins that we have as mobile licences, as and when they are needed (like Spanner or Slapper). If these prove popular, we then expand them out.

Similarly, our equipment choices (Avid S6 console desks, custom made AKA Design desks, to name a few) were carefully selected to ensure projects could move seamlessly around our facilities, across the UK. This provides our talented creatives with as much freedom as possible.

When it comes to plug-ins, my recommendation is that less is more. No option paralysis from a long list of choices — it’s just not time efficient. We prefer to use the time more creatively.

You have a very close relationship with equipment supplier Scrub, who has done all your installations, sometimes on a very tight turnaround.

John Johnson, their chief technology officer, and Mike Rigby, senior engineer, are utterly superb.

We now have Mike working with us within Streamland Media. They played a key part in spearheading our collaboration with Dolby, Netflix, and our expert engineer Anthony Kirkland to make Dolby Home Atmos a huge success within our facility in a tight turnaround. Scrub are always

there to help and we always get our equipment on time and without issues. An amazing group of people.

Your choice of monitoring through the entire facility is Genelec — what is it that you love about their monitors?

I love the sound of Genelecs, they translate to TV

perfectly. They make you work harder, as the detail in them is incredible, they’re brutally revealing. They are very good in a rear field environment, like our studios here. In this studio we have a 7.1.4 configuration; 1037s across the front LCR. For the surrounds and the height speakers we have 8040Bs and for subwoofer duty, a 7071a.

Autumn 2022 / 37

Are you using GLM software for room correction?

Yes, in Manchester and in Bristol, but this room we’re currently in was built before GLM came out. We use DAD (Digital Audio Denmark) for our audio interfaces (the Avid Matrix) which does our IO/monitor control and room EQ all in one box. It’s EUCON controllable from the Avid S6. We have a bespoke audio curve, so whenever Dolby come to line up our rooms for Atmos they use that. It’s a TV appropriate line up and all our studios are very consistent.

How was the transition to Dolby Atmos achieved?

We pre-planned much of what needed to happen.

We created a full Atmos studio, and a client mix in just three months.

I give people two days training for Atmos mixing; a day with me where we go from the ground upwards and run through how things

EQ232D Bettermaker EQ232D is a faithful plugin recreation of one of the most respected analog mastering EQs of the new millennium

The Bettermaker EQ232D is the Pultec of the 21st Century.

Matt Schaeffer - Recording Engineer (Kendrick Lamar, Bakar, A$AP Rocky) I can use my Bettermaker on a plane, I can use it on a train, I will use it on a bus, I will use it everywhere man oh man.

- Jimmy Douglass (Aaliyah, Missy Elliott, Ginuwine, Jay-Z.) The analog version of the Bettermaker EQ has been my final top-end and bottom-end for final touches on almost every single mix for the past five years. The plugin version is a winner! Sounds, looks and feels fantastic.

- Luca Pretolesi - Producer/Mixing/Mastering Engineer (Diplo/Major Lazer, Snoop Lion, Steve Aoki) The Bettermaker certainly lives up to its name, it's a wonderful sounding EQ that's simple enough to get results quickly, but with enough features to address any problem areas in your audio. The P EQ section allows for great tone-shaping, while EQ 1/2 and the HPF let you address the fine details. A great addition to anyone's EQ arsenal.

- Paul "Willie Green" Womack (The Roots, Wiz Khalifa, ScHoolboy Q)

AVAILABLE ONLY ON PLUGIN-ALLIANCE.COM

38 / Autumn 2022

work, and a day on their own to experiment. I designed templates, bolt-ons and IO configs, for both Unscripted and Scripted work. A full kit of parts for any of our mixers to utilise.

So, when we transitioned to Atmos, we already had some very solid practices in place. Everything we do in Sound is templated — so any mixer can pick up a job from another mixer and make deliverables. We took the variables out of the equation and standardised the approach. This allows the creatives to be creative and not worry about the technicalities, giving them the full time make a great mix. Any changes, updates or deliverables can be done in any studio.

How do you begin an Atmos mix, and do you like dialogue editors to NR for you?

I start the same way as per 2.0 or 5.1, I clean up the dialogues with de-noise plug-ins and a fair amount of equalisation. We like the mixers to do their own de-noising as we believe it is very mix dependant and should be part of the mixing process.

Dialogues are the anchor of a good mix. If they’re clean, consistent and clear you can have so much more fun with the other elements. I mix differently according to the programme’s audience, as well as the network. Suit your mix to who your audience is.

In 5.1 or 2.0 you would typically use a Bus Compressor for your dialogue, but in Atmos there are no buses…

I send my dialogues out through an Atmos bed, so I can control the peak limiting, compression and EQ. In Formula 1: Drive to Survive, all the ‘in-car dialogue’ and the ‘pit radio’ is an object (as are the in-car FX), placed in the middle of the room to make you, the viewer, experience the driver’s perspective — it’s in your head. We’ve noticed people tweet about this, as they love it!

Because of the attention to the mixing of the dialogues, I had more space to be playful with dynamics. As it’s not for theatrical release, the mix must work on Televisions, tablets, iPhones, etc in 5.1 and 2.0 as well. Without a good dialogue premix, it would be too ‘flappy’ and just wouldn’t translate to TV. Across the series, both Steve Speed and I, created a soundtrack that works extremely well in Atmos and sings across all formats.

You seem to like the Netflix -27 gated dialogue anchor?

Totally. Formula 1: Drive to Survive just wouldn’t sound the same on the old algorithm. It came in just as we started the first series. We were one of the first Unscripted shows to use this algorithm and checked in with Scott Kramer at Netflix that this was OK. How do you cope with true peak limiting with Atmos objects?

In short, you can’t. Most streamers now accept that some audio will peak. It’s all down to good mixing — if you’re careful in the mix, you won’t be peppered with red lights. You can’t stop what happens when audio is summed in the RMU. We decided early on to not put limiters across every object output to the RMU.

/ Interview

Do you use surround or stereo reverbs for dialogue, or just centre only?

It really depends on what I’m mixing. For example, for dialogue, I predominantly use mono reverb in the centre channel, that’s traditionally where the reverb should be. This is for good reason, unless you are in an unusual acoustic location like a cave or a church and want to make a point of that by spreading sound out, or by using it as sound design.

What format does most music arrive to you for an Atmos mix?

Mostly stereo, but I have had some mixed in 5.1. I have experimented with putting the music into beds, but prefer it as objects, it’s then more future-proof and room applicable.

I have tried upmixers, but I wasn’t too keen on ‘the downmix of the upmix’, so I reverted to using the two main stereo pairs of the 5.1 and panned them appropriately, sending the LFE off to a separate bus. I’ll give the front pair a bit of height and pull it back slightly, and the second pair would be panned back.

In TV, the downmix is so important, so I will always listen back over the TV monitor before the clients hear it. We now have a choice of binaurally encoded stereo, LoRo or LtRt stereo from the re-renderer.

How much time should a production allow extra for an Atmos mix, over and above a traditional broadcast 5.1/2.0 mix?

It really depends on the project and how much detail is required in the Atmos mix, as well as the deliverables required from the streamer or broadcaster. We discuss with the team how long we recommend on a case-by-case basis.

How do you approach dynamics in an Atmos mix?

Always remember it’s TV, so listen back on TV. We use a calibrated monitoring level on our TV audio system so that I can be sure to hear all the dialogue, and nothing shreds my ears — then we are dynamically correct.

Is your TV monitoring solution standardised between studios?

From inception, every TV in every studio was the same, so we could achieve consistency in monitoring. Over time, some clients wanted ‘better TV sound’ with more bass so, with the advent of soundbars, we developed another solution. Anthony Kirkland found some stereo speakers that we could mount either side of the TV, with a rear facing sub, that really fitted the bill. These are now the standard in every studio.

We are rolling out DAPS (Dolby Atmos Production Suite) into every studio to be able to listen to Atmos mixes — via a live downmix re-render — in nonAtmos studios. I am also going to make sure all editorial rooms can track-lay using Atmos session templates and bolt-ons, even if they are only monitoring in 5.1. All our Atmos mix studios have a Dolby RMU (Rendering and Mastering Unit). All our mix studios are island sites, so our audio and our video is always local, and not dependant on network storage. Therefore, if things go down for any reason, we can carry on working.

How much has the pandemic changed the way top flight audio post works in Soho?

During the first lockdown we very quickly pivoted to further increase our unscripted work. We were agile and carried on working. We shipped six systems to people’s houses before the lockdown, all with Genelec monitoring.

The facility stayed open, and a very small core of audio team came in to run the studios. I mixed a Jack the Ripper series for Netflix using Source Elements Source-Live Low Latency. It worked well, but missed the intimacy of the iterative and creative process.

The biggest change for us have been remote voice overs. That hasn’t fully gone back [to pre-Covid workflow], and I don’t think it will. Clients are either used to having remote talent or remotely listening-in to voice sessions.

Are programmes being made for television still too dynamic?

We must always be cognisant of which format we are mixing for. I would also include over-loud music in that pool. I love watching lots of TV, but loud music under dialogue can be distracting. Since the BBC introduced their best practice sound guide, viewers complaints have dropped substantially about loud music and over dynamic mixes. I always remind the team we are mixing for the end consumer. The consumer is the one buying the product. Mixing is not an arms race. This has always been our ethos.

Autumn 2022 / 39

Craft

DANNY TURNER discovers the smoke and mirror techniques that brought ‘The King’ back to life on Baz Luhrmann’s Presley biopic

F

ilm composer Elliott Wheeler’s association with filmmaker Baz Luhrmann began over a decade ago on The Great Gatsby, and continued three years later with the Netflix musical drama The Get Down, where Wheeler expertly intertwined jazz, pop and hip-hop with musical storytelling, alongside music icons such as Nas, Grandmaster Flash and Nile Rogers.

So successful was their partnership that Wheeler was appointed executive music producer for Luhrmann’s recently released Elvis Presley biopic. Diving into the ‘The King’s’ 800-strong discography, the composer began reworking classic tracks, creating orchestral themes and helping actor Austin Butler create authentic vocal renditions using high-fidelity stems, taken from original Elvis recordings.

With the assistance of Nashville producer Dave Cobb, Wheeler also had access to the legendary RCA Studios where Elvis recorded dozens of hits, adopting his original microphones, preamps and 40 / Autumn 2022

recording devices. Orchestral recordings took place at AIR studios and were relayed to Wheeler’s production house Turning Studios, with facilities in Sydney, Los Angeles and New York.

You’ve developed an ongoing partnership with filmmaker Baz Luhrmann. What lies at the heart of this creative affiliation?

With any creative relationship between director and composer you start to develop a form of musical shorthand when it comes to looking at a story, and trying to understand where you need to get to. From that perspective, I can understand why composers lock in with particular directors, because so much time and effort is devoted to getting these projects up and running that it requires a leap of faith to develop that relationship.

One of the understandings that I have with Baz is that he tends to use many external artists. Coming

Are you happy to work with Baz irrespective of the topic, or did the Elvis biopic hold a particular fascination for you?

The Get Down and Elvis are very American stories looking at different eras of the country, but when Baz is telling a story you want to jump on board no matter what it is. There are very few directors who make the music such a focal point of the storytelling, so it’s a real gift to work with him.

At the same time, your role moved beyond composer into executive music producer. What did that entail in relation to this project?

The great thing was that Baz got my music editor Jamieson Shaw and I involved very early on so we could sit down and start going through this huge body of material that comprised over 800 songs. We sat with Baz, did a lot of listening sessions, made a lot of lists and started to understand which tracks and performances we’d begin using for the

Elliott Wheeler images, Prudence Upton Elvis images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Elliott Wheeler

in as composer and executive music producer on The Get Down, and now Elvis, gave us license to use whatever flavours we needed to, whether that’s recording the score with Jeff Foster in London or bringing in other artists like Doja Cat, Yola and Gary Clarke Jr. to play a role in the film.

/ Interview

storytelling and how we would try and portray Elvis.

For example, do we do it all using masters or recreations and who was our actor going to be? It was such a gift to find Austin Butler. Without him I’m not sure how we would have moved forward, and that led to a lot of other answers. Then we went over and worked with Dave Cobb in Nashville to recreate a lot of the early recordings of Elvis. We had access to all of Dave’s incredible equipment including every microphone and preamp and the tape that Elvis recorded to. We even had the original tape delay machine that he used and we recorded at the same studios at RCA that Elvis recorded at. But knowing we had Austin to vocalise the early Elvis really did unlock a lot of avenues for us.

How important was it to work at RCA and use so many of the same tools that Elvis had in order to get your head inside the project?

With regard to the recording process, we wanted to keep a sense of fidelity but also manipulate recordings in a way that felt cinematically exciting.

We felt it was really important for that sonic landscape to be absolutely authentic. Basically, Austin sings everything up to 1968, and after that it’s pretty much Elvis’s vocals being blended in.

Austin’s voice was so close to Elvis’s anyway, but because we had the Turner microphone that Elvis used at Russwood, or the RE15 mics that he used in Vegas, we had the flexibility to blend the two voices together in a way that was authentic. Another thing that Baz was really insistent on was that we wanted a contemporary audience to have a cinematic experience and understand what a punk Elvis was — by sensing the danger of his performances.

As mentioned, you worked very closely with Austin to ensure that his performance was as authentic as possible. How deep did you personally go into that process?

I was very deeply involved in that side of things, but at the end of the day the person who was most

responsible for Austin’s voice was Austin. His work ethic was insane and there’s not a recording or a performance that he couldn’t do verbatim, but we did do a lot of work with him. We had a wonderful coach, Irene Bartlett, who helped him to understand how to access different parts of his vocal range to match all the different types of voices that Elvis had over his career. We also had access to those stems, so we’d often sit down with Austin and listen line by line to work out what Elvis was doing in each of those performances.

What about the physical component of Elvis’s performances?

The incredible rhythmic ability that Elvis had in every line he sang was something we worked on developing, working hand in hand with movement coach Polly Bennett. There’s a line that Elvis says in the movie: “If I can’t move, I can’t sing” — his physicality affected his voice, so as Austin was learning the songs he’d also learn how to do the movements in conjunction with the vocals.

What tools were used to combine Austin and Elvis’s vocals?

It’s worth mentioning that the reason we combined their vocals was to make sure that the audience never slipped from the illusion that we were trying to create on screen. If Austin breathed or came in fractionally early or late on a line during a live performance, by using the old microphones we could switch between Austin and Elvis’s vocal for that particular scene. For sync purposes, we’d often use Austin’s live take as the master then phase the Elvis recording into his performance. By moving Elvis’s stems rather than Austin’s, not only was the lip sync always locked in, but it gave us a greater sense of fidelity. We basically fed the source material into VocAlign (review, Resolution V17.7) followed by the material that we wanted to affect so that any variation in delivery locked one line up with the other.

/ Composer, producer and Turning Studios founder Elliott Wheeler

Did hearing Elvis’s vocal stems add a sense of mystery to his enigma or subtract from it?

For me, it was spine tingling because you suddenly feel like you’re in the room with the person. Being able to hear what he’s doing with his breathe and how much his rhythm was guiding what was happening with the music were some of our best geek-out moments.

You must have been intensely aware that there would be a level of scrutiny from Elvis fanatics and audiences at large. How did you deal with that pressure?

I dealt with it with endless nights of sleepless terror! We were very much aware of the responsibility that the Presley estate gave us in being entrusted with the music, and didn’t ever Autumn 2022 / 41

/ Austin Butler as Elvis

/ Wheeler conducting

underestimate how much it means to his millions of fans, his family and the legacy that he represents. You just have to honour it through the work. When you’re trying to represent a lifetime in 2 hours and 40 minutes you have to take poetic conjunctions but you also have to be absolutely certain that you know when you’re breaking the rules — because you think it makes sense, for example, having Elvis performing Trouble at Ruswood Stadium when that wasn’t where he originally performed the song.

But having Priscilla and Lisa Marie’s blessing on this film meant everything, because they knew the man in a way that none of us did. Of course, we also hope that The King would have liked the way he was portrayed and the family has already told us that they think he would have approved, so we have to trust them on that.

about the musical storytelling. I was very certain from the beginning of this process that a film about Elvis Presley’s music should be entirely about his music, so all of the thematic choices and main character themes are Elvis songs too. It was a joy trying to work out how to take ‘Suspicious Minds’ and give it a more operatic feel or take ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ from the beautiful version that Kacey Musgraves sings as they’re kissing to the final goodbye. For that, we created a large orchestral version of the song using an original Elvis stem that was re-harmonised and placed on top of it. Hopefully, it didn’t feel like there was any separation between the score and the performance, because the idea was that it should all feel very much like one tapestry of Elvis’s music taken through different lenses.

Was it difficult to create a score that would enable the big Elvis numbers to stand apart from everything else?

In some ways, but the joy of wearing the composer and producer hat is that we didn’t really have to think about the score differently because it was all

I also read that you combined Elvis songs such as ‘Edge of Reality’ and ‘I Got a Feelin’ in My Body’ to make a completely new musical piece…

That was something we wanted to play with because not only did we have access to all of the Elvis material but we were very lucky to have the ultimate Elvis scholars Ernst Jorgensen and Rob

Santos to help us. They gave us access to the vault, so we took a bassline from ‘I Got a Feelin’ in My Body’ and put the melody of ‘Summer Kisses, Winter Tears’ on top of it with the idea of creating what we called “DNA tracks”. Jamieson Shaw was fantastic at pulling out different elements from different songs to create an entirely new track made up of only Elvis vocals and instruments.

Was it a challenge mixing vintage tracks for a modern cinematic audience?

That’s one of the reasons why we rerecorded all the ’50s and early ’60s material, but even when we got to the ’60s and ’70s multi-tracks it was a real challenge mixing them for cinema. Our mixer, Evan McHugh, did a lot of that work, but we also spent a long time trying to work out how to place the sound in the cinema properly. One of the challenges with the later stuff is that Elvis always recorded himself in the room, so the spill was everywhere — you’d have bass in the string mics and brass in the vocal mix, and trying to isolate that in a way that you normally would for a cinema mix was a real challenge. We had to use a lot of tricks to work out how to translate that

/ API, UA, Manley, Thermionic and more…

42 / Autumn 2022

/ Interview

music into an experience the audience would feel on a visceral level while keeping the fidelity of the aesthetic and giving the sound an extra sense of oomph.

What role did sound design and Dolby Atmos play in the soundtrack?

In terms of sound design and Atmos, Wayne Pashley of Big Band Sound Design did an incredible job creating an audio universe comprising not just sound effects but the crowd, which was like another band member. It was another education for me to hear the level of detail that’s in a crowd, which typically has seven or eight different layers. Unfortunately, the crowd sounds on the original recordings were so baked into the musical stems that it was hard to isolate them, so most of that work was done by a sound recordist on set. We used hundreds of extras as a starting point and those were then recreated using extra recordings and loop groups.

or equipment that’s unique to that space, so it’s always great to be able to access something different from a studio. There’s so much wonderful technology out there now, but I think Spitfire Audio have done an amazing job with their orchestral libraries, and I love how they’re making them accessible to young composers. We’re mostly recording and writing in Pro Tools, which is a whole other universe — I really wouldn’t know where to start with the myriad of plugins and other equipment that we use.

Having completed the score, were you able to view the movie with any sense of objectivity?

Probably not, yet [laughs]. Once you’ve lived with a film and know every single decision and thought process that’s gone into making it, it’s really hard to unlearn that, and just watch it as a film. It’s also hard to turn of the analytical part of the brain when comparing the original mix to how the movie might sounds in another space. Even in a Dolby high-specification room a wall might have a cavity that resonates, so it varies from theatre to theatre. Fortunately, Dolby does a great job signing off with their Dolby specification. They’re super aware of how a mix changes as it travels around a room and spend a lot of time building in those systems.

What role did your own Turning Studios play in the production process?

The joy of this film was that we were able to work everywhere. We went to Nashville to access Dave Cobb, the equipment, the incredible players he had over there, and be in the space Elvis recorded at; but we were still able to produce a number of tracks at Turning Studios and record the orchestra in London. I have to say that the amazing technology that we now have seemed to move forward in leaps and bounds throughout the pandemic. For example, it was a shame that we couldn’t attend the orchestral scores at AIR studios, but it was still an amazing experience to sit in our production studios on the Gold Coast and do a full orchestral score in real-time, mixed in 7.1 with Chris Masterson conducting over in London. In terms of physicality, the technology has got a point where it feels more like an enabler than a limitation.

To what extent is the acceleration of those technologies likely to change how you work in the future?

We used a combination of Source Connect, which I know a lot of the ADR sessions still rely on, Audiomovers for the orchestral sessions and even Zoom or Clearview in some instances. I do think it will change how composers think about producing because you’re not limited to having to be there, but there’s also the real sadness of not being there when the music’s being made because that’s part of why we do this. Being in the room during some of the Gospel sessions at Nashville was one of the most transformative musical experiences I’ve ever had — people were crying after their takes. It’s really hard to recreate that sense of proximity, so there are gains and losses.

What can you tell us about the facilities at Turning Studios’ various locations?

We have it set up so we can go where the work is, and that particularly applies to Baz because we ended up working in a lot of different places. Due to recall, the core of the workflow is digital now, but each studio has bits of beautiful analogue gear

Above system shown with 8 channels of digital wireless receivers, 4 Stereo channels of digital IEM transmitters, an 8 channel power antenna combiner, and a 4-port redundant DC supply.

USA 1-800-821-1121 In Canada, call 877-753-2876 In Europe, call +33 (0) 78558 3735 In South America, call +57 310799 4564

Autumn 2022 / 43

Craft

Six Degrees Of Freedom with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra NIGEL JOPSON talks to 3D sound specialist HENRIK OPPERMANN

44 / Autumn 2022

collaborative project was presented to the VR audience in the very same venue it was recorded in, the atmospheric Berliner Kulturbüro Elisabeth.

This suggests how performers could in future use

VR to extend regional concerts to ‘mini residencies’, enabling audiences to experience music in a less structured, but more granular style than a traditional performance.

Photo credit: Nigel Jopson & bildgeber.de

W

e were fortunate enough to be invited to a unique recording in Berlin — 47 members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra came together to record Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream for a unique 6DOF (Six Degrees Of Freedom) immersive audio experience. The recording was significant for a number of reasons: the innovative technical implementation, facilitated by Sennheiser’s AMBEO team, which highlights some interesting ideas (not just for VR) for improvements in future sound recording. Also, that a classical orchestra — albeit an unusual one governed by its own players — considered it an imperative to take the time to create an ‘appointment to hear’ digital audio experience. On a personal level, it was fantastic to re-visit recording location the Meistersaal, Potsdamer Platz (Resolution V10.1) — a magnificent space I had not visited since working at Hansa Studios many years ago.

VR listeners and viewers of the recording will be transported directly into the performance amidst the orchestra, to be premiered at a special digital installation. Precision distance modelling allows the headset-wearing audience to roam around freely within the orchestra, with accurate modelling of every instrument. Two successful smaller scale VR experiences and installations, Future Presence I: Mozart String Quintet, and Future Presence II: Ives Ensemble, precede the Mendelssohn project.

The digital experience for the initial Mozart

/ VR musicians are represented as moving point clouds

Playing in an orchestra is an immersive experience — with VR and immersive sound, we can share that experience with you The VR audio experience

I expect some music production pros reading this are wondering what relevance a VR project might have for them, so I will describe my own experience of Future Presence I: Mozart String Quintet. VR goggles on, I find myself standing in an empty brick venue facing the quartet. The musicians are represented as coloured point clouds. They look ethereal — which is cool — I was afraid the musician images would have more of a kinematic chain ‘crash test dummy’ look.

The ghost-like point source visual images encourage me to go and stand actually within the violinist’s body: the sound in my headphones becomes super close — it’s as close as possible to the experience of manoeuvring impolitely near to an acoustic performer — like recording engineers do when positioning mics. As the violinist sways slightly away from me in time to the music, I hear the timbre of the bow change and I feel a little more of the room ambience. I have fun finding a sound balance — I’ve always enjoyed a hefty quartet sound so I’m low down by the cellist. The experience is pretty much exactly the same as moving around in a nice recording room with an ensemble playing, finding the correct position for your mics. Of course the trained ear is going to pick out a few signs of crossfades — is that a touch of extra ‘verb on the cello when I walk right to the back? But the experience is incredibly realistic.

If you’ve played VR games, in which foley sounds (often meticulously recorded) are ‘placed’ within a game sound field, this experience is completely different. Henrik Oppermann, (Artistic Partner for the MCO Immersive Experiences and part of the Sennheiser AMBEO team) has done a fantastic job recreating a very, very authentic 6DOF soundfield.

What is Six Degrees of Freedom in sound? VR systems allow the listener to move in three rotational plus three transitional degrees of freedom. The apparent angles and distances of the sound sources depend on the listener’s (unpredictable) position. There have been several AES papers and academic studies on how 6DOF can be achieved, but many studies actually start from some rather old-fashioned assumptions of ‘what a microphone is’, or how recording

/ Timothy Summers and Henrik Oppermann

engineers actually use mics for recording today.

Oppermann has utilised an innovative approach to achieve a very realistic and high-resolution 6DOF for acoustic instruments, which owes much to the modern multi-mic approach familiar to all recording engineers. But there’s a twist – he’s using some polar pattern magic to create spatial sound.

Oppermann’s employed innovative mashups of game, VR and music recording techniques in a quite unusual way.

The MCO and Henrik Oppermann met back in 2019, when they worked together on Symphony, a virtual reality project featuring renowned Venezuelan conductor and violinist Gustavo Dudamel. Since June 2020, the collaboration has continued in the form of the three MCO digital projects in a curated sequence to restore “the natural acoustic responsiveness of a live performance while opening new possibilities for interaction between listener, performer,

/ Neumann MCM positioned close to violin F-hole

Autumn 2022 / 45

/ Mic positioning of Neumann MCM on clarinet and French horn

instrument and sound”. I sat down with Oppermann to discover how he achieved this, and what recording engineers can learn for the future from some of the innovative techniques used.

/ Orchestral control room (Henrik Oppermann, standing)

46 / Autumn 2022

Henrik Oppermann — 3D sound specialist Audio for VR vs. stereo or 5.1 — what’s the difference?

What I’m trying to explore with these projects is

proximity to sound and distance, and being close to the source, experiencing details and also experiencing sound in space. I think in immersive audio, it’s very important that you actually ‘play’ with distance. Coming from a stereo background you always try to have sound sources up front — of course you have a sound field — but you’re always mixing more to the front.

Looking at VR experiences, you actually have a sound source you can walk around, and you want to have the correct [aural] distance information.

With regular recording techniques, it’s very hard to have this distance modelling available. You need to have multiple factors of information in space, in order to get a realistic distance modelling behaviour.

This is what we’re exploring with this project and we’re finding a lot of new rules on how to work with this medium. A lot of rules that you have in the stereo domain or in the 5.1 surround domain are not applicable. It’s a new set of rules — kind of more forgiving, but there are more points to address and to think about.

What was the micing approach, with the quintet recording for example?

Each of the five musicians had a Sennheiser MKH 800 Twin microphone. It was the same setup for the Charles Ives piece. The special thing about this dual capsule Sennheiser mic is that the signals of both transducers are not combined in the microphone, but are available separately as two channels at the microphone output, so the polar pattern can be adjusted remotely on the mixing

/ Craft

/ Reaper is the DAW of choice

desk and even in post-production. I think it’s an underused technology.

Considering ‘six degrees of freedom’ — where you can walk freely around the sound source — the MKH 800 outputs have quite an interesting application — because you can put them into a video-game audio engine. Based on your [virtual] distance to the sound source, you can then change the polar pattern. That means when I’m close to the sound source, I’m just listening to a cardioid signal.

I positioned the mics very close, so you get all the details, you can really hear the bow going over the strings, you can even hear the musicians breathe. When you [virtually] step away from the sound source, it transforms dynamically [in the game engine mixer] into an omni microphone, giving you a natural sound which is more distant.

The detailed sounds also naturally disappear [ramped down in the game engine], something which we would struggle to emulate with regular distance modelling, with just EQ or something.

This is a very nice way to emulate distance on a hardware basis.

Is it a smooth transition between the two Sennheiser MKH 800 capsules?

The goal is to make the VR audio behave ‘as in reality’, the orchestra was very generous and allowed me to walk around, explore and get a reference. Regular distance modelling is that one sound source is ramping up when you’re getting closer, so it’s just getting louder. We also have a negative ramp. So when I’m getting closer [in the VR experience], the distant signal gets lower in volume, and the signal transforms into a cardioid pattern.

Which gaming engine was used for mixing?

This is all being mixed in the cross-platform Unity engine, there is an audio engine to create these experiences. It kind of works in a similar way to plug-ins, and there are bespoke scripts, but I had to

/ Experience the orchestra… virtually

In the future we will have a different way of approaching space, and how as recording engineers we place sound sources do quite a few things which were not already implemented. I had help from Unity game programmers but I also did my own programming quite a bit.

What is the mic setup today for the full orchestra?

Here we had a different approach because it’s very hard to get 48 MKH 800 Twin microphones! I was only able to get 24 — for the remaining individual mics we used Neumann MCM (the newly introduced electret Miniature Clip Microphone).

The MCM was a good solution because movement is always an issue with certain instruments, and musicians should be able to move freely. With the mic actually attached to the instrument I’m very, very close, and I can capture all this detail. Then I have a second layer of microphones, which is kind of like a regular recording setup, but these are all Twins. So I still have the [hardware] distance modelling behaviour available to me.

How do the electret clip mics integrate with the ‘normal’ recording setup?

If you virtually walk around the orchestra and you’re located with the first violins, and the second violins are on the other side, you are only listening to the Sennheiser MKH 800 Twins. If you approach them closely, the sound transforms [within the game engine] into the signal of the Neumann MCM microphones and you get all the detail. It’s quite a lot of audio management and dynamic mixing,

based on your positioning within the orchestra, but I have considerable control of how it behaves.

Is phasing between the 102 microphones a problem?

Phasing is not actually an issue anymore. What I do is put sound sources back in space, so you have this kind of phase alignment anyway. I do not need time alignment because I don’t have a single reference of a ‘spot’. If a signal is bleeding into another microphone, if two musicians are playing close together, basically the rule of the first wave applies. So even if I have a signal present in a different microphone, I still have the perception of the correct space, because the sound occurs first within the correct space, and this is how the sound field builds.

So, if we wanted to describe the audio mixing process for VR in Dolby Atmos terms, there is no bed, only sound objects?

Yes, everything is an object. I am recording some room mics today, but they are only for musical reference. This is because every sound source has the ability to become a ‘room mic’, with VR. Is the sound recording a VR-only experience?

It’s definitely intended for a digital installation. You can’t download it and just experience it at home because you would need to have quite a big space in order to walk around it! The premiere will be held at Radialsystem in Berlin (a 19th-century Autumn 2022 / 47

/ Craft

Recording equipment for Future Presence III: Mendelssohn Orchestra Microphones 24 x Sennheiser MKH 800 TWIN 48 x Neumann MCM 7 x Sennheiser MKH 8040 3 x Neumann KM 184

/ The recording team (l/r): Hannah Schmeise, (3D Sound Assistant and Editing), Florian B. Schmidt (Tonmeister), Ann-Christine Bromm (3D Sound Assistant), Johannes Kares (3D Sound Assistant), Henrik Oppermann (Artistic Partner and 3D Sound Engineer), Jonas Ritter (3D Sound Assistant)

pumping station with waterside terrace, used for performance), which means we have all this space and you can dive into a virtual reality. The quintet was presented in the Berliner Kulturbüro Elisabeth, so it was premiered in the same venue within which it was recorded.

In an ideal world, when augmented reality is further developed, then you could go into Meistersaal and see the actual space, and the actual MCO in there. This type of installation will come, so we are basically preparing for the future. The idea is to get people to travel to the digital show and experience it in a very controlled way, and to give them a very good experience, although of course we can create any kind of content from this recording.

How would you generate a stereo or Dolby Atmos ‘down mix’ from this project?

Because I’m recreating this sound field, you can then just take a virtual listener, choose the best position with a nice balance and have this either as a stereo, binaural or Atmos listener. Alternatively, having an ambisonic sound field that you can implement with head-tracking later on. I think in the future we will have a different way of approaching space, and how [as recording engineers] we place sound sources.

So music recording in general could, in future, benefit from this sort of VR/game engine approach?

Yes — for instance — when recording an acoustic drum kit, you’re always fighting to align microphones, and phasing is definitely an issue. But if you would make a 3D model of a drum kit and scan it, which is very simple nowadays — with your smartphone — then you could assign the sound sources in virtual space and all your phasing issues are resolved. I think there’s lots of things that we need to think about and develop further.

Timothy Summers — artistic director of Future Presence, violinist of the MCO Why did the MCO devote so much time to this project?

It’s been very clear that these technological developments are so profound that there’s no choice but to treat them in the same way as other artistic partnerships, because they’re shaking the foundations of other things that we might have otherwise called artistic partnerships, and we [as orchestras] should look into them and we should fund them. It brings all sorts of artistic possibilities immediately out of this technical experimentation.

Artistically, what have you learnt from the Future Presence projects so far?

It turned out to show something very interesting: I would say it was something about polyphony, there was the idea that the voices were separate, and yet coming together.

This was different from regular recording where you get a mix, and then the mix becomes a single ‘work’. So you have both the togetherness and the separateness of the players represented. This was a very interesting relationship, for me, with the way the score is written, and all the shapes on the score were suddenly more evident — all kinds of things that we (as musicians) enjoy in a score — suddenly audiences can actually hear [as musicians in an orchestra do] if we record in this new way.

The central element of the MCO’s Artistic Partnership with Henrik Oppermann is that we are both interested in the meaning and possibilities of sound, and right now Henrik is doing beautiful work in the realm of spatial immersive sound. Our work opens up a world of new possibilities for creation, exploration and engagement in the digital realm. But in the end, it is only possible because we can work in such detail, and with such friendly fluency, with Henrik. It has been a great pleasure to create things with him, and we look forward to many fascinating projects in the future.

48 / Autumn 2022

Audio interfaces and monitoring 2 x Merging Technologies Horus (48 mic pre-amps each) 1 x Merging Technologies Hapi (16 mic pre-amps) 1 x Merging Technologies Anubis (monitoring) Signal flow The Ravenna-compatible audio interfaces are placed within the orchestra, enabling the use of very short XLR mic cables. This in turn will keep any noise to a minimum. A single network cable then delivers all microphone signals to a high-performance laptop running the Reaper DAW software.

/ Merging Technologies Horus

Sennheiser MKH 800 TWIN The MKH 800 TWIN is a universal studio condenser microphone featuring a dual capsule design. The signals of its two linear, symmetrical push-pull transducers are not combined in the microphone to generate different pick-up patterns but are available separately as two channels at the microphone output. This allows the pick-up pattern of the MKH 800 TWIN to be remotely adjusted. The signals can be combined in / Sennheiser MKH 800 TWIN any desired way in the mixing console in order to create all pick-up patterns from omni-directional to figure-8 with an infinite number of intermediate stages. Saving the microphone signals as two channels allows an unlimited range of mixes to be realised in postproduction or at a later date.

Unity game engine Unity’s audio system imports most standard audio file formats. It allows you to mix and master in real time, and it can replicate 3D spatial sound effects like echo, object movement and reverb. To simulate the effects of position, Unity requires sounds to originate from ‘Audio Sources’ attached to objects. The sounds emitted are then picked up by an ‘Audio Listener’ attached to another object, most often the ‘main camera’ [goggle viewpoint]. The Unity development platform supports building games for more than 19 different platforms, including mobile, desktop, consoles, and VR, and is free for personal use or smaller companies generating less than $200,000 annually.

Technology

Ambeo screenshots Sennheiser • Stranger Things S4 images and posters courtesy of Netflix Mark Paterson image, Todd-AO

AMBEO experience now streaming on Netflix NIGEL JOPSON explains how Sennheiser adds exciting sound for viewers without the need for a surround system

N

etflix and Sennheiser have announced a significant audio improvement for all viewers accessing the popular streaming service: AMBEO 2-channel Spatial Audio is now implemented on Netflix, and delivers an enhanced immersive audio experience to viewers with standard speakers. Full control of the amount of spatialisation on immersive audio objects is set by the re-recording mixer.

“Most people watching Netflix are listening on the speakers built-in to their devices,” Scott Kramer, manager for sound technology at Netflix, told me. I wondered if earbuds and headphones might be significant for tablet or mobile devices, but Kramer told me: “headphones are a pretty small percentage, so AMBEO worked better than binaural for us because it works well on speakers.

For a Netflix spatial audio feature, we look at any technology that meaningfully improves the sound experience for members. This includes binaural encoding that happens on mobile devices, and speaker based ‘transaural’ technologies.”

An imperative for Netflix was to respect creative intent and engage with production pros involved with mixing audio for picture. “We want to adopt

We take object based input — so the rerecording mixer may choose the amount of effect that is wanted sound technologies which keep the re-recording mixer involved in determining the result, and which have a clean sound that’s respectful of the mix,” Kramer emphasised. “It’s also important to cover the most members possible without regard to what device they use. For this, pre-encoded solutions are a clear fit.”

While in the past those viewers without a full surround sound set-up were unable to benefit from the growing amount of music and films produced in Dolby Atmos® or MPEG-H Audio, the AMBEO 2-Channel Spatial Audio feature aims to change this. Netflix’s Stranger Things Season 4 benefits from this new audio experience; currently 32 Netflix titles are available with AMBEO technology, and it’s growing on a daily basis.

Sennheiser ProLabs

I spoke to Dr. Renato Pellegrini, manager of Swiss-based Sennheiser ProLabs, to discover more.

“We work on projects for all Sennheiser business units, including Neumann and Dear Reality, and I am in very close contact with the newly acquired Merging Technologies,” Pellegrini told me. “We help each other — we’ll find out what will make sense for a given customer base as an upcoming product; we share our thoughts and inputs from users to come up with next generation solutions.”

ProLabs’ brief to deliver a spatial sound for viewers, without the need for a surround system, was to develop a set of tools for re-recording mixers. These tools would take an original immersive mix — let’s say a Dolby Atmos mix or an Autumn 2022 / 49

/ The preview tool of the AMBEO 2-Channel Spatial Audio rendering software. The Object Viewer window at the bottom right shows fixed loudspeaker positions at the edges and individual renderings as blue dots. Pale dots are elevated sound sources

/ From standard stereo mixdown (left) to full AMBEO effect (right): mixers can fine-tune the spatialisation

MPEG H mix — and create a two channel version far better than the normal stereo downmix. “We imagine this as a service that just runs in the encoding cloud,” explained Pellegrini. “As it’s currently deployed, there’s a tool that allows re-recording mixers to preview Dolby ADM [Audio Definition Model] files, to see and adjust the type of spatialisation. Then the ADM files can be processed, or the IAB [Immersive Audio Bitstream, the SMPTE interoperable solution] file can be processed in the streaming platform’s cloud, just like they would process any other ADM file, to deliver two channels.”

Mixing tools

A preview tool enables the re-recording mixer to compare stereo to AMBEO during postproduction and adjust the rendering settings by stems/groups.

The renderer offers patented granular control of the spatialisation, ranging from full AMBEO effect to standard stereo mixdown, while specific channels can be excluded from any modification.

“We have a tool where mixers can actually pre-listen during their studio work” Pellegrini

50 / Autumn 2022

/ Mark Paterson, Stranger Things re-recording mixer

explains. “Mark Paterson, who mixed Stranger Things for instance, did the Atmos mix first, and at the point where the 5.1 downmix was done, he used our tools to listen to the two-channel outputs.

Not much extra time is required to create a mix, and further time can be saved by relying on just the cloud mixer to do its trick.”

Re-Recording Mixer Mark Paterson commented: “I’m a huge fan of AMBEO. I experimented with it a lot on the Fear Street movies and was impressed with how the surround channel information was represented. I’m always looking for ways to get that cinematic sound at home, and on The Adam Project I was able to make the mix sound really immersive on everything from high-end soundbars to iPhones, which I believe helps the audience connect more emotionally. It’s been a perfect format on Stranger Things. In the Atmos mix, Vecna’s [the fearsome antagonist in season 4] voice wraps around you, which is an important part of making him scary and larger than life. The fact that AMBEO is able to help recreate that in stereo is very impressive to me.”

Object control

We asked Dr. Pellegrini how much control an Atmos re-recording mixer would have over the beds and objects which are included in an ADM file as

/ Technology

separate tracks. “We have a total of up to 128 mono files, which are grouped into groups that you have in your original Dolby Atmos mix”, he revealed.

“Normally mixers would work in groups that they labelled very similar to the stems in their mix. So that would be dialogue, music, FX and so on. You can choose the amount of effect from the AMBEO pre-processing: a mix engineer might choose a little less on dialogue, not so much on music but a lot on the effects and the dramatic sounds — the aural ‘ambience’ that you want to create in the movie.”

Total loudness is preserved too, and a music mix can be kept clean for left and right channels while adding the immersive AMBEO rendering to other channels. All signals are properly timealigned to match the original content. “The processing is in line with Sennheiser’s reputation to deliver tools that are ‘transparent’ and do not interfere with the original sound. In a nutshell: Sennheiser 2-Channel Spatial Audio seeks to translate mixer intent, not to overpower it.”

Cloud processing

Rendering deliverables in AMBEO is not a process confined to the studio. “In the cloud, we have a different set of options,” Pellegrini continues. “The reason for having a cloud solution is simply that OTT players [Over-The-Top: provision of TV and film content over the internet at the request of the individual consumer] see a benefit in doing this type of conversion in the cloud.” All that requires to be done is to upload to the cloud an ADM or an IAB file, and then perform re-renders into the various formats within the cloud, on their servers.

The benefit of this is to limit upload bandwidth, and to significantly reduce the work needed if there are multiple dubbed versions of the audio in different languages.

A template for the degree of spatialisation on different objects is pre-set by an accompanying control file. “The input of the parameters for cloud rendering is a simple XML file,” Pellegrini adds, “where you have the ability (on your command line resolution 1 12.10.2021 22.46 in the cloud) to set all2021_2.pdf the parameters that you

I was able to make the mix immersive on everything from high-end soundbars to iPhones, which I believe helps the audience connect more emotionally would have in the studio with the GUI version.” In other words, a re-recording mixer can set their parameters on the preview tool, save it as a file and send it alongside the ADM file for use with a range of deliverables.

Streaming Stranger Things 4

No additional upgrades to a viewer’s streaming account are required to experience the Netflix AMBEO spatial audio. Viewers can access content with AMBEO processing by searching for “spatial audio” in the Netflix app. It’ll be available first with original titles such as Stranger Things 4, The Witcher and Red Notice. As long as the user’s device audio output is set to stereo audio, they won’t have to

adjust any settings to try AMBEO. Netflix is making it the default setting for two-channel setups for certain titles.

“There is some difference in how our technology works as opposed to other offerings in the market,” Pellegrini explains, as he adds that Sennheiser will likely be open to negotiate deals with other big players in the streaming market in future. “Not only do we take object based input, but also we deliver very granular control — so the re-recording mixer may choose the amount of effect that is wanted. It’s patented technology by Sennheiser, and it’s something that the customer base — from producers to mixers — really love because it’s not just an ‘on-off’.”

AWARDS 2021

WINNER MICROPHONE

Scope Labs Periscope C

REWARDING QUALITY AND INNOVATION

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

CMY

K

Autumn 2022 / 51

Audio@IBC

Audio@IBC

Head for these audio booths when you visit RAI Amsterdam, 9-12 September

Stand: 8.B57

Stand 8.B90

At IBC 2022, Calrec will run multiple independent consoles from a fully redundant pair of ImPulse IP cores, including physical control surfaces and headless consoles running Calrec Assist on a PC. ImPulse is “the most powerful DSP engine on the planet” according to Calrec, and has native SMPTE 2110 connectivity. It’s compatible with Calrec Assist, a browser-based interface that creates a virtual console environment, as well as Calrec’s Apollo and Artemis consoles, to provide a simple upgrade path for existing Calrec customers moving to an IP domain.

Impulse provides 3D immersive path widths and panning for nextgeneration audio with height and 3D pan controls, with flexible panning and downmixing built-in. ImPulse allows up to four independent mixing environments to run from a single core, wherever in the world it’s located, and each independent mixer can access up to 1458 paths. Calrec’s flexible Type R will sit on the same IP network, as will the rugged Brio console and Artemis consoles which are both connected via an IP Gateway.

Visit Lawo to experience industry-leading IP video, audio, control and networking solutions for mobile and on-air production, facility infrastructure, remote/at-home production and MCR/Playout applications. Lawo will explain their latest innovations, and there will be opportunities for hands-on experience at booth #8.B90. Get personal demonstrations of groundbreaking IP-based products and solutions like Lawo’s HOME management platform for IP-based media infrastructures, .edge Hyper-Density SDI/IP Conversion and Routing Platform, V__matrix (Lawo’s software-defined IP processing & multiviewing platform), VSM — Lawo’s standard in IP broadcast control systems and mc² series Audio Production Consoles.

Also on display will be Lawo’s brand-new diamond Radio/Broadcast Mixing Console, A__UHD Core Ultra-high Density IP DSP Engine for mc² consoles, Power Core RP IP Audio I/O & DSP Node for Remote Production — and all the latest products to be unveiled at the show.

Lawo have a compelling invitation to “unwind and network whilst enjoying a fresh, cold sip of original Black Forest drinks at our Happy Hour Events on Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 5pm!”

Calrec

Lawo

Stand 8.F87

Stand 8.F96

Stand 8.C50

DPA Microphones is showcasing its latest microphone offerings, designed to meet the growing needs of the entertainment and media markets, at IBC 2022. Mics on display include DPA’s 4097 CORE Micro Shotgun Microphone.

Ideal for plant miking applications and other film and TV productions, the highly durable 4097 CORE features the same sonic qualities as the brand’s other supercardioids and is optimised to pick up speech from a distance. It is ideal for small spaces because of its compact footprint and clear audio pickup, and its sonic qualities are particularly beneficial for placement in inconspicuous locations, enabling sound capture from anywhere on set.

When selected as part of the company’s new Interview Kit, which includes a durable, lightweight boom and windjammer, the 4097 CORE is perfect for single-reporter interview applications. Additionally, used in conjunction with DPA’s lightweight MMA-A Digital Audio Interface, the 4097 CORE becomes a complete remote recording package.

With the latest version introduced earlier this year, the A21-M has become a favourite with broadcasters. It is now in its 5th generation. This large 2-way is equipped with a hand-made proprietary tweeter for even more transparency in the highs and a better crossover blend between the middle and high frequencies.

Used in nearfield or midfield, it meets the needs of sound engineers who want to go further in their work. As with all PSI Audio speakers, the monitor has a reputation for allowing work for long periods of time, without your ears getting tired. All of PSI speakers are 100% analogue, handmade in Switzerland and individually tested and calibrated in PSI’s very own anechoic chamber (see Resolution V16.3 ‘Meet Your Maker’ feature on the PSI factory).

PSI’s stand in hall 8, booth number 8.F96 is shared with their Swiss partners Merging Technologies (now part of Sennheiser group) and Sonosax.

Digital Audio Denmark has been chosen for handling audio conversion and routing in many high-end recording studios, as well as mastering and post production facilities for years. However, there has always been an additional interface in between the company’s products and computers. That is about to change with the introduction of the Thunder | Core technology, implemented in two new products: Core 256 and AX64.

Thunder|Core is a direct link between DAD audio conversion, flexible routing and computers.

At the core, two USB-C / ThunderBolt 3 ports with a capacity of up to 256 bidirectional channels and near-zero latency connects to Windows or macOS based computers, ensuring a steady flow of audio channels across Dante, MADI and ADAT. Core 256 and AX64 will be on demo and display at IBC.

DPA

52 / Autumn 2022

PSI Audio

DAD

Stand 8.F65

DirectOut German-based audio and connectivity specialist DirectOut is now shipping the third generation of its popular ANDIAMO. The device comes with newly designed AD/DA Converters, network based audio and remote control. “When we launched our first ANDIAMO in 2010, we already had the feeling that it would be a game changer”, Claudio Becker-Foss, CEO and CTO of DirectOut remembers, “and now, twelve years later, our clients can witness the evolution of ANDIAMO to again meet their expectations for an AD/DA Converter, they can count on.”

Optionally equipped with RAVENNA, supporting ST2110- 30/31 and NMOS, the 3rd generation ANDIAMO offers an amazing value of channels compared to 1U rack space. More audio network options are Dante or SoundGrid. Up to 288 inputs and 288 outputs with internal routing matrix and failover redundancy using EARStm. The device features eight Summing Busses, Input and Output Gains and TRIM, hardware monitoring for PSU status and temperature and of course redundant power supplies. Remote control over network is available via globcon. “While modernising the feature set of one of the most reliable AD/DA converters on the market, we still wanted to keep it simple”, adds Becker-Foss. “Our goal was to make it possible to use the new ANDIAMO also without remote control if needed. A very straight forward bank routing, clock and I/O selection are directly accessible from the front panel.”

Stand 8.D50

Sennheiser & Neumann Today, content creation serves a multitude of media and channels from ‘prosumer’ to pro, and traditional to new. Whether you are planning a full-blown TV production or are looking for an external smartphone microphone, one thing remains the same: excellent audio will make your work stand out and establish a real connection with the audience.

At IBC 2022, Sennheiser, Neumann, and Dear Reality will reveal how their audio solutions can lift your projects to the next level. Visitors to stand 8D50 can experience AMBEO 2-Channel Spatial Audio, a renderer that delivers an incredibly immersive audio experience with standard stereo speakers, have the opportunity to get a first-hand impression of Sennheiser’s upcoming EW-DX wireless system, experience the new Neumann KH 150 monitors in a surround set-up or listen to the new, open-back Neumann NDH 30 studio headphone, and watch live virtual mixing sessions with immersive audio expert, Dear Reality.

Stand 7.P11

NUGEN

FORWARD THINKING AUDIO GEAR

TITAN

NUGEN Audio will showcase its latest COMPRESSOR LIMITER broadcast and film-focused plug-ins to IBC 2022 attendees at Stand 7.P11, including the new Halo Vision software — a customisable, real-time visual analysis suite designed for 3D, www.davehilldesigns.com surround and immersive audio workflows.

Operating in up to 7.1.2 channels for the AAX, VST3 and AU formats, Halo Vision features a variety of modules that provide audio Dave Hill Designs SHW 0914.indd 1 14/08/2014 professionals with a clearer understanding of every sound aspect.

Available tools include a Correlation Matrix, Correlation Web and Spectrum; expanded versions of NUGEN’s Frequency Haze and Location Haze functions; a True Peak meter for each channel; and a Timecode View. These Sign up at www.resolutionmag.com/newsletter modules all support mix engineers’ decisionfor the all-new, fortnightly Resolution email newsletter, making and troubleshooting process, allowing featuring exclusive Resolution features and content, them to pinpoint problem areas that might be news and competitions, and more! missed using ears alone. Halo Vision can be customized, re-arranged and re-sized to suit any specific workflow, making it perfect for a broad spectrum of immersive sound projects, from music to film.

Not getting the newsletter?

Don’t panic!

Autumn 2022 / 53

09:04

Playlist

Resolution anniversary party Contributors get some eclectic tunes on the office boom box to welcome Nigel back as editor in our 20th anniversary year!

Alan Branch Artist Song

Why?

Soul II Soul ‘Back to life’ (Club Classics Vol. One, 1989) A welcome back song for a man whose passion for music making is like a complex love song. [Great tune! recorded by the late Arabella Rodriguez, an engineer who I knew from Pink Floyd’s Britannia Row studios — Ed]

Rob James Artist Song

Why?

Alice Cooper Years ago Welcome to My Nightmare (1975) The lyrics — “Here I go again, Up and down alone, All my friends went home Years ago” Album produced by keyboard player Bob Ezrin, who went on to work with Aerosmith, Kiss, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Peter Gabriel, Andrea Bocelli and Phish.

Danny Turner

Jon Thornton

Song Why?

Song Why?

Artist

Why?

Backstreet Boys Everybody (Backstreet’s Back) (Backstreet’s Back 1997) ’Cause everyone loves this tune!

Written and produced by Swedish hit-makers Denniz Pop and Max Martin, a Canadian breakout hit which was added to the Backstreet Boys’ US album after the first million units had already been manufactured. 22 weeks in the chart.

Artist Song

Why?

Why?

Mark Morrison Return of the Mack Return of the Mack (1996) Dont even need to think about this one to be honest. — There is ONLY ONE fitting tune for such an occasion, I’m gonna need to listen to it full blast (dialled up to 11) whilst typing this — the ONLY fitting tune for the main man kicking open those office doors and waltzing back in like he never left...

54 / Autumn 2022

Wishbone Ash ‘Front Page News’ (Front Page News 1978) When Nigel is back — hold the front page! — it’s great news!Great melodic twin guitar based rock from the era when music had dynamics!

George Shilling Artist Song

Why?

XTC Making Plans For Nigel (Drums and Wires, 1979) Apart from the obvious, this is a cracking Steve Lillywhite production of a fantastic song by a band at the peak of their powers.

As is Mr J of course…

Alan Sallabank Artist Song Why?

Ed Lister Artist Song:

Artist

Mike Aiton

Rob Speight Artist Song

Basement Jaxx (Junto 2014) ‘Never Say Never’ It’s all in the lyrics “The music brings me right back, and you know that.” Resolution wouldn’t be the same without you, Nigel.

Eurythmics (& Aretha Franklin) ‘Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves’ Be Yourself Tonight (1985) In honour of the England Women’s Football Team, and because it’s a brilliantly mixed and mastered track. Mastered by Stephen Marcussen in Hollywood, but what happened to recording engineer (and Eurythmics bassist) Adam Williams?

Bill Lacy Artist Song Why?

John Scofield/ Roberto Gatto ‘There Will Never Be Another You’ Ask (1987) The classic song re-imagined by guitarist John Scofield on his first ever solo guitar album.

The Soggy Bottom Boys ‘In the Jailhouse Now’ The title may speak for itself… But also, given this is Nigel’s 20th anniversary writing for Resolution, something of an homage to founder Zenon Schoepe. The song is featured on the soundtrack to the Cohen Brothers movie ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou’. Which was also one of Zen’s favourite email subject lines when my copy was late….

John Broomhall Artist Song

Why?

Frank Sinatra It Had To Be You Trilogy (1980) The lyrics, boss! “Some others I’ve seen, might never be mean / Might never be cross, or try to be boss, but they wouldn’t do / For nobody else, gave me a thrill — with all your faults, I love you still /It had to be you, wonderful you, it had to be you”

Donato Masci Artist Song Why?

Bruno Lauzi ‘Ritornerai’ (1965) Ritornerai in Italian means “you will come back”, this is an extremely famous song in Italy, but I also think a little abroad, being the soundtrack of many films (one of the most recent is House of Gucci). For me it is one of the masterpieces of the Italian Music Golden Age and I hope my friends abroad like it too. So Nigel, as the song said “You will find again / All the things that / You didn’t want to / See around you” :)

Pete Bailey Artist Song

Why?

The Eagles Hotel California Hotel California (1977) Because of the lyrics “You can check out any time you like, But you can never leave”… the Eagles themselves describing the song as their ‘interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles’

Subscribe!

REPORT

REVIEWS

REVEALED

REPORT

REVIEWS

REVEALED

/ AES TD1008: Streaming loudness / ISE in 2022: back and in Barcelona! / Resolution Awards 2021: all the winners

/ Eventide SplitEQ: a new approach / Apogee Clearmountain’s Phases / PSP Saturator: back to the classics

/ Matt Colton: mastering master / Neve 88R: living with a legend / REDIAcoustics & NIRO

/ Motor Museum: Al Groves at home / Metropolis goes Atmos: full tour / CEDAR and AI: a long history

/ Austrian Audio: Hi-X65 Open-back ‘phones / Celestion: Speaker Pro / KRK: Classic 8 & Sub 10.4

/ AI in Audio: machines are learning / James Loughrey: mixer meet-up / Tom Salta: Deathloop deep-dive

V22.1 | January/February 2022 | £5.50

V21.7 | November/December 2021 | £5.50

The

The

Interview

Interview

Shooter Jennings

Stephen Lipson

Resolution V21.7 November-December 2021.indd 1

10/12/2021 15:44

To guarantee your copy of Resolution throughout the year, wherever you are in the world, why not subscribe?

Print and digital download subscriptions available

Sign up now! www.resolutionmag.com/subscribe/ Subscription costs £49 (UK), £57 (Europe), £66 (Rest of World) including postage Digital subscription £41 (PDF file sent to you ahead of printed version)

dns4 4 channel dialogue noise suppressor

the portable DNS that ever yone can use ever ywhere

www.cedaraudio.com