The New Mix Room

So, a bit about the new mixing room!

“Sumsound At Trackdown” – an affordably priced ICON mixing room on the Fox lot at Sydney.

An "unfinished" Sumsound at Trackdown front wall

Lots of techy details coming…feel free to skip if you’re not into it…

Heart of the studio is an 8 core “Nehalem” HD3Accel rig with a D-Command ES 24 sitting in a lovely custom made desk running lots of plugs; McDSP, Sonnox, SoundToys, Waves 360, Brainworx, URS amongst others. Attached to that system is then a Video satellite (8 core Xeon) running Media Composer but it also loads up PTLE for HD Quicktime workflows (ProRes, DVCPro etc)

The video satellite would be silly unless we could show that picture nicely – so, a 150′ (3.5m wide) 16″9 projection screen with the LCR speakers mounted behind. Responsible for display of the HD image is a current generation Sony BRAVIA projector. This projector is rather massive weighing in close to 10kgs but it’s ridiculously quiet! (Thankfully!)

Bass management is being handled by the Waves 360 bundle, but interesting the sub channel is then split through a crossover into two subs. The idea here being dual subs, time and phase aligned and positioned carefully should give a smoother bottom end in the room, rather than a single point source. Room EQ curves are then through the Serato RANE 31 band graphic plugin suite. Benefit being we can tune the room to flat, small room XCurve or Large room XCurve, and play around with them until we find the best translation to the larger rooms in town like Soundfirm, Deluxe or Audioloc.

Monitoring, well, you could accuse me of being a company man…my near fields for several years have been the co-designed PMC/Digidesign RM2s. I love the transmission line design and the incredibly smooth bottom end. Then the satellites I’ve gone with the new DSM series. 4 x DSM2s and a DSM3 centre. What I dig about the DSMs is the great imaging but also the filter section on the back – you can really go to town tailoring these speakers to your own needs.

The room is psuedo “coffin shaped” – 6m deep and about 7m at is widest, an even sided trapezium making up the front of the room and then the rear walls are joined in the middle behind the mix position. To place the mixer as far back from the LCRs as possible (for theatre translation) we’re using a fair amount of diffusion on the rear wall, some on the ceiling and some on the first reflection points on the side walls, and then appropriate amounts of absorption to tailor the reverb time to our liking.

So that’s Sumsound! We’re at the point of painting now, then comes the acoustics treatment(mounting RPG “Skylines” and “Hemifusors”) and calibration. We’ve taken “before” measurements of the room, and will take several measurements as we progress and I’ll post some updates as we go along – hopefully you readers are as interested in the real world effects of acoustic treatment with non-parallel walls as I am…??

Hope you’re all having a good Jan 2010 – back to work for me, tomorrow!