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12.21 Contents

Volume 45, Number 12

28 Apple Goes Spatial: What It All Means for the Artist and the Engineer BY STEVE HARVEY

34 Period Sound of ‘Passing’: Intimate Dialog in a Noisy 1920s NYC BY JENNIFER WALDEN

36 Gear of the Year 2021: Top New Products for a Pandemic Year BY MIX EDITORS

42 Russ Long’s Holiday Gift Guide

BY RUSS LONG Photo credit: Scott Harris

MUSIC

TECHNOLOGY

LIVE SOUND

14 Dolby Launches Atmos

43 New Products: Studio

22 Tour Profile: The

Venue in Vegas BY MIX EDITORS

18 News & Notes: Dweezil Zappa Goes Immersive: Foos Enter Studio 666; Blasting Room Studio Documentary

and Live Sound

44 Review: NUGEN

Audio Paragon ST Reverb Plug-in BY STEVE LA CERRA

46 Review: Reverb Foundry Tai Chi Reverb Plug-in BY BARRY RUDOLPH

48 Review: Warm Audio

22 Mix Presents Sound for Film & Television 2021: Sound for The Power of the Dog • The Guilty • Composers Mark Mothersbaugh and Dickon Hinchcliffe • Keynote: Thomas Dolby and Wylie Stateman • Rebirth of Sound Design

WA-8000 Mic; Morton KickTone Mic; Austrian Audio Hi-X65 Headphones

On the Cover: Larrabee Studios owner and A-list mixer Manny Marroquin with musician/artist Pink Sweats, photographed in Larrabee on October 30, 2021, the same day the two Apple Spatial Audio advocates got their first look at the new 16-inch MacBook Pro with Logic Pro X 10.7 and its integrated Dolby Atmos toolset. Photo: Jim Donnelly.

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PRESENTED BY

Evolving Mixes of Manchester Orchestra BY CLIVE YOUNG

25 Post-COVID, The Cap Comes Back BY CLIVE YOUNG

26 News & Notes: Montréal

Jazz Festival Returns With Solotech; Beartooth Mixes Own Monitors Live

DEPARTMENTS 10 From the Editor: It’s Good to Have Apple Back 12 Current: View From the Top: Maureen Droney, P&E

Wing, Recording Academy; Best of Show Awards; Nashville’s New Production/New Tour Prep Facility

50 Open Channel: Watch Your Language BY CRAIG ANDERTON Mix, Volume 45, Number 12 (ISSN 0164-9957) is published monthly by Future US, Inc., 130 West 42nd Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10036. Periodical Postage Paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Mix, PO Box 8518, Lowell, MA 01853. One-year (12 issues) subscription is $35. Canada is $40. All other international is $50. Printed in the USA. Canadian Post Publications Mail agreement No. 40612608. Canada return address: BleuChip International, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2.

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December 2021

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FOLLOW US twitter.com/Mix_Magazine facebook/MixMagazine CONTENT VP/Content Creation Anthony Savona Content Directors Tom Kenny, thomas.kenny@futurenet.com Clive Young, clive.young@futurenet.com Content Manager Anthony Savona, anthony.savona@futurenet.com Technology Editor, Studio Mike Levine, techeditormike@gmail.com Technology Editor, Live Steve La Cerra, stevelacerra@verizon.net Senior Content Producer Steve Harvey, sharvey.prosound@gmail.com Contributors: Craig Anderson, Russ Long, Barry Rudolph, Tamara Starr, Rob Tavaglione, Jennifer Walden Production Manager Nicole Schilling Managing Design Director Nicole Cobban Design Directors Lisa McIntosh and Will Shum ADVERTISING SALES VP/Market Expert, AV/Consumer Electronics & Pro Audio Adam Goldstein, adam.goldstein@futurenet.com, 212-378-0465 Janis Crowley, janis.crowley@futurenet.com Debbie Rosenthal, debbie.rosenthal@futurenet.com Zahra Majma, zahra.majma@futurenet.com SUBSCRIBER CUSTOMER SERVICE To subscribe, change your address, or check on your current account status, go to mixonline.com and click on About Us, email futureplc@computerfulfillment.com, call 888-266-5828, or write P.O. Box 8518, Lowell, MA 01853. LICENSING/REPRINTS/PERMISSIONS Mix is available for licensing. Contact the Licensing team to discuss partnership opportunities. Head of Print Licensing: Rachel Shaw, licensing@futurenet.com MANAGEMENT Senior Vice President, B2B Rick Stamberger Vice President, Sales & Publishing, B2B Aaron Kern Vice President, B2B Tech Group Carmel King Vice President, Sales, B2B Tech Group Adam Goldstein Head of Production US & UK Mark Constance Head of Design Rodney Dive FUTURE US, INC. 130 West 42nd Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10036

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Current From the Editor

It’s Good to Have Apple Back I know, I know. It’s just a headline. Apple never left the music and recording industries. Heck, according to the most recent report from MIDiA Research, Apple Music is second in worldwide market share for streaming music subscription services at 16 percent and rising, trailing only Spotify at 35 percent and slipping, and well ahead of Amazon, Tencent, Google and the rest. So why is it that for the past five to 10 years, up until the Big September Event to announce the launch of Apple Spatial Audio and the availability of Dolby Atmos Music tracks—along with binaural delivery, lossless coding, dynamic headtracking in AirPods Max and an updated version of Logic Pro X with integrated Atmos toolset, all running on new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops with new, much more powerful Apple Silicon M1 chips—it sort of felt like Apple hadn’t been paying that much attention to music? Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I take the ease of the whole MacBook-iPadiPhone triumvirate for granted. I have PC and Android friends, but I’m a Mac guy, and I have been since 1989 when Mix editors and graphic artists each got a Mac IIcx, while the sales and production teams got PCs. Macs were for creatives, we proclaimed! Since 2001, iTunes, and now Apple Music, have simply been a part of life. It’s hard to explain to someone under 30 just how dominant Apple was in the sales, distribution and playback of music in the first decade of the 2000s. When Steve Jobs announced the launch of iTunes in January 2001, MP3 had been accepted as a file delivery format, and Napster, Limewire and other illegal peer-to-peer services were at their height. Eight months later, Jobs took the stage again, this time to debut the iPod. In 2003, Apple opened the iTunes Store, forefather of today’s App Store. That combination of the iTunes app to accept payment, download the music file, manage the song library and playlists, then burn to a CD-R drive and/or Export to an iPod, changed everything about the way we purchase, disseminate and listen to music. Yes, there were portable digital players before the iPod and there were download services before iTunes, but they weren’t too consumer-friendly and they hadn’t captured the imagination of the public. Apple made portable digital music simple, convenient and cool. Apple also made a lot of money. There hadn’t been anything like the iPod since Sony introduced the Walkman in the 1970s, ushering in the age of personalized portable music on cassette. Then again, Sony only produced the hardware. By 2005, Apple had its own delivery spec for the music mastering community, Mastered For iTunes, with its own acronym: MFiT. Apple owned (most of) the 99-cent download, the computer, the OS, the app and the playback device. And this is all pre-mobile! Pre-AirPod! Then the iPhone came out in 2007, the iPad in 2010 and the rise of

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streaming audio followed soon after. We heard a lot about Pandora first, then Spotify, later on Amazon and TIDAL, with Soundcloud, Bandcamp and others dancing around the edges from the beginning. Apple had streaming music, of course, but admittedly was focused more on adding video and other types of streaming media at the time. iTunes was getting overloaded to the point that the company split it into three apps in 2019: TV, Podcasts and Music. This brief (though it seems more long-winded as I read it back) synopsis on the launch of iTunes and the iPod has a point: I feel that 20 years later, here at the close of 2021, we are at a similar tipping point in the delivery of music. Then in one day, Apple announced the availability of the Spatial Audio delivery platform, thousands of Dolby Atmos Music tracks, Hi-Res and Lossless compression options, and third-gen AirPods that feature dynamic headtracking. This time, however, Apple added something for the creatives, those who will be delivering the Atmos mixes, with the simultaneous launch of the stupid-fast M1 chip-driven MacBook Pro and a 10.7 update to Logic Pro X that includes the complete Dolby Atmos toolset. The cost of entry for Dolby Atmos Music production just plummeted, and that’s a good thing. Of course, as Pink Sweats and Manny Marroquin point out in Steve Harvey’s excellent cover story on all things Apple Spatial, a laptop and headphones can get you 80 percent there, like a rough, with the artist setting up his or her vision. Then finish in a pro, treated room with a tuned, certified 7.1.4 monitoring system. Much like how films are mixed. People will still buy speakers. For Apple, it’s all about getting the artists involved with spatial audio from the beginning of the creative process—playing with it, experimenting with it, learning about it. The more that the creative side gets involved, the more immersive music becomes available to consumers, and soon it becomes normal. That’s how change takes place: Supply feeds demand same as demand feeds supply. A lot of good people have been working for years on developing tools and techniques for immersive music production, including Dolby, Capitol Studios, UMG and PMC.But when I see a 30-second commercial during the World Series with Justin Bieber touting the experience of listening to his own song in Atmos, I think, Sometimes it takes a company like Apple to tip things over the edge.

Tom Kenny, Co-Editor

Current

View From the Top Maureen Droney P&E Wing, Recording Academy By Tamara Starr.

Future Best of Show/ Best of Market Awards With an abbreviated industry trade show season this fall due to the pandemic, Future brands Mix and Pro Sound News have announced their recipients for the 2021 Best in Market Awards (previously “Best of Show at the 2021 NAB Show”), as well as both the InfoComm 2021 Best of Show and related InfoComm 2021 Best of Market Awards. Every year, Future publications evaluate products submitted by manufacturers exhibiting at NAB and InfoComm for respective Best of Show awards. There’s no denying that 2021 is a bit different than the past, so companies not exhibiting at the shows were allowed to submit for a new award: Best of Market. Winners were selected by panels of professional users and magazine and site editors, and we congratulate all of them. n 2021 Best in Market Awards Mix / Pro Sound News OWC Envoy Pro SX Wholegrain Digital Systems LLC DynPEQ Plug-In Family Shure Incorporated ADX5D Axient Digital Dual-Channel Portable Wireless Receiver NUGEN Audio Paragon Reverb Best of Show, InfoComm 2021 Mix / Pro Sound News NETGEAR M4250 AV Line Switches Samsung S4 Webcam Monitor Best of Market, InfoComm 2021 Mix / Pro Sound News Clear-Com FreeSpeak Edge Base Station Crestron DM NAX 8-Zone Streaming Amplifier Fulcrum Acoustic AHS Steerable Large-Format Array Modules

MIX | DECEMBER 2021

hile she’s been the Sr. Managing Director of the Recording Academy’s Producers & Engineers Wing (P&E Wing) for the last 16 years, Maureen Droney has always had a passion for music—that’s what led her to literally knock on studio doors around San Francisco when she was starting out. “I finally got very lucky,” she recalls. “I was hired as an assistant engineer at the best studio in town: The Automatt. That’s where I learned the craft of engineering and was inspired and mentored by the many extraordinary musicians, engineers and producers I worked with, from Leslie Ann Jones and Jim Gaines to Ron Nevison, Mitchell Froom, Mike Clink, David Kahne and Randy Jackson.” Following time spent as a musician, engineer, artist manager and more— including a long stint as the Los Angeles editor of Mix—today, Droney advocates for producers and engineers through her work leading the P&E Wing, a national division of the Recording Academy’s membership department. The Wing’s members currently number around 4,000, making up about a third of the Academy’s voting membership. “The P&E Wing’s official mission is to advise the Recording Academy on issues of technical importance, including best practices in music recording, archiving and preservation,” says Droney. “We also promote the interests of our producer and engineer constituents within the Academy, to the recording and music industry at large, and, in some cases, to the general public as well.” The P&E Wing pursues numerous initiatives, many of which are charitable and community-

minded works, aiding and supporting Recording Academy efforts like the MusiCares charity, which distributed nearly $29 million in funding to music people in need during the height of COVID-19. The organization’s impact stretches far beyond charitable work, however. “As our industry has evolved, the Recording Academy’s efforts toward protecting the rights of music creators has become one of the most important things that we do,” says Droney. “Two outstanding examples of that work are our annual events: GRAMMYs on the Hill in Washington, D.C., and District Advocate, when our members meet with congressional representatives in their home districts to inform them about issues that are important to us.” This has included the HITS Act, currently included in the Build Back Better bill, which can help provide tax relief for recording projects; and the American Music Fairness Act (AMFA), which is focused on addressing the lack of terrestrial radio performance royalties. For the P&E Wing, fostering industry education and “respect for the craft” among producers and engineers will always be a top priority, helping ensure and facilitate the capture of great performances that stand the test of time. “We don’t have as many commercial recording studios as we used to, so the old apprenticeship model of learning this craft and passing it down to future generations is now available to only a very few,” she observes. “At the P&E Wing, we’re dedicated to finding ways to share that knowledge so that more recordings reach their full sonic potential and become music that stands the test of time.” n

Current // news & notes Nashville Nets New Tour Prep Facility Plans have been announced for the construction of a 47-acre production campus outside Nashville to be named Music City Studios. The site will serve the live touring, content, production, film, broadcast and virtual production industries. The facility as proposed would provide 200,000-plus square feet of sound stage space and 500,000-plus square feet of space for tenants serving those fields; construction is projected to start by year’s end and reach completion in early 2023, with sound stages opening in late 2022. Capital investment on the project is said to be more than $100 million. The anchor tenant will be Monolith Studios, a Los Angeles-based virtual production and content creation studio focused on LED volume architecture and content-todisplay systems and services.

The campus will be led by touring veteran David Buttrey. “With this new campus, no Nashville-based artist or crew member will ever have to leave the metro area to rehearse for a global concert tour, produce a movie, or film a commercial,” says Buttrey. “I used to have

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to travel to Los Angeles, New York, and overseas for global-level production work. The goal of Music City Studios is to act as a platform and catalyst for more world-class production coming to and being created out of Nashville.” n

Music Dolby Live at Park MGM is touted as “the first fully integrated performance venue of its kind to offer live concerts in Dolby Atmos.”

Live Music Goes Atmos in Vegas

olby and MGM Resorts have teamed up to launch Dolby Live at Park MGM, touted as “the first fully integrated performance venue of its kind to offer live concerts in Dolby Atmos.” Located on the Las Vegas Strip, the venue (formerly known as Park Theater) has been renovated for the project and now features a fully integrated Dolby Atmos playback system designed, calibrated, and tuned by Dolby engineers to match the size and unique characteristics of the 5,200-seat theater. While the system will be primarily used for live concerts, it has the capability to support live events in Dolby Atmos such as musicals, eSport events and more. Dolby Live is home to

special engagements by Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, Aerosmith and Cher, among others; upcoming performances in Dolby Atmos will be announced at a later date. “This is a new immersive live music experience where the audience will feel like they are literally on stage with their favorite artist,” said Todd Pendleton, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Dolby Laboratories. “Dolby Atmos is at the center of this new experience, which is transforming how music is created and enjoyed. There is no better way to enjoy live entertainment than in Dolby.” The venue launch follows the debut of Dolby’s recent consumer campaign educating users about Dolby Atmos Music. The campaign

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features Billie Eilish, J Balvin, Justin Bieber, Olivia Rodrigo, and The Weeknd, and explores why they believe Dolby Atmos is ushering a new era for music. “Joining our slate of premier offerings for immersive entertainment, such as the Dolby Theater in Hollywood and the hundreds of Dolby Cinemas around the world, the venue is the ultimate experience for enjoying live music in Dolby Atmos,” said Kevin Yeaman, president and CEO, Dolby Laboratories. “As we continue to grow our presence in music, it will offer consumers more ways to enjoy a Dolby Atmos experience while deepening and expanding our engagements with the artist community.” n

Music // news & notes Blasting Room Documentary in the Works By Clive Young Seminal studios of the punk rock era continue to fall; the demise of Alexandria, Virginia’s Inner Ear Studios in November to make way for a parking lot is just the most recent example. Still, some fabled facilities continue to survive and flourish, and now one of the most revered—The Blasting Room in Fort Collins, Colorado—is getting the full documentary treatment, celebrating its role as the birthplace to crucial albums by Descendents, ALL, Rise Against, Alkaline Trio, Good Riddance, NOFX, Less Than Jake, Hot Water Music, Lagwagon and more. Appropriately titled The Blasting Room, the documentary by Static Age Productions

and Kreativ Media (Filmage: The Story of Descendents/All) will trace the facility’s history, starting with how the studio was founded in 1994, when bandmembers from ALL used the advance for their next album to move from Los Angeles to Colorado, purchase a former furniture warehouse and open their own facility for recording, mixing and mastering. “Just like the studio, the documentary is very DIY with a crew made up of friends and fans of the studio,” says producer and cinematographer Kevin Kirchner. Shooting for the documentary began in November, 2019 and ran for a few months until the COVID-19 pandemic brought production to a stop. With things back up and running, the film announced a Kickstarter campaign (set to end just as this issue hits, it is nearing its $40,000 goal at press time) and the team hopes to have the film hit the festival circuit in 2022. The trailer can be found at blastingroomfilm.com. n

Grand Bay Upgrades After Pandemic Boom Alex “Mixedbylex” Romero saw such a bump in business from his hip-hop and R&B clientele over the past 18 months that he was able to upgrade the mixing console in his main room at Grand Bay Recording Studios in Tampa, Florida. Many production facilities nationwide saw bookings decline during the COVID-19 pandemic and that was initially the case at Grand Bay, too. However, after an initial slowdown in bookings, months of 18-hour days

Alex “Mixedbylex” Romero upgraded the main room at his Grand Bay Recording Studios in Tampa with an SSL Origin.

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brought home a string of RIAA-certified Gold and Platinum singles from the likes of Internet Money, Larray and Iann Dior, Lil Tecca and A Boogie wit da Hoodie, Romero reports. Romero previously worked on SSL desks at another studio in town, where he brought in clients such as 10K Projects, Lil Yachty and Machine Gun Kelly. With the boost in revenue at his facility, he says, “We said, ‘We should upgrade and get an SSL board.’ So we talked to Mike Picotte, who’s been a friend of mine for 15 years and is a sales engineer at Sweetwater, and we bought the Origin,” he says. “We noticed a change in the sonics in the room right away. We all fell in love with it, and now we can’t take our fingers off this board.” Romero designed both rooms at Grand Bay. “A lot of it is common sense,” he says. Studio 2, formerly a mastering room, is now outfitted with an SSL SiX, a pair of PMC monitors and a Sony C800G microphone. “People ask which room is better,” he says. “I ask them, ‘Do you want a huge room or something more intimate? Because the quality is the same.’ 10K Projects signed Damian Styles and I did one of his rock records in Studio 2. It came out great.” Romero will soon be moving his SSL desks to another location after acquiring a new building during the boom in business. For his new main room, he says, he’s consulted with acoustician George Augspurger on the custom monitors and front wall dimensions. n

Music // news & notes Foos Get Their Kicks in Studio 666 By Clive Young Recording at home can be alternately hilarious and horrific, but Foo Fighters will be aiming for a bit of both with their upcoming movie, Studio 666. Hitting more than 2,000 theaters on February 25, 2022, the fictional flick will follow the Foos as they attempt to record their most recent album in a haunted Encino mansion. Hilarity (and blood…so much blood) ensues. “We can finally let this cat out of the bag after keeping it our best-kept secret for two years,” said leader Dave Grohl when the film was announced, and Mix can attest that it was indeed a hush-hush production. When writer Matt Hurwitz covered the real-life recording of that album, Medicine at Midnight, in a massive feature that appeared in our July, 2021 issue, no mention of the film was made. There was, however, a brief reference to a space in the mansion used as drum isolation booth…referred to as “the dead room” (Insert raised eyebrow here). It’s not the first time on film for Grohl and Co., as they starred in 2013’s acclaimed documentary

Sound City, which traced the history of the famed title studio, and the 2014 HBO series Sonic Highways, which followed the group as it recorded in a different studio each episode, resulting in the album of the same name. The film will star the entire band—Dave Grohl, Taylor Hawkins, Nate Mendel, Pat Smear, Chris Shiflett and Rami Jaffee—as well as Whitney Cummings, Leslie Grossman, Will Forte, Jenna Ortega and Jeff Garlin. While Grohl directed those documentaries, Studio 666 will be helmed by B.J. McDonnell (Hatchet III and Slayer: The Repentless Killogy). Grohl added, “After decades of ridiculous music videos and numerous music documentaries under our collective belts, it was finally time to take it to the next level…a full-length feature horror comedy film. Like most things Foo, Studio 666 began with a far-fetched idea that blossomed into something bigger than we ever imagined possible…. We wanted to recapture the classic magic that all of our favorite rock and roll movies had, but with a twist: hilarious gore that f—— rocks…. Be ready to laugh, scream and headbang in your popcorn.”

Commented director McDonnell, “I am so excited to have teamed up with the Foo Fighters to create an old-school “Band” movie. It’s been years since we’ve seen something like the Beatles’ Help!, The Monkees’ Head, or Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. Take that 60s/70s old-school band film fun, mix it with horror and Studio 666 is born.” When a director cites Kiss’ legendarily bad 1978 TV movie (produced by cartoon kings HannaBarbara, no less) as an influence, it may be best to keep expectations low. On the other hand, if the film gets blood and guts all over Grohl’s beloved Neve 8028 that starred in Sound City, well, that really would be disturbing. n

Dave’s Room Vibes Out with Mojave Mics Shortly after producer/engineer David Spreng became the co-owner of artist feel comfortable and allows them to start being creative right away.” Invariably, Spreng’s go-to setup consists almost entirely of Mojave Audio Dave’s Room, the recording facility founded by Grammy-winning producer Dave Bianco in North Hollywood, Calif., he became a firm fan of Mojave mics, typically incorporating MA-200s as permanent room mics, as well as for drum overheads with his 201FETs. He also favors the 100 and 101FETs Audio microphones. Bianco had been a longtime fan of Mojave mics, and once Spreng heard for close-miking a variety of “hot” sources, including horns, guitar cabinets them, he knew that he needed to make them a permanent addition to his and drums. The MA-300 serves as the studio’s main vocal mic, he reports. “Something that I really love about them is that the setup. “They really have this beautiful thing going for sound is just there from the get-go; I can run them them that I’ve loved from the moment I heard them,” he straight into the mic preamp without any EQ,” he says. says. “The sound is always round, fat and warm, and you “We have them placed all over the studio, and no matter can use them on anything and know that you’re going to what source they are on, it always sounds great.” sound incredible.” Having put so much work into making the studio Spreng and partner Paul Fig have built off Bianco’s sound how he wants, Spreng even brings a little bit of original concept by making Dave’s Room a vibey and that workflow with him wherever he goes, never leaving well-stocked musical clubhouse. The vibe and reputation home without his MA-300 and 301FET mics. “I’m always of the facility has attracted a veritable who’s who of top saying, ‘Let’s capture it when it happens,’ and if you’re musical talent, including Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams, going to do that, it needs to sound great,” he says. “That’s Alice Cooper and Bette Midler. why I’m always carrying my 300 and 301FET with me— “We laid out the studio in such a way that you can walk David Sprang, co-owner because I’m used to that sound now, and I know it’ll do right in and start recording; everything you need is here,” of Dave’s Room it right.” n Spreng says. “It’s how I like to work because it makes the

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Dweezil Zappa against the gear wall at his Hikari.

Zappa Gears Up for an Immersive Thrill Ride Dweezil Zappa has geared up for immersive music production at his new Los Angeles-based Hikari Studios, which he designed and built from the ground up. Although surround sound has been around for a while, Zappa notes that Dolby Atmos and other modern immersive audio platforms are fundamentally different. “The issue with all previous surround sound approaches has always been playback,” he says. “The average person didn’t have the right equipment. But with Atmos and other formats, the average person can get an immersive experience even on headphones. The delivery system is the big difference.” Giant racks of analog gear line the walls at Hikari, interfacing with the DAW via a 512 I/O analog router with digital recall. Zappa has designed the facility for immersive recording from the very beginning of a project, installing microphones in the ceiling of the live room and tracking spaces. “You can plan the immersive experience for the listener and hear how it’s developing as you create it,” Zappa says. “It’s like an audio movie. You can choose the way something builds, where it’s supposed to go, where it’s supposed to take you. It’s a spatial drama, and you can plan for phrases and movements of a song. They can have themes, like certain instruments enter at certain places at certain times or move in certain ways. From the start, it sounds natural and purposeful because it was only ever designed to be that way. It’s not just a reimagining of a stereo reference.” Hikari is equipped with a 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos monitoring system comprising three ATC SCM45A monitors at LCR with eight ATC SCM12 Pro monitors for the side, back and height zones. There are five ATC SCM0.1/15ASL subwoofers, three across the front and two in back. “With five ATC subwoofers, this room can feel like a thrill ride at Universal Studios. It shakes in such a good way!” he says. “I always found ATCs to be accurate without being over the top. I could work on them all day long,” Zappa adds. “Now that I’ve become familiar

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The front-facing view of Hikari, with a 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos monitoring system comprising (3) ATC SCM45As at LCR and (8) ATC SCM12 Pros for the side, back and height zones.

with ATCs in my own studio, I have discovered that anything that was done very well sounds correct and natural and full-range and smooth. But any flaw in the recording pokes out. I can even hear flaws in some of my favorite records. That gives me confidence that everything I do going forward will translate.” n

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now available on the Mix YouTube channel. The daylong event typically takes place inperson at Host Partner Sony Pictures Studios. The one big advantage of the virtual format has been that expert panelists are able to take part

from around the world. There’s more to come in December and January with the companion Mix Awards Season event. In the meantime, here is a rundown of what you can view any time at Mix on YouTube.

KEYNOTE: WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT SOUND The event kicked off with a Keynote Chat between Musician/Educator Thomas Dolby and Sound Designer Wylie Stateman, who talked about music, effects, composition, new media and what we can learn from the next generation regarding new approaches to collaboration, invention and sound in all its forms.

minute action surrounding a 911 call. Panelists are all veterans of Fuqua’s intense approach to sound as storyteller. Mandell Winter, MPSE, Supervising Sound Editor; David Esparza, Supervising Sound Editor/Re-Recording Mixer; Steve Pederson, ReRecording Mixer; Ed Novick, Production Sound Mixer. Presented by Netflix

Mathew Winters, Re-Recording Mixer. Presented by Mix

PHOTO: Larry Canner

s a lead-in to the end-of-the-year film and television awards season, Mix presented its eighth annual Sound for Film & Television event in late September, its second consecutive year virtually. All videos are

Keynote speakers Thomas Dolby, Top, and Wylie Stateman.

SOUND FOR THE POWER OF THE DOG The buzz surrounding Director Jane Campion’s period piece set on a ranch has been huge following its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, where Campion took home the Silver Lion award for Best Direction. Hear we hear from the folksy and extremely talented all-New Zealand sound crew: Robert Mackenzie, Supervising Sound Editor, ReRecording Mixer; Tara Webb, Re-Recording Mixer; Dave Whitehead, Sound Designer Richard Flynn, Production Sound Mixer; Peter Sciberras, Editor; Leah Katz, Dialog Supervisor; and Peter Sciberras, Editor. Presented by Netflix SOUND FOR THE GUILTY Director Antoine Fuqua has returned with a tense thriller where the soundtrack plays an especially important role in driving the minute-by-

COMPOSER DICKON HINCHCLIFFE (The Lost Daughter) British composer Dickon Hinchcliffe, who brought loneliness and Americana to the standout film The Winter’s Bone, and created an energetic, period score to the hit series Peaky Blinders, teamed up with Director Maggie Gyllenhall on this powerful and evocative soundtrack. Presented by Netflix COMPOSER MARK MOTHERSBAUGH (The Mitchells vs. The Machines) From his mid-1970s emergence with Devo, to the theme for the Rugrats, all the LEGO movies and everything quirky in between, Mark Mothersbaugh has consistently brought his distinctive, quirky style to a myriad of projects, each with its own musical voice. Here, he blends the electronic and the orchestral to bring life to Director Michael Rinda’s animated funfest. Presented by Netflix THE REBIRTH OF SOUND DESIGN: MUSIC, EFFECTS AND THE UNIFIED EDIT Panelists: Dave Paterson, Supervising Sound Editor; Cheryl Ottenritter, Re-Recording Mixer; Glenfield Payne, Supervising Sound Editor;

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TECHNOLOGY AND WORKFLOW: WHAT’S CHANGED, WHAT’S NEXT? Panelists: Thomas Dolby, Peabody Conservatory, Johns Hopkins University; Phil Wagner, Solid State Logic; Bob Ehlers, Audinate; Dave Rieley, Focusrite Pro. Sponsored by Audinate and Peabody Conservatory STEALING BACK THE TIME TO BE CREATIVE: INTEGRATED EFFICIENCIES IN POSTPRODUCTION WORKFLOW Panelists: Mark Leombruni,VICE Media Group; Durin Gleaves, Adobe; Eric Hoehn, Sound Designer/Re-Recording Mixer. Presented by Adobe EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES AND WORKFLOWS IN SOUND AND PICTURE Panelists: Ron Lagerlof, Visioneering Design; Cheryl Ottenritter, Re-Recording Mixer; Tim Boot, Meyer Sound; Tom McAndrew, Dolby. Presented by Meyer Sound CONNECTION, CONTROL AND PLAYBACK: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE BUILDING AN IMMERSIVE STUDIO Panelists: Will Eggleston, Genelec; Ozzie Sutherland, Netflix; David Gould, Dolby, Leslie Gaston-Bird, Mix Messiah Productions; Dave Rieley, Focusrite Pro. Presented by Focusrite Pro and Genelec DYNAMIC PARAMETRIC EQUALIZATION (DPEQ) IN CONVENTIONAL AND IMMERSIVE MEDIA POST-PRODUCTION Panelists: Thor Legvold, Sonovo; Jason LaRocca, LaRocca Fella Center; Tom Marks, CAS, WB Sound/Black Rock Audio; George Massenburg, McGill University; Matt Orlando, Q Department. Presented by Wholegrain Digital Systems

Live

PRESENTED BY

The Evolving Mixes of Manchester Orchestra By Clive Young

For Manchester Orchestra’s fall tour, FOH engineer TJ Elias used local gear at each stop, like the Avid VENUE SC48 desk provided at Ram’s Head Live in Baltimore, MD.

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PHOTO: Sangsouvanh Khounvichit

fter a near four-year wait, Atlantabased alt rockers Manchester Orchestra unveiled their latest album earlier this year and immediately began planning to hit the road. The new collection, The Million Masks of God, found the band delivering cinematic moments that were just begging to be made even more expansive in a live setting, and the group’s recent fall tour finally provided an opportunity to do just that. Starting in Dallas and rolling up the east coast over three weeks in October, the 12-date run culminated with a sold-out night at New York City’s 2,200-cap Hammerstein Ballroom. Along the way, the band used local control gear and PAs at each stop, much as it had in the past, so FOH engineer TJ Elias and monitor man Mike Rogers spent much of each day focused on creating uniform experiences for the group and its audiences, night after night. Ensuring aural consistency—particularly during more epic moments onstage—often required extensive preparation beforehand, whether learning the room, finding the appropriate effects to match it, or something else. For Elias, that approach drew on his main career as a studio engineer; while he may co-own Atlanta’s Big Trouble Recording with business partner Dan Gleason of Grouplove, Elias started out as the studio assistant of mega-engineer Nick DiDia for nearly five years, working with producers like Brendan O’Brien and Ben H. Allen in the process. When stepping into a live setting then, he brings his recording-

Live // news & notes // presented by world analytical skills to the table. “The main thing for me,” he said, “is going in, tuning a room and spending a lot more time when I get into the venue listening to music and listening to the guys play in there, and then really finetuning the balance of how the room is sounding and what the room needs to do…. I had a lighting guy from one of the places go, ‘I didn’t know front of house engineers do this much work!’” Elias wasn’t reinventing the wheel nightly, but instead figuring out the best game plan for what he wanted to achieve. “When you’re making or a mixing an album, you’re finding elements that will pull you into the songs, and there’s a similar vibe in the way Manchester plays shows and orchestrates the setlist,” said Elias. “A lot of it for me is finding these different spaces where yes, we may be in this one particular venue, but it’s like, ‘How do I transfer you to another room where this song actually takes place?’” With gear, venues and vibes changing nightly, some parts of the setlist became a perpetual work-in-progress: “I use the record as a guideline, but they’re not playing the songs exactly like the records all the time; they have new arrangements that are meant to have a different energy and vibe, so to me, it’s ‘do a tip of the hat,’ see where things sit blend-wise, find new soundscapes, use different effects with the vocal, and things like that. We figure out how that plays night after night with different venues.” Much of Elias’ approach to the band’s live mix centered around implementing different effects to fit the room appropriately, despite using different gear nightly. “That’s been my gripe in the past with a lot of live sound consoles and what’s on them,” he said. “It’s very difficult sometimes to get the big lush reverb sounds that I want for the show. I was like, ‘I know I can do this with these things in the studio; let me figure out how to make that work’— and now we’ve got that working.” Key to his effort was a computer packed with Universal Audio UAD plug-ins, used most notably for time-based effects on singer Andy Hull’s vocals: Since they’re all time-based effects, I don’t have to worry as much about delay between the console and processing into my computer. I do a lot on my Echoplex, there’s a few small plate reverbs, little room sounds, things I use for drums, but I use my

EMT 250 reverb all night in different capacities. I’m always in and out of that and have it up at all times on my computer so I can change how long the reverb time is. I send a single, repeated delay into it so I can time-out delay throws in a way so that it’s always in time. On some songs, some parts of the verse, I may have it really fast and tight, and then other times on that same verse, I’ll need to slow it down, so I’ll be tapping it at a 16th note and slow down to a quarter note by the end of the verse to get the length on it. It’s constant movement and that’s a big part of it. Of course, their damn good singing makes my life a lot easier! I can do almost anything with it.”

“These guys have already put all the colors in the palette, and I need to put those colors together into the full picture without adding to it, in a sense.” Up on stage, further efforts were made to provide consistency for the group, from the tour carrying a monitor desk for Rogers, to drummer Tim Very adopting in-ear monitors for the first time, to Hull hearing himself nightly on his own pair of L-Acoustics wedges. “They have been great for Andy and really great for Mike, too,” said Elias. “Now it’s smooth up there unless the room sounds crazy, but Mike’s always got it dialed in. There’s rooms we’ve been in that I’m like ‘I don’t know how Mike’s gonna do this,’ and the guys get offstage like, ‘The stage sounded incredible,’ so he’s a wizard.” Aiding in the wizardry is a mic pack curated by both engineers. “Andy, I’ve always just had a 58 on his vocal,” said Elias. “We’ve experimented, but ultimately there’s something about him on a 58 live and an SM7 in the studio; his voice just works for those microphones. I’ve gone through different things with his vocal—back-end stuff, front-end stuff, different mics—and it always ends up that the 58 is the one. It works like a charm and there’s a reason that you’ve seen

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them for so many years on so many different applications.” While lead guitarist Robert McDowell was nabbed with Shure Beta58s on his side of the stage, capturing Hull’s acoustic guitar work, on the other hand, came down to both his custom Taylor guitars and the tools on-hand. “I want to say 85% of the DIs on stage are Rupert Neve Designs RNDIs,” said Elias. “We run his guitar through it, and that DI coupled with everything going on inside of that guitar just works magic.” All that gave Elias plenty to work with, he said; the main thing was to capture and present it all accurately. “These guys have already put all the colors in the palette, and I need to put those colors together into the full picture without adding to it, in a sense. To me, that’s a big thing, even in recording; it’s making the effort on the front end. If you don’t like how something sounds, you don’t grab an EQ; you move the microphone.” Of course, the house console and PA of the day were equally crucial for achieving those goals, and like all engineers, Elias has his favorites: “Any night I have an L-Acoustics rig in the room, I am the happiest person on Earth because I feel like I’m mixing at the studio. The clarity is there, the punch is there. I never feel like anything’s too overbearing in those rigs; you can really hear when something needs to be moved or EQ’ed. L-Acoustics with a DiGiCo desk? You’ll never hear me complain, because I want the cleanest processing humanly possible, and for me, that’s happened every night we have a DiGiCo console.” Rewarding experiences for the audio team and the group ultimately led to achieving the tour’s true goal—creating rewarding experiences for the fans. The band and engineers will get to do it all again in January, hitting the road for three months through Europe and more of the U.S. Elias observed, “We’re getting a lot more of a respectful crowd that realizes there’s points to cheer and have a good time, and there’s points to sit down and focus and watch what’s happening on stage. A lot of that has to do with how well the band is manning the stage; they get that crowd ready to come along for the ride. It’s different—a lot more honed in and everyone’s firing on a higher level than we ever have before, so it’s pretty awesome.” ■

Live // news & notes // presented by Post-COVID, The Cap Comes Back Photo credit: Scott Harris

By Clive Young

Photo credit: Dino Perrucci

t many venues around the country, reopening after being shuttered for so long has been a strange but exciting experience. As for The Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, NY, well, the venue’s been there before. Located 20 minutes outside of New York City, the Cap (as it’s known locally) A d&b audiotechnik V Series PA adorns the stage as Phil Lesh and Friends perform inside is an 1,800-seat facility built in 1926 the Capitol Theatre. that became a bona fide rock palace in the 1970s. Pink Floyd, Santana, The rig, timed and tuned for the room, that Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, Derek and any engineer should be able to have a the Dominos and Jefferson Airplane really good night on,” said Wheeler. “Most all played legendary shows inside headline acts will come in with their own the revered venue; heck, Janis Joplin consoles, mic pack and all that kind of stuff, even wrote “Mercedes Benz” there Keeping the Cap on track are (l-r): Bil Emmons (A1), but we have an Avid VENUE Profile console one afternoon after soundcheck and Paul Monahan (Production Manager), Bruce Wheeler (General Manager), Eliot Byron (Crew Chief), Juliette Smith out front, a Yamaha CL7 at monitors and debuted it that night. Later, in the (Projectionist), Brett Lohr (LD) and Byron Berrocal (A2) a pretty extensive mic pack with Shure, 1990s, the Rolling Stones and David Sennheiser, Audio-Technica, Telefunken Bowie taped MTV concerts at the Cap—and then it went dark for decades, relegated to occasional use as a and Beyerdynamic, so we have anything they might ask for. For the PA, we have a great d&b audiotechnik V Series rig—10 boxes a side with some catering hall. At one point, the roof even caved in. Music entrepreneur Peter Shapiro, founder of the numerous Brooklyn flown V-SUBs, plus some more subs on the ground; a Lake LM 44 processor Bowl venues (not to mention New York City’s fondly remembered Wetlands), is driving it all. Also, we have supplemental coverage with some 10S boxes took over the dilapidated theatre in 2011 and poured more than $2 million throughout the venue, like under our balcony to fill our rear orchestra, and into renovations. The following year, the Capitol reopened with a Bob Dylan in our Presidential Boxes. Monitors are M4 wedges.” One of the revitalized venue’s touchstones has been its fully projectionshow and never looked back. Now, more than 800 shows later, the likes of Ringo Starr, Skrillex, Bonnie Raitt, Snoop Dogg, Kacey Musgraves, The mapped dome and walls; overseen by video/projection tech Juliette Smith, Strokes, Tom Petty, Cyndi Lauper, Willie Nelson, Don Henley, Kevin Hart, the 10 Barco RLM-W12 projector system can present visuals from the Cap’s content library of abstract textures, psychedelic imagery, full-motion video Elvis Costello and hundreds more have all graced its stage. As it happens, the revitalized venue’s 12th show, back in October 2012, and more. “When people see it for the first time, whether they’re a patron was a Regina Spektor gig; Bruce Wheeler, her production manager/FOH or a performer, they’re just blown away,” said Wheeler. “It’s a totally extraengineer at the time, recalls, “I remember being impressed with the rig and sensory experience.” The Cap has its regulars—many come all the time to see artists like the venue, especially with the place only being open for about a month at that point.” The experience was good enough that when the opportunity Phil Lesh, who has an ongoing residency—but even they likely felt like arose, Wheeler became the Cap’s director of production in 2017, and later first-timers when the theater reopened in September after months of moved into his current role as general manager in 2019. A music industry closure due to COVID-19. The staff is vaccinated and patrons are expected journeyman, Wheeler has held positions at labels and artist managements to show vax cards or negative tests for entry, but most find it’s a small over the years, in addition to working as an FOH engineer, production inconvenience for the chance to see finally live music again. “I’ve had manager and tour manager on the road, and as GM of Central Park patrons actually pull me aside and thank us for doing that,” said Wheeler. Summerstage in New York City. Today, all those roles inform his approach “We want them to come in, relax, have a beverage and really focus on the to running the Cap, ensuring that the venue is equally welcoming for performance, rather than be ‘Oh my God, am I safe?’ So, like so many other things here, it comes down to the comfort level of our patronage. We want artists, crews and audiences. “When tours come in, they know that they’re getting a quality audio them to enjoy themselves, and that’s what they’re doing.” ■

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Live // news & notes // presented by NEWS BRIEFS

Daniel Lanois was heard on the Scène Place des Festivals Stage via a sizable Meyer Sound rig.

Jonas Brothers Dig DPA Los Angeles, CA—The Jonas Brothers wrapped up their 2021 “Remember This” tour in late October with a show at the Hollywood Bowl; throughout the monthslong trek, the production used a selection of DPA mics on-stage each night. Chosen for the tour by monitor engineer Jon Kooren, the mics were deployed primarily for percussion and vocals, with the selection on-hand including DPA 4011 Cardioid, 4099 CORE Instrument and 2011 Twin Diaphragm Cardioid microphones for drums and percussion, as well as the d:facto 4018V Vocal microphone for backup and the d:facto 4018VL Vocal microphone for Kevin Jonas.

Casino Bets on EAW Hot Springs, AR—Oaklawn Racing Casino recently opened a 15,000-squarefoot event center for concerts, conventions and more. The 1,500-seat venue’s audio system, designed by Jerrold Stevens of Marsh/PMK International LLC., includes an EAW ADAPTive PA system comprising 20 Anna loudspeakers and 12 Otto subwoofers as well as various monitors and side-fills. Tuning was handled using EAW’s Resolution software along with additional reference resources. “The system was configured as a left/right hang with eight Anna units and six Otto subs per side, complete with a four-box center cluster for downfill,” reports Mark LaBouff, national sales manager, TMG Systems.

Montréal International Jazz Festival Returns with Solotech Montreal, Canada—The Montréal International Jazz Festival returned this year, presenting 30 acts, including headliners like Charlotte Day Wilson, Patrick Watson, Plants and Animals, Shay Lia and artist/record producer Daniel Lanois. They all appeared on two outdoor stages in the city’s downtown area due to a new alloutdoor format—a move that required longtime audio provider Solotech to cover audiences without hammering the neighbors. Systems on both the Place des Festivals and Parterre Symphonique stages incorporated a trio of Meyer Sound GALAXY 816 Network Platforms for loudspeaker processing, and MJF210 low-profile stage monitors used for artist foldback at both locations. The larger system at Place des Festivals employed main arrays each with five LEO-M and four LYON-M per side, with six 1100-LFC lowfrequency control elements per side in a focused gradient configuration. Fills were two each MSL4 and CQ-1, while first delays were, per side, six MICA line array loudspeakers with three 900-LFC elements in gradient configuration. Second delays were a pair of CAL 64 steerable loudspeakers. Meanwhile, the Parterre Symphonique stage

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system was anchored by twin arrays of nine LINA loudspeakers per side, with seven gradientconfigured 900-LFC elements at center. LINA and MSL-4 loudspeakers served as fills, with a pair of CAL 32 loudspeakers as delays. Festival technical coordinator Dan Meier noted, “We have difficult spaces to work with because we are in the Quartier des Spectacles, in the heart of the city…. Working closely with Meyer Sound’s David Vincent and Solotech, we designed systems that focus the sound and keep everybody happy. We use cardioid subwoofer configurations and we also use CALs [Column Array Loudspeakers] as delays, which allow us to steer the sound exactly where we want it. They are small, efficient, and we can aim them with precision.” Artist/producer Daniel Lanois brought along his personal set of Meyer’s UPJ-1P loudspeakers to reproduce his trademark wash of ambient sound and rhythm, with the vocals heard through the festival’s MJF-210 stage monitors. “The MJFs have a nice, full sound, the way we like it,” he said. “We only put vocals in them because we’re almost acoustic volume on stage. It’s almost a throwback to the old Grateful Dead days where every member of the band got his own speaker stack.” ■

Live // news & notes // presented by Beartooth Mixes Own Monitors Live Columbus, OH—Mixing while also performing onstage is a relatively rare phenomenon once an act reaches a certain level of fame. Prince went through a brief stretch in the late Nineties where he mixed FOH from mid-stage, but the Purple One ultimately abandoned the idea. More recently, personal monitor mixers have caught on, particularly in HOWs and classical music, but that tends to be for artists mixing sound solely for themselves. Columbus, OHbased metal act Beartooth, however, has been tearing it up on tour recently with vocalist Cabel Shomo tackling monitor mixes for all five members while simultaneously commanding the crowd at center stage. Shomo founded the group in 2012, singing but also acting as recording and mix engineer for the band’s four studio albums, including its latest, 2021’s Below. Touring the U.S. behind the new album this fall, the band were joined by FOH engineer Danny Harvey for a six-week run. Carrying control for the journey, Shomo and Harvey opted for a dual Allen & Heath dLive system supplied by Illinois-based V2 Productions. Harvey handled FOH duties on a 28-fader dLive S5000 Surface and DM48 MixRack, decked out with a Waves V3 card. “All the dLive systems sound great; before this tour, I was on the C1500 at FOH, but having the extra faders—and therefore control—feels particularly great,” said Harvey. “With the inbuilt processing, I can control it how I like and achieve the power and punch I’m looking for. Beartooth are a loud rock n roll band that needs to be mixed loud and heavy, and the dLive makes this easy.”

been a game-changer. The preamps are completely transparent and the built-in components give me all the analog feel I need without the hassle of outboard. I’ve never felt so confident creating mixes that make everyone on stage want to melt face night after night.” ■

Equipped by

The Premier Supplier of Pro Audio, Video, Lighting & Musical Equipment

Photo: Wyatt Clough

Beartooth performing at ZooMontana on the Below tour.

For the onstage monitor system, controlled by Shomo, a compact 12-fader dLive C1500 Surface and DM48 MixRack were chosen. In between delivering his vocal lines, Shomo controlled five stereo IEM mixes, side fills and two pairs of center monitors. He noted, “The dLive system has

“Top musicians don’t want to wait. I know Full Compass will have what I need so I can avoid downtime and keep the takes rolling. ” -Landon Arkens, Award-winning Recording Engineer at Blast House Studios

800-356-5844 • fullcompass.com

Goes Apple

Spatial

Dolby Atmos, Binaural, Stereo, M1 Silicon, Lossless, Hi-Res, New Logic, AirPods — What It All Means for the Artist and the Engineer By Steve Harvey

he revolution will not be televised, Gil Scott-Heron declared in 1970. But this fall, during the World Series and on college football Saturdays, viewers saw Justin Bieber during a commercial break talking about his single, about how “that’s the best I’ve ever heard that song,” and how he “felt it over here; I felt it up here; I felt it up at the top.” He’s talking about hearing his hit single “Ghost” mixed in Dolby Atmos, and before it cuts to the next commercial, the full-title screen pops up: “Now on Apple Music.” What if ScottHeron was wrong—at least as it regards music distribution and playback—and we’re living through the start of a revolution but just don’t know it? Dolby has been working hard behind the scenes over the past few years to bring its brand of immersive music to the masses. The major labels, most notably Universal Music Group and Warner Bros., are onboard, hiring mixers around the world to rework a long list of classics into the

Atmos format. UK speaker manufacturer PMC has been a staunch ally, playing no small part in the promotion of the immersive format and an active role in remixing catalog tracks. But to get this music to everyone’s ears, you need to bring out the big guns. Which brings us to this summer and Apple’s announcement that it was launching Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos on its Apple Music service, free to all subscribers. Thousands of tracks would be available, Apple promised, with more added regularly. Oh, and 75 million songs are available in lossless audio now. “How is that revolutionary?” you ask. “I can already hear immersive music on TIDAL, Amazon and a couple other places.” True enough. But Apple wasn’t finished. At its October launch event, the company introduced two new models of Apple Silicon-powered MacBook Pro notebooks and third-generation AirPods with headtracking, also offering a brief glimpse into Logic Pro 10.7 software with

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integrated Dolby Atmos tools, which debuted just days later. WHAT’S IT ALL MEAN? These new product announcements, particularly regarding Apple Music Spatial Audio, were met with some confusion and skepticism. There appears to have been some misunderstanding of the original announcement, leading to the unwitting spread of misinformation online. (See “Spatial Audio” sidebar.) It’s not just Apple’s messaging that has folks in a muddle, either; the pro audio industry’s language can often be opaque, as Craig Anderton explores on page 50 in this issue. All that will sort itself out in the coming months as engineers and artists familiarize themselves with the tools. Meanwhile, let’s not miss the forest for the trees. Over the course of this summer, Apple rolled out an immersive music ecosystem that can take an idea all the way from the mind of a musician to the ears of his or her fans,

PHOTO: Courtesy of Apple

on the cover

from production to distribution to delivery. For a few thousand dollars, anyone can now produce and mix a song in Dolby Atmos using just these tools and deliver it to a global audience through Apple Music Spatial Audio streaming, where it’s delivered over headphones in binaural. And they can produce and mix anywhere. Can you truly produce a finished Dolby Atmos track using only Apple’s core immersive tools? We humans are not great at localizing sounds from certain directions with any degree of accuracy, so there are definitely limitations to mixing in Dolby Atmos while monitoring a virtualized downmix in binaural on headphones, even with headtracking. As Manny Marroquin, owner of Larrabee

Sound Studios in Los Angeles and a multiGrammy winner with 15,000 mixes to his credit, points out, “You can get it 80 percent there without having a studio setup. I’ve got to give Apple credit for this new Logic. They’re like, ‘We’re not going to wait for the revolution to happen with speakers, we’re going to do it in a way that even in headphones you can take it there,’ even if it’s 80 percent.” That done, take your mix to a dedicated immersive room to add the final 20 percent and it’s ready for uploading to Apple Music. FIRST, THE M1 HARDWARE While Apple’s marketing and the attention of the media have largely focused on the Apple Music Spatial Audio and lossless audio rollouts

PHOTO: Jim Donnelly

Larrabee Studios owner and A-list mix engineer Manny Marroquin, seated, with artist Pink Sweats as they both get a first look at the new Apple Siliconpowered MacBook Pro in late-October.

to consumers, there is plenty for professionals to get excited about. Apple has always been about the tight integration of its software and hardware, and it’s certainly evident in its approach to audio and video. Take the new MacBook Pro models. Available in two sizes, with either a 14- or 16-inch display, these notebooks are fully optimized for all media-makers, not just audio pros. The full spec and options are far too extensive to detail here. Suffice to say, the key to the power of these new machines lies with Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, which deliver up to 4x faster performance than the M1 chip—not to mention competing products—while using 70 percent less power. Retail prices range from $1999 to $3499. According to Xander Soren, Director, music apps product marketing, Apple, “One of the most profound increases in performance we’ve ever seen for the Mac is the M1 Pro and the M1 Max. This is workstation desktop-class performance on a notebook. And Logic is highly optimized to take advantage of that.” Even in a live recording situation, he says, the new MacBook Pro machines can host a stack of power-hungry plug-ins. “We’re seeing up to three times the amount that you can put on a channel strip compared to the previous generation 16-inch MacBook Pro, which was a great, powerful system at the time.” Both notebook models incorporate four force-canceling woofers (a design familiar to Barefoot monitor users) and two mid/high tweeters capable of delivering a convincingly immersive soundstage. Apple has also upgraded the built-in mics to a three-element array with directional beamforming and macOS’s Voice Isolation filtering. Oh, yeah, and there’s an impedance-sensing 3.5mm headphone jack, along with three Thunderbolt 4 ports and an HDMI port. For more critical monitoring, the new thirdgeneration AirPods redesign brings it into line with AirPods Pro and AirPods Max to also support the dynamic headtracking and Adaptive EQ necessary for a more realistic 3D audio headphone experience. Immersive audio is best experienced through over-the-ear headphones that direct sound at the pinna, so AirPods and AirPods Pro earbuds use directional filters to optimize the 3D effect. (More about headtracking in the “Spatial Audio” and “HRTF” sidebars.)

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PHOTO: Jim Donnelly

Manny Marroquin’s Dolby Atmos mix room, Studio 3 at Larrabee Studios, based around an SSL console and a Meyer Sound 7.1.4 monitoring setup, with Bluehorn speakers LCR.

Apple M1 Pro, M1 Max M1 Pro and M1 Max have upped the ante for what is possible in a system-on-a-chip. According to Apple, the new CPUs perform up to 70 percent faster than M1, which powers the 13-inch MacBook Pro and other devices. A small sampling of what’s new: • The onboard SSD, optionally offering up to 8TB of storage, delivers up to 7.4GB/s, twice the previous best. • M1 Pro’s 14- or 16-core GPU is 2x faster, and M1 Max’s 24- or 32-core GPU is 4x faster than M1’s GPU. • M1 Pro offers up to 200GB/s of memory bandwidth and supports up to 32GB of unified memory. • M1 Max delivers up to 400GB/s of memory bandwidth—double that of M1 Pro; 6x that of M1—with support for up to 64GB of unified memory. • For video, both new chips support H.264 and HEVC, like M1, but add ProRes capabilities that enable M1 Pro to support up to (20) 4K or (4) 8K streams and M1 Max to deliver (30) 4K or (7) 8K streams.

PHOTO: Courtesy of Apple

ADD THE LOGIC SOFTWARE That brings us to Logic Pro 10.7, the 35th free update to users of Apple’s digital audio production software since launch. Apple no doubt has its reasons for not labeling this Logic Pro 11, but make no mistake, it’s a major update. For starters, Logic Pro 10.7 integrates the full suite of Dolby Atmos mixing tools, including object panning and 3D visualization, as well as the full menu of monitoring and rendering options. To be clear, this new update includes all the functionality of Dolby’s standalone software. While Dolby Atmos Production Suite is a $299 add-on for other DAWs, the price for this updated Logic Pro app remains unchanged at $199. For good measure, Apple also upgraded 13 of its plug-ins to 7.1.2 operation in Logic Pro 10.7, including the Space Designer convolution reverb. All of the surround-sound impulse responses previously available are now Atmoscompatible. In addition to adding more loops and sounds, the updated app also includes a complete Dolby Atmos session of “Montero” by Lil Nas X, plus a spatial audio demo grid, two instructive resources. Logic Pro operates in two modes: Complete or Simplified. By selecting Complete mode in Preferences, audio pros can configure a Dolby Atmos project through a submenu in the Mix dropdown menu and apply Dolby’s 3D panner plug-in on the required channels. Simplified mode streamlines Logic’s features and is intended for novices and users stepping up from GarageBand. Optimized to run on the new MacBook Pro models, Logic Pro 10.7 can support a massive number of tracks and plug-ins. In a demonstration of the setup’s capacity, Apple played me a Dolby Atmos session mixed by Steven Wilson comprising 1,000 tracks of live

The main Dolby Atmos mix page in Binaural mode, within Apple Logic Pro 10.7. Inset: The new 14-inch MacBook Pro, with Apple Silicon M1 chips underneath and Apple Logic Pro 10.7 on the screen.

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orchestra plus 500 virtual tracks, with plug-ins galore. The machine didn’t break a sweat. Previously, the means to produce and mix a song in Dolby Atmos—a computer for the DAW and another for the renderer, typically linked by a Dante network and associated interfaces; Dolby Atmos Production Suite software; an upgrade to at least 11 speakers and a sub; a monitor controller; plus integration and certification and, of course, a room—were accessible only to those with a hefty five- or six-figure budget. Now, while you could pay more if you load up the laptop options, the entry-level buy-in is under $3,000 for a 14-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro chip, Logic Pro 10.7 software and a pair of third-gen AirPods. This easy access to spatial audio tools is all part of Apple’s grand plan. “We want to help people create in a much simpler way,” says Soren. “It’s the democratization that was really important to us. We want all musicians to be able to mix their songs in spatial audio themselves and publish them to Apple Music.” With that all-Apple gear list, he says, “I think it’s kind of a revolution in terms of ease of use and pricing. You really have everything a musician needs to start mixing their music in spatial audio.” Apple would like nothing better than for its immersive audio tools to become commonplace in the hands of all creatives. “I think what you’re going to see over time is that the artists are going to want to get more hands-on with the spatial audio mix,” Soren says. “We’re seeing that already when we show this to artists: ‘I want to take the first pass and decide how my music is going to get placed.’” Some will mix with a more traditional, natural approach, Soren says, while others will

THE ARTIST AND THE ENGINEER One such artist, Pink Sweats (stylized Pink Sweat$; birth name David Bowden; pictured on this month’s cover), is looking forward to working with Apple’s new tools. His latest album, Pink Planet, is available on Apple Music in Dolby Atmos, but he’d like to integrate immersive tools earlier in his creative process. “I’m intrigued to see what I can do,” he says. “I don’t have any specific ideas, but I just want to mess around with it. Later on, if I produce a project, I want to do it strictly in the realm of Atmos, understanding that if someone listens to this, they’re going to hear every little nuance. So it makes me want to play around with that.” he says.

The Philadelphia-born, L.A.-based artist has been making waves lately with his music, which Rolling Stone describes as “acoustic soul with a touch of alt-90s angst.” Pink, who has been working on his next album at Larrabee, where Manny Marroquin mixed the stereo versions of his last EP, The Prelude, and current album, Pink Planet, likens the immersive music experience to the metaverse. “You are able to experience things within it; you’re not a spectator,” he says, adding that it’s similar to watching a movie in

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HRTF and Headphones The realism of any sounds delivered through headphones, especially those in an immersive audio format, is vastly improved if you can apply a personalized HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function), also known as an acoustic fingerprint, to your headphone path. A personalized HRTF is an acoustic model of how sound from any direction is received at an individual’s eardrum according to their unique physiology. There are third-party developers that can provide a custom algorithm of your personalized HRTF to insert before your headphones.

PHOTO: Courtesy of Apple

experiment. “If you’re producing a jazz quartet, you want to feel like you’re in the room. And I think a lot of electronic and hip-hop artists are going to want to do interesting things with movement and automation.” The unforeseen creative potential of Apple’s spatial audio products in the hands of artists is inspiring, he says: “They’re going to surprise us and do things we never dreamed of.”

The new third-generation Apple AirPods Max support dynamic headtracking and noise cancellation. Above: The internal structure underneath the over-ear design.

Dolby Atmos. Marroquin predicts, “Pink is going to be doing his own immersive mixes soon, presenting it to the immersive mixer almost like a stereo rough: ‘This is where I want it to be.’ That’s going to happen with this technology a lot quicker than buying all the speakers for his studio.” Widening the lens, as these immersive tools become more accessible, “Imagine that 15-year-old kid in their bedroom, where all they know is immersive, like all we know —Continued on Page 33

How-To: Apple Spatial Audio Explained By Steve Harvey

f you’re an independent artist or producer with no major label machinery to support you, how do you get your Dolby Atmos mixes onto the new Apple Music Spatial Audio streaming service for all to hear? While the artistic and mix talent is all in your hands, here are a few procedural items to be aware of before you start putting guitar in the height speakers.

PHOTO: Courtesy of Apple

RENDERING TO BINAURAL The Dolby Atmos version of a song on Apple Music is streamed to consumers and rendered on-device for (non-AirPods and Beats) headphone listening in binaural audio, in a way that is optimized to preserve as much of the original immersive mix as possible. While the software that you use to create your Dolby Atmos mix can render a binaural version, Apple renders its own binaural version at the listening device. The mix, therefore, might sound slightly different from the Dolby renderer. Apple’s delivery spec calls for creators to deliver each song as an ADM Broadcast WAV file, at 48/24 and 24 fps, because the service needs all of the objects and metadata of the original Atmos mix in order to stream using the Dolby Digital Plus JOC (Joint Object Coding) codec. When delivered to a Dolby Atmos-enabled device, that song is rendered to 7.1.4 and then binauralized. Apple does not accept upmixes from stereo masters on its platform. Apple also does not synthesize or upmix any song into the Dolby

Check out the bottom right of the Apple Music Playlist grid.

Atmos format, contrary to the rumors that spread online after the launch of Spatial Audio. [Editor’s Note: That misinformation may stem from a switch in the Control Center in iOS labeled Spatialize Stereo. (This only shows up if using AirPods (3rd gen), AirPods Pro, or AirPods Max. If selected, this applies standard spatializing techniques to any stereo track to create a wider image and to direct ambience behind the listener, similar to the optional processing offered in any number of home and car entertainment devices.] The Dolby Atmos software’s binaural render can still be useful, of course, enabling you to reference what listeners will hear while you are working on your mix—well, more or less. To preview what it will sound like on Apple Music you can export an .mp4 file from the Dolby Renderer and play it back from the Files app on an iOS device while using AirPods Pro or Max.

Olivia Rodrigo’s “good 4 u,” with Spatial Audio on, illustrating the UI’s simplicity on an iPhone 13.

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UPLOAD: ATMOS AND STEREO Once your Dolby Atmos mix is finished and appropriately exported, how do you deliver it to the Apple Music platform? The answer is the same way you send out your stereo tracks, through aggregators such as The Orchard, Distrokid, CD Baby and AvidPlay, which have all added support for Dolby Atmos material. Apple lists more than

15 such partners just for North America; ease of use and pricing may vary from one to the next. When you upload your ADM BWF, you must also include the 2.0 stereo master, per Apple’s deliverables spec. Inside Apple this is referred to as the “intentional stereo” mix, because the service can alternatively create a stereo render—a downmix—from the ADM file if the appropriate checkbox is selected when uploading. (No one has yet requested this, Apple says, which shouldn’t come as a surprise.) When someone selects a song in Dolby Atmos, their device downloads the stereo master with it, allowing the listener to switch between the two versions. NOW WITH HEADTRACKING Listeners wearing Apple’s latest AirPods, including the Pro and Max versions (as well as the latest Beats model) can now experience an Atmos mix with dynamic headtracking. For those unfamiliar with the technology, headtracking can monitor the position of your head and reposition the mix in your headphones relative to it, so that it sounds as if you are listening to a fixed set of speakers in the room. If Apple Music detects that a listener is on headphones without headtracking capabilities, it will instead send a binaural render, created serverside using the exact same processing described previously, to reduce bandwidth use. Certain Apple devices, including the latest MacBook Pro notebooks, can also play the immersive mix out of their built-in speakers. Apple updated its Apple Music for Android app in July, but so far Spatial Audio is available on only the handful of Android devices that are Dolby Atmos-enabled. ■

PHOTO: Jim Donnelly

is stereo,” Marroquin says. “Now that they know it exists, they can be producing differently.” Marroquin upgraded Larrabee’s Studio 3 about a year ago with a Meyer Sound monitor setup for Dolby Atmos mixing, including three Bluehorn speakers across the front. “From that moment, the demand has almost been too high,” he says. “That tells me the labels are ready; they see the potential to monetize it. It’s exciting for the labels, it’s exciting for engineers and it gives artists another set of tools to create.” When mixing songs in the Dolby Atmos format over the past 12 months, Marroquin says, “Typically, my goal is to get it to sound like the stereo mix, and then I want to expand it. They worked so hard on the stereo mix that I don’t want to change that. I want to keep that integrity, the emotional connection they had when they created it. When I A/B stereo to immersive, I just want that feeling of space.” Beyond that, it’s a question of taste, he says: “As a chef would say, how much salt, how much pepper, how much flavor do you give something?” Until now, labels, artists and engineers have largely been creating immersive mixes that, as Marroquin describes, remain faithful to the stereo version. But in the future, he suggests, “As we transition to only immersive, it could be two versions of an album, a stereo version and an enhanced version in Atmos, where you do overdubs and sprinkle things here and there.” REVOLUTION VS. EVOLUTION Is Apple’s technology revolutionary? Perhaps evolutionary would be more accurate, since the underlying tech is hardly new. The public first got to hear binaural techniques delivering spatial audio through headphones in 1881. Dolby Atmos was launched with the Disney/Pixar animated feature Brave in 2012. Headtracking has been used by gamers and VR enthusiasts for years and is available as a headphone add-on from a number of companies. Where Apple has shaken things up is in packaging the essential technologies into a single, easy-to-use ecosystem that won’t break the bank. And in this case, the evolution is most certainly being televised, with artists such as Olivia Rodrigo, Coldplay and The Weeknd also appearing in ads for Dolby Atmos and Apple Music, right there with Justin Bieber. Whether you’re a skeptic or an advocate, you must admit: Apple knows its audience, both consumer and pro. ■

Pink Sweats at the drum kit in Larrabee Studios, where he’s currently working on a new set of songs. The stereo version of his previous release, Pink Planet, was mixed by Marroquin at Larrabee and is available at Apple Music alongside the Spatial Audio version.

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The Period Sound of Passing Intimate Dialog in a Noisy 1920s NYC—Mixed in Dolby Atmos

he new Netflix film Passing, director Rebecca Hall’s intimate, black-andwhite portrait of friendship and identity, transports audiences back to New York City of the late 1920s, to a time of jazz clubs, Prohibition and racial segregation. The film follows two childhood friends who reunite after a chance meeting in a swanky hotel café. Irene, a woman of color, hides beneath her large hat brim, trying to keep a low profile and escape the summer heat while seated at a table indoors. In walks Clare, also a woman of color, who is “passing” as a white woman. She boldly strides into the room, eventually notices Irene, and joins her at her table before heading up to Clare’s suite. where they can talk openly about racial identification, social status and their divergent paths. Passing premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival in US Dramatic Competition, but filming started back in November 2019 before Covid shut down New York City (and film production). Passing was shot on-location in Brooklyn Heights and Harlem, where production sound mixer Paddy Hanlon’s biggest technical challenge was keeping the pervasive sounds of the modern city from infiltrating his recordings. At the same

time, he felt frustrated by not being able to record the city. “When I go out on a movie, I’ll get all the dialog, but I’ll also capture ambient sounds of the avenues or streets we’re close to so they can create a bed in post,” he says. “With this one, I was a little bit disgruntled because I couldn’t do that. It was the opposite. I had to keep the city out.” Fortunately, the large-brimmed hats worn by the actors afforded an enclosed space where Hanlon could stash radio mics—in this case, the unobtrusive Countryman B6 lavaliers. “Any time we shot outside, my first question was, ‘Are they wearing hats?’” he says. “The hat brim in combination with the B6 was an effective way to shut out the city. It gave really good signal-tonoise ratio. That saved us a lot on the streets.” A building on Malcolm X Blvd., which runs right through the heart of Harlem, proved to be a particularly challenging location that is key to the film—for the scene at the end where Irene, Clare and Brian (Irene’s husband) attend a big party at a walk-up apartment on the top floor. The sequence starts outside in a quiet, wintery courtyard with the building looming over the trio. Their shoes crunch in the snow as they head toward the lobby.

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By Jennifer Walden

“That was a noisy area,” Hanlon recalls. “It was an enclosed group of buildings with a huge iron gate at the entrance, and beyond that gate was a very busy avenue—like Broadway. The grips were a great help here; we covered the whole gate with sound blankets. It didn’t block the noise completely, but I was trying to get the city to dissolve into more of a rumble rather than discernible sounds.” CAPTURING THE PERFORMANCE Passing is a dialog-driven film. The actors packed tremendous amounts of meaning into the subtle delivery of their lines. Hanlon’s approach to muffling the modern city sounds allowed dialog editor Branka Mrkic to filter out or significantly reduce the remaining rumble in post using iZotope RX, while still maintaining the quality and integrity of the on-set performances. Another challenging scene for production sound was with Irene and Brian driving home in a 1920s-era car. Hanlon placed a small Schoeps MK41 near the window to record Irene’s lines before she gets into the car; both actors were also wearing Sanken COS-11 lav mics paired with Lectrosonics transmitters and receivers. Brian moves over to let Irene drive—climbing

past the shockmount-secured Sennheiser MKH 50 shotgun mic that Hanlon clamped between the seats to capture both Brian’s and Irene’s lines. The car was, of course, being safely towed by a process trailer, on which Hanlon was riding while monitoring the tracks on his customized PortaBrace Wheeled Audio Cart Hard Case. It has a rack that houses a Lectrosonics Venue 2 modular receiver, a Sound Devices 788T recorder, and a Sound Devices CL-9 mixer. The traveling sound cart set up to record dialog in “The engine on the process trailer was so loud it Irene and Brian’s car. Inset: Production sound mixer was like sitting next to a generator,” Hanlon says. Paddy Hanlon’s sound cart, left, and sound bag. “I listened to all the mics, and they sounded fine in their own ways, but the MKH-50 but you couldn’t hear it at all. really saved us inside the car.” It was my job to make it sound During a street scene in which windy, to create all of that. ” Irene and her friend Felise encounter Clare’s white husband John, wind ATMOS MIXING AT HARBOR machines were used to create a There were actually two mixes gusty December day, and filming for the film. Ribicoff completed took place near the Brooklyn Bridge. the initial 5.1 mix at PostWorks These two difficult conditions made NY in August 2020. Then capturing usable production sound Passing was chosen for the Dolby questionable. Jacob Ribicoff, Institute Fellowship just before “The wind was blowing in the supervising sound editor/ its Sundance premiere, allowing actors’ faces, so it was blowing out a re-recording mixer for a final Atmos mix in Harbor bit on the radio mics, and there was no point in having the boom over the top as it Picture Company’s Studio A, which is equipped would get blown out, too.” he says. “So we were for theatrical Atmos, near-field Atmos, 7.1, and 5.1 surround mixing. It features an Avid S5 just getting a guide track, essentially.” To add some flavor, Hanlon sent boom console with JBL speakers throughout. “The film was posted to Frame.io that fall, and operator Richard Baldomero down the street to record kids on a nearby playground in case I was able to watch it again after not hearing the their ambient voices were needed to layer under mix for a while,” Ribicoff recalls. “Immediately, dialog edits. For this, Baldomero used a Schoeps there were changes I wanted to make. Then in MiniCMIT shotgun mic and Hanlon’s mobile late November, we got word of the Dolby grant, recording bag equipped with a Sound Devices so we had a chance to do more mixing. It’s funny, 633 mixer/recorder, three Lectrosonics 411a because I was thinking of possibly mixing the receivers, and three Lectrosonics SRb receivers. film in mono since it’s black and white, much While Baldomero recorded the children playing, like the approach on Mank. But when we got the Hanlon ended up getting clean dialog on the grant to mix in Atmos, that sealed the decision to not mix in mono.” turnaround takes. The additional Atmos channels were useful Although Hanlon worried that the windy street dialog might be marred by buffeting wind, for building up the world beyond the screen. supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer For instance, the height channels helped to Jacob Ribicoff—at Harbor Picture Company in add dimension to the townhouse in Harlem New York City—said the tracks sounded quite where Irene’s family lived. “The kids are playing upstairs, and we were able to have them stomping good. “Paddy [Hanlon] did an amazing job, because around, literally over your head,” says Ribicoff. when it came to me there was no wind distortion; “Also, the 7.1.2 beds are nice for spreading out we had clean recordings of the voices,” says the ambience and music.” Ribicoff makes the most of this during the Ribicoff, who has won Emmy and MPSE Golden Reel Awards for sound editing. “Visually, you final party scene. Guests are walking around, could see the wind blowing around the actors, as well as sitting and chatting. Their voices fill

the space and pan with the action. There’s diegetic music coming from the corner of the room, but there’s also a license track over top —a piano piece by Emahoy Tsegue Maryam Guebrou called “The Homeless Wanderer.” The party music clashes with the licensed track, creating a tense vibe in this otherwise buoyant atmosphere; it’s reflective of Irene’s mood. “This was one of several instances where Rebecca was adamant on combining layers that you wouldn’t often have going at the same time,” Ribicoff says. “It was tricky to have all those coexist in a way that made sense. Atmos helped with that, to give space to these layers of competing sounds.” Atmos was also helpful for creating the feeling of a bustling New York City of the 1920s. There is no wide, sweeping shot of the city in the opening sequence. Instead, director Hall simply filmed the feet of two women walking down the street into a toy store. Ribicoff then created the world through sound, filling the surrounding space with vintage horn honks and engines for cars passing by, sidewalk chatter, Foley footsteps for pedestrians in ‘20s footwear (courtesy of Foley Artist Marko Costanzo and Foley Mixer George Lara) and era-appropriate construction sounds. He says, “I did some research into construction tools of the time and discovered the power drill had started to be used around then. I put an old-sounding power drill way in the background. There were elevated subway trains and old telephones. I had a lot of good recordings of that period—even traffic beds—that I was able to lean on throughout the movie, enough so that the audience always feels that toehold on the period.” Ribicoff certainly appreciated and touted the benefits of being able to revisit a final mix. “Having the opportunity to come back to the mix, and being able to mix it in Harbor’s Studio A, a beautiful-sounding Atmos stage, I felt as if I was getting into another level of hearing, and that helped with the Foley and with the voices themselves; it was helpful in so many ways.” ■

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Editor’s Choice: Top New Products for a Pandemic Year

hat a strange year for new-product introductions. No tradeshow cycle to time the big announcements. Severe computer chip and supply chain problems. And a customer base that faced an uncertain future. And yet…Nearly every manufacturer we talked to—hardware. software and hybrids—was reporting banner sales leading into the end of the year, many exceeding pre-pandemic levels. There was certainly no shortage of new products. Here, in alphabetical order, Mix editors, contributors and product reviewers present their selections for the Top 20 Products of 2021.

ABLETON LIVE 11 Ableton Live has long provided a wealth of creative choices for composing, arranging and producing, and is renowned not only for its clip-launching but also for its stability and streamlined architecture. One capability the DAW has long lacked is comping, but Live 11 changed that with the introduction of well-implemented and easy-to-use comping features. Ableton also added linked-track editing, MPE support and Tempo Following. The latter allows Live to adjust its internal tempo in real-time based on an external source. Owners of Live Suite, Ableton’s top-of-theline edition, got several powerful new creative devices. Hybrid Reverb lets you combine algorithmic and convolution reverb. Spectral Resonator, Spectral Time, Inspired by Nature and PitchLoop89 continue Live’s tradition of plug-ins that let you creatively fold, spindle and mutilate your tracks. Live 11 is an excellent update overall, but the addition of comping is what caught our attention. —Mike Levine

ALLEN & HEATH DLIVE CTI1500 As part of the Audiotonix group of companies, most of them console makers, Allen & Heath has been at the forefront of technology advancements over the past couple of years, quickly responding to change. Early to adopt Dante networking technology and early to enter the hot installation market, Allen & Heath continues to innovate. This year, again reflecting the times, the company introduced its lightest and most compact fully-featured live console yet, the dLive CTi1500. The original dLive C1500 has gained a foothold in live sound in part due to the portability; the new edition eschews as much weight as possible, now weighing in at 25.4 pounds. The front panel remains largely the same, providing the familiar dLive feel, but redesigned to replace the armrest with steel curves. The console sports 12 faders (with six layers), built-in audio I/O, an audio networking port, a 12-inch capacitive touchscreen and the onboard Harmony UI. There’s also numerous rotary controls and 19 assignable softkeys. —Tom Kenny

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AUSTRIAN AUDIO CC8 MICROPHONE When Austrian Audio launched its debut product, the OC818, my review found a full-featured, exceptionally flat, neutral and colorless re-creation of most any source. Bland description, but the highest of compliments. All the same goes for the new small-diaphragm CC8 condensers, and there’s more, too. Amply armed for versatility (two-stage pad and HPFs), supplied with full kit (case, wind filters, clips, bar), solidly built and modestly designed, the CC8s are clearly part of the 818 family. The sonic similarities are abundant, too: very little compression, seemingly rulerflat response, pleasant off-axis response, neutral mids and a pleasantly natural balance that allows further EQ’ing. Great mic-to-mic consistency makes for easy stereo pairing and solid stereo imaging. I’m not entirely done putting the CC8s through all the paces yet, but with success on violins, handclaps, backing vocals, drum overheads, piano, percussion and acoustic guitar so far, it’s a safebet that I can recommend anywhere you’d want focused, small-diaphragm response from a lifelike and entirely neutral point of view. —Rob Tavaglione

AVID PRO TOOLS CARBON Carbon packs a potent punch in a single-rack unit. It’s a 25x34 AVB audio interface that features 8 mic/line preamps, 8 analog line I/O and 16 channels of digital I/O, a Pro Tools subscription and lots of cool plug-ins. I love that the onboard chips let you combine DSP processing with Native power, which lets you track with little to no latency. Any AAX/DSPcompatible plug-ins can be tracked through with the press of an onscreen button. I use it as my main studio interface but also as a powerful mobile rig. Because it connects to your Mac via AVB and Ethernet, it plugs right in. For mobile applications, I simply use an adapter to my MacBook Pro. On a recent session with Al DiMeola in a cool acoustic space, we used every ounce of this thing, including all four included headphone outputs, each with its own volume control. Connecting 8 channels of outboard optical preamp along with its 8 mic preamps, it was a plug-and-play experience with world-class sound. The 32-bit end-to-end production makes this thing sound like the full-fledged monster that it is. —Rich Tozzoli

BABY AUDIO SMOOTH OPERATOR Modern plug-ins have moved beyond recreations and emulations into the realms of the quirky, intelligent and heretofore impossible. NYC’s Baby Audio has mastered this trend, in hit after hit: first, I Heart NY (parallel compression), Parallel Aggressor (compression/VHS saturation), Spaced Out (delay/reverb/morphing) and now Smooth Operator, with smart spectral compression and resonance suppression. Acting like some sort of very-fast multiband compressor with a multitude of bands, deep processing power and the intelligence to “know what to do with it” SO can hone in on narrow problems and execute broad corrective strokes, all at once. Bass guitar note jumps, modal room resonance in omni mics, vocal sibilance, low-freq buildup in the mix, harsh hi-mids—no problem. Frequency-selective ducking via sidechaining? With SO you can attenuate only the exact frequencies you want from bass guitar with kick as your key, or duck the instrumental mix with keyed vocals, with precise control over what frequencies attenuate and by how much. Don’t be surprised if your mixes find SO on all your vocal tracks, on many instruments, some buses and maybe even the L/R, too. —Rob Tavaglione

ELECTRO-VOICE EVOLVE 50M The EVOLVE 50M is the newest and largest speaker in the Electro-Voice EVOLVE series of portable column P.A. speakers. It utilizes a 12-inch woofer and eight Neodymium 3.5-inch mid/HF drivers mounted on proprietary waveguides that produce a coverage angle of 120 degrees horizontal x 40 degrees vertical (asymmetric). The enclosure for the 12-inch sub incorporates an 8-channel mixer with four Combo mic/ line inputs, stereo line input (Combo or RCA jacks), wireless Bluetooth stereo input, balanced XLR mix outputs, and aux send outs for feeding a stage monitor. The mixer can be controlled from the woofer module or by using the E-V QuickSmart Mobile app. Struggling musicians will love this: two EVOLVE 50Ms can be linked using an Ethernet cable to form a stereo system with a single 16-channel mixer. —Steve La Cerra

DESKEW GIG PERFORMER V4 Gig Performer from Deskew is a plug-in host application that provides an easy way to manage entire instrument or effects rigs for live performance. Gig Performer can load any VST or AU plug-in, and route any output to any input without need for DAW software or a mixer. The GUI allows a user to create custom “Rackspaces” (collections of plug-ins and routing), where “Widgets” (controls such as knobs, switches, etc.) are dragged and dropped onto a custom rack panel, and then mapped to your preferred plug-in controls. Gig Performer 4 incorporates a Global Rackspace feature whereby you can insert effects once into the Global Rackspace and then share them with individual Rackspaces, enabling commonly used sounds to be accessed quickly throughout a setlist. —Steve La Cerra

L-ACOUSTICS L-ISA PROCESSOR II Over the past decade, L-Acoustics has become much more than loudspeakers. Just this year the company introduced the new SB10i subwoofer and the Contour XO premium in-ear monitor in conjunction with JH Audio. But for our annual award, we picked the revolutionary L-ISA Processor II, a 3D audio processing engine providing advanced objectbased mixing. The L-ISA Processor II doubles the original unit’s potential output count of 64 up to 128 outputs. Housed in a 3U chassis equipped with Neutrik connectors, the unit boasts a multi-ore architecture equipped with Milan-AVB dual-network redundancy; it also features MADI connections. Remotely controlled by L-ISA Controller software, L-ISA II is compatible with DeskLink, which places direct control of L-ISA objects on the channel strips of DiGiCo, SSL and Yamaha mixing consoles. —Tom Kenny

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LEAPWING ULTRAVOX PLUG-IN Leapwing’s new Ultravox is a simple vocal processor plug-in with four single-parameter controls: Compression, Harmonics, Air, and Gate. These are four well-tuned algorithms developed over time, especially for vocals. Sensitive to a singer’s dynamics with minimal collateral artifacts, the Compressor is a singleband compressor with variable attack and long release times. The Gate is designed to remove extraneous room noise and errant inhalations—it has a program dependent (medium-long) and a short release time. Harmonics adds second- and third-order harmonics that can add a certain “je ne sais quoi” character to any vocal. Air is a single control for adding air equalization in the 12kHz range. The four controls surround a fabulous circular display that shows the instantaneous signal level of the singer over a moving 360-degree “radar” sweep. I liked the stereo in and output meters and the numerous carefully designed presets included. —Barry Rudolph

IK MULTIMEDIA T-RACKS TAPE MACHINE COLLECTIONS Get the classic sounds of the Ampex 440, Studer A80, Revox PR99, MCI JH24 in one plug-in that gives you the amazing warmth that you’re used to hearing from these iconic tape machines! High-quality oversampling, sampling rates up to 192 kHz, Native compatibility with 64-bit applications, Fulllatency compensation support and full-latency compensation. The flexibility and sensitivity of each setting makes it realistic and helps to glue tracks together. Don’t miss the four latest T-RackS TASCAM tape machines; TEAC A-6100 MkII, TEAC A-3340S, TASCAM 388, and TASCAM Porta One (offers a choice of two cassette tape formulations: Type I and Type II). They are new this year and don’t disappoint! —Fela

KALI AUDIO IN-8 THREE-WAY STUDIO MONITOR The Kali Audio IN-8 Three-Way 2nd Gen Monitors are in my control room now and I get nothing but compliments on their sound. I’ve used Kali Audio monitors starting back when the company’s first LP-6 two-way monitors came out, and have watched them consistently improve. I like their true sound and performance. They present a solid stereo field with a locked-in center image due to (among other features) the co-incident (coaxial) midrange/ tweeter driver. After I set them up in my acoustically treated control room, mixes came together quickly, without second-guessing the bottom end level. Mixes translate as well as I have come to expect in other rooms and on different monitors. I’ve had much more expensive monitors in my studio but not necessarily better than the IN-8 2nd Gens. They are my solid choice! —Barry Rudolph

MOTU ULTRALITEMK5 The term “portable studio” gets thrown around loosely these days, but MOTU’s UltraLiteMk5 has the goods under the hood to make that idea fly. Boasting 18 inputs (two mic/ line, six line, 8-channel ADAT and S/PDIF), and 22 outputs (a front-panel headphone jack, 10 analog line outs including a Main L/R pair, ADAT and S/PDIF), the UltraLiteMk5 has enough connectivity to get some serious work done. ESS Sabre32 DAC technology gives the UltraLiteMk5 a dynamic range of 125 dB and a THD+N figure of -114, while the USB-C interface enables latency as low as 2.4 mS round-trip at 96 kHz with a 32-sample host buffer. The UltraLiteMk5 also provides a critical feature that we didn’t realize we needed until the Covid lockdown: loopback channels that can be mixed with live inputs for streaming purposes. —Steve La Cerra

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NEXO P+ SERIES Earlier this year NEXO expanded its P+ Series with the P15 coaxial loudspeaker and the L18 compact subwoofer. The P15 Point Source Speaker is a full-range (57 Hz to 20 kHz) speaker employing a custom-built coax driver with a 15-inch Neodymium lowfrequency transducer and a 3-inch highfrequency transducer. Dispersion of the HF driver is set at the factory to 60x60 degrees, but can be changed to 90x40 degrees or 60~100x40 degrees (asymmetrical) using magnetic, rotatable flanges. The cabinet can be used vertically or horizontally, and the touring version features a steel grille that can be removed without tools. The L18 Compact Horn Loaded Sub features an 18-inch Neodymium long-excursion driver in a horn-loaded birch/poplar plywood cabinet. Frequency range is stated as 32 to 120 Hz, and the L18 can generate a maximum SPL of 140 dB. —Steve La Cerra

OCEAN WAY AUDIO PRO3 MONITOR Ocean Way Audio’s monitors, designed by Allen Sides, have a well-deserved reputation for sonic excellence. The company builds most of its monitors with commercial studios in mind and prices them accordingly. That’s why we were delighted to see the company release the Pro3 monitors, which, at about $3,000 a pair, are not inexpensive but are considerably less costly than the rest of the Ocean Way product line. Did Ocean Way manage to maintain sonic excellence despite the lowered cost? The answer is a resounding Yes! The Pro3s offer both analog and digital inputs and provide extreme clarity in the top and midrange. The bass response, which goes down to 45 Hz, is impressive and tight and is notable considering the Pro3’s 7-inch drivers. Ocean Way includes a built-in highpass filter if you want to add a sub. In our testing, we were pleased with how clean the monitors sounded when turned up loud. The overall takeaway was that the Pro3 monitors’ exceptional quality transcended their price. —Mike Levine

PLUGIN ALLIANCE/BRAINWORX BX_CONSOLE AMEK 9099 Brainworx modeled this plug-in from the classic Rupert Neve-designed AMEK 9098i console, and it’s one of the most fully featured channel strips you’ll find. It also features the company’s Tolerance Modeling Technology, which emulates the minute channel-to-channel differences that exist on an analog console due to the tolerances of its components. . But it’s not the number of adjustable parameters as much as their utility that’s so impressive. Like on the original hardware, you get an immense amount of control. The channel contains several different sections. The first has the preamp and filters; the next is a flexible gate and expander. Then you get a relatively transparent-sounding compressor and a separate Limiter, with which you can squash the signal. And if you press its Clip button, you can add some dirt. The 4-band EQ section lets you change filter types (the choices vary depending on the band), and it even offers notch filters in the midrange bands. The combination of features, sound and the TMT technology make this plug-in one of 2021’s top products. —Mike Levine

PMC NEARFIELD, MIDFIELD MONITORS Enough top engineers and industry insiders heard PMC’s new line of near-and midfield monitors—the PMC6, PMC6-2 and PMC8-2, along with their associated subwoofers the PMC8 SUB and PMC8-2 SUB—at a launch party in September and in subsequent months that even though we haven’t yet had them in for review at press time, we are giving them a Gear of the Year Award. Let’s face it, immersive music is hot, and PMC has been at the forefront of development in its technologies and techniques for the past five years. The new line replaces the company’s existing twotwo Series and is said to have the same sound signature as the company’s main monitor products, making them ideal for mix-and-match 7.1.4 playback systems. Created from the ground up, the new monitors sport all-new drivers, DSP and Class-D amplifiers, as well as improvements to the proprietary ATL bass-loading and Laminair air flow technologies.The low frequency extension of the new designs comes due to advancements in both woofer and ATL bass loading technology. —Tom Kenny

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RETRO INSTRUMENTS 500PRE TUBE MIC PREAMP What first caught my eye about Retro’s 500PRE was that it was a vacuum tube mic preamp/line amp with three tubes in a singleslot 500 Series module. How is that possible? Don’t tubes need high voltages? Wow! I found the most pleasing, colorful sounds when recording or post-processing audio through one of these modules. Retro has devised a circuit that is powered from both the +48-volt phantom power and the ±16 VDC supplied in a standard 500 rack to offer up to 75 dB of mic gain and wonderfully warm sound. I liked the 500PRE especially for recording vocalists with rough, edgy voices using a condenser microphone. By slightly overdriving the 500PRE, it seems to mellow out the harshness. Likewise, by using the 500PRE as a line amp, it smoothed and warmed up prerecorded tracks with a kind of leveling amp effect. It adds an instant vibe to my mixes. I use both of my 500PREs on every mix! —Barry Rudolph

RME BABYFACE PRO FS On the surface, the Babyface Pro FS from RME Audio looks more like a desktop monitor controller than an audio interface, but make no mistake: this is a high-end audio path for serious recording. Analog I/O includes two digitally controlled microphone preamps with phantom power, two ¼-inch TS analog instrument/line level inputs, and balanced line-level XLR outs. Outputs 3 and 4 feed a ¼-inch headphone output optimized for high-impedance phones and a 3.5mm output optimized for low-impedance phones, and can route a mix independent from the control room mix. Optical I/O supports eight channels of ADAT I/O at 44.1 or 48 kHz/24-bit, or four channels at 96 kHz/24-bit (S/MUX II), and the unit can operate at sample rates ranging from 44.1 to 192 kHz. —Steve La Cerra

SENNHEISER EVOLUTION WIRELESS DIGITAL Sennheiser’s Evolution Wireless Digital Series was designed to make it easy for musicians who do their own tech work to set up, coordinate and use a high-performance wireless system. Products include the EW-D EM digital half-rack, single-channel receiver; EW-D SKM digital handheld transmitter (which accepts any Sennheiser or Neumann wireless capsule), and the EW-D SK digital bodypack transmitter, which can be used with a CI1 instrument cable as well as a variety of lav or headset mics. Evolution Wireless Digital systems transmit digitally in the UHF band and do not utilize companding circuitry. The Smart Assist app helps users configure a system by scanning the local RF environment to find open frequencies and then automatically setting wireless links at 600 kHz intervals without need for any frequency calculation. Bluetooth Low Energy allows remote access to the system and facilitates sync between transmitters and receivers. —Steve La Cerra

SESSIONWIRE 2.1 REMOTE COLLABORATION Sessionwire 2.1 is a live, online communication/collaboration tool specifically designed for music makers, producers and audio professionals. Sessionwire provides 2-way audio between each member’s DAW for talkback communication and high-quality stereo audio streams using a single, integrated software program that runs in MacOS and Windows computers along with any DAW. Besides an Internet connection, there are three components. The Sessionwire Community is a tier-access system with both free and paid plans available. The Sessionwire app runs along with your DAW session. This is a real-time managerial and monitoring interface featuring a member search engine, two-way high-quality audio/video, drag-anddrop files, your CPU and Internet connection status, audio meters, talkback audio stream facilities, and much more. Sessionwire 2.1 finally made the remote session collaboration dream a reality—and just in the nick of time! —Barry Rudolph

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SPL MARC ONE CONTROLLER/INTERFACE The SPL Marc One Monitoring and Recording Controller is a beast, providing high-end quality whether you’re listening back or putting down tracks. It offers three monitoring modes, a 32-bit AD/DA converter and a smart, user-friendly design. All of the TS and TRS inputs and outputs on the back of the unit stick out for better grounding. While reviewing the Marc One, we found the amazing resolution and high-quality build combined perfectly as we toggled seamlessly between studio monitors and headphones. As a monitor controller, SPL got the layout perfect for muscle-memory mixing, with the monitor toggle switch and volume knob ideally located for quick adjustments. When you consider that it’s also an interface for recording, able to record high-resolution audio from 10 Hz to 200 kHz, the $899 price tag is definitely worth it. —Fela

SSL UF 8 ADVANCED STUDIO DAW CONTROLLER I was looking for a desktop DAW controller that was small, easy to set up and learn, plus it had to conform to my particular mixing workflow. The UF 8 came shining through, and it works with up to three different DAWs with the ability to switch between them “on the fly” using the 360° Control software. Having a standard 17-inch width means it fits into a rack case or in a cutout space right in the center of my desktop. With the UF 8 now flush-mounted in my desk and just in front of my computer monitors, I’m able to use the touch responsive motor faders to do a “proper” hands-on music mix. Up to four UF 8s for 32 faders total can be run together. I like being able to program a few quick keys for commonly used Pro Tools operations, and I like the large Channel control knob for adjusting plug-in parameters microscopically. A lot of mouse/click functions in Pro Tools are streamlined; automation modes, mute/ solo, send/return and such are handled with dedicated lighted buttons on the UF 8. Awesome choice! —Barry Rudolph

SONNOX CLARO What I like about the new Claro EQ is both its simplicity and its complexity. It’s a multiband EQ that offers three distinct views: Produce, Tweak and Mix. Tweak is the most comprehensive, with all bands and filters available sitting above a visual real-time analyzer. Produce has three bands of tone EQ for quickly offering up broad strokes to your audio that includes M/S capability—my favorite is quickly spreading highs with the “air” frequency. Mix is unique in that it lets you see all of your Claro instances across your session and gauge how the audio interacts. Mix shines for me because it lets you quickly see where your frequencies compete with each other, allowing for easy corrections. I use it to compare drums with bass, drums with guitars and anything else that might have tonal conflicts. You can use an invert EQ function where boosting one track will cut the corresponding frequencies on another—an incredibly useful tool. —Rich Tozzoli

UAD APOLLO SOLO I tracked and mixed with Solo at a friend’s studio a number of times and it was a blast to work with. I use a number of Apollos in my work, especially when I fly to various locations. This compact unit is especially cool because, via Thunderbolt 3, it’s bus-powered and has two Unison mic preamps, which we loaded up with the included UA 610 Tube Preamp/EQ plug-ins. We also love the near-zero-latency tracking, which is possible with the real-time UAD processing and the headphone amp, which was split into a Y cable for the two of us, was plenty loud and clear. It has everything you need right on top—Input, filter, phantom, PAD, phase and Link, as well as Preamp selection and Monitor buttons below the large rotary Volume/Level knob. On the back are simply two balanced TRS outputs, two mic/ line inputs and a Thunderbolt connection. With what it offers in a rugged desktop 2x4 with the badass UAD plug-ins, it’s well deserving of top awards. —Rich Tozzoli

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2021 Pro Audio Holiday Gift Guide By Russ Long

’ll be damned if another holiday season isn’t already approaching and I’ve yet to buy a single gift. I have so many people to shop for, but thankfully I have a plan. With dozens of hits under his belt and more around the corner, F. Reid Shippen knows the importance of accurate monitoring, which is why I’m giving him a pair of Auralex ProPOD Acoustic Decoupler sets. I picked them up for myself last summer and was amazed at how much they improved the low-frequency clarity and imaging of my monitor configuration. If you aren’t a listener already, you owe it to yourself to check out A Little Bit Famous with Ted Marotta, a fantastic podcast that only gets better with the right microphone, which is why I’m giving Ted Earthworks’ new ETHOS broadcast mic. I’ve been playing with the mic for the past several weeks and have already used it to record nearly a dozen voiceovers. I’m blown away by the sound quality. The Satsuma and Honeydew IEMs, manufactured by Campfire Audio, offer prolevel IEM performance without the excessive price tag. I’ve been impressed with their build quality and superb sound performance. The Satsuma ($199) is the more accurate of the two (and my favorite). I’m giving a set of these to Vance Powell so he can check his mixes out while running from studio to studio. I’m getting “The Beatles: Get Back Book” for

mastering engineer Jim DeMain. I always thought Let It Be was the Beatles breakup album. The book, with text made up entirely of dialog from documentary footage shot during the making of the album, is worth it for the photos alone— Jim is also a world-class photographer. The accompanying Peter Jackson documentary titled The Beatles: Get Back debuted in November, and based on the teasers I’ve viewed online, it’s going to be fabulous! Renowned studio engineer Steve Marcantonio frequently engineers sessions in Studio A at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios. The studio’s backbone is a Neve 8078 console (previously owned by Donald Fagen!) that has been highly modified. I know Steve misses the sound of that desk when working at his home studio, so I’m going to give him the KIT Plugins BB N105 plug-in, which perfectly emulates the sound of the classic console, modifications included! After Dennie Miller (FOH, Miguel & Volbeat) and Kenny Sellers (FOH, Twenty One Pilots) turned me onto the Peak Design Everyday Backpack that they each carry, I picked one up last summer and fell in love with everything about it. It looks great, it’s flexible, it’s well made, and it easily carries all the gak I need traveling between studios and live gigs. I’m going to give one of these beauties to Matt Herr, who travels the world as Elton John’s FOH mixer. Synth sage Tony Miracle is an in-demand

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programmer and remixer, as well as a founding member of the synth-pop underground superstar group Venus Hum. Tony has been a good friend for over 30-years and has an encyclopedic knowledge of synths and their contribution to modern music. Mike Metlay’s new book “SYNTH GEMS 1 Exploring Vintage Synthesizers” will keep Tony drooling for hours, and as an Erasure fan, I know he’ll love Vince Clarke’s introduction. I’m getting Sonnect’s Sound Bullet for my buddy Jay Vicari, who has been the music mixer for SNL for decades. Jay can’t afford to miss an input, and while the Q Box performs great, the Sound Bullet is a fraction of the size, has more features, and is built like a tank. A longtime member of Michael McDonald’s legendary band and one of Nashville’s most sought after studio bassists, Jacob Lowery hosts the hilarious The Sideman Chronicles podcast, where he talks to studio legends about their craft. He records his podcast from his home studio, but I know if I get him AKG’s new ARA USB microphone, he’ll be able to record it from anywhere. All of this shopping has me exhausted, but I’ve saved myself for last. All I need to put a smile on my face this holiday season is the new Mojave Audio MA-37. This modern classic was inspired by the Sony C37-A, which has been a studio mainstay for decades. Okay, back to mixing. Looks like I’ll be needing some extra cash. Happy holidays everyone! ■

Tech Audio-Technica BP898 and BP899 Lavaliers

Audio-Technica has unveiled a pair of new subminiature condenser lavalier microphones with the arrival of the BP898 cardioid condenser and BP899 omnidirectional condenser models. The mics are intended for usage by stage and television talent, lecturers, and worship leaders. Both lavs are 5.3 mm in diameter and available in a number of different terminations for wired or wireless use. The BP898 is available in five black-finished models while the BP899 is available in a total of 17 different models, all with permanently attached cables, and varying termination and power configurations. Most of the BP899s are available in two available sensitivities, and black or theater beige finishes. The BP899 features an open-diaphragm design with protective mesh that repels sweat and other moisture. It includes a resonance cap that can be applied to the mic for greater intelligibility and to direct sweat and moisture away. The BP899 is also available in low-sensitivity versions, for dynamic theater performances or other high-SPL applications.

L-Acoustics L-ISA Processor II L-Acoustics has launched the L-ISA Processor II, the next generation of its 3D audio processing engine. Similar to its predecessor, L-ISA Processor II is a hardware solution that provides advanced object-based mixing. While both units offer control of spatial audio processing and virtual acoustics for up to 96 audio objects based on speaker positioning information and mixing parameters, the L-ISA Processor II doubles the original unit’s potential output count of 64 up to 128 outputs, allowing it to tackle larger, more complex events. Nonetheless, most productions are unlikely to utilize 100-plus outputs, so L-Acoustics is offering L-ISA Processor II in a choice of four output counts—16, 32, 64 or 128—from the same device, with various capacities accessible via different lifetime licenses at tiered pricing levels. Customers at all price points now have access to the same immersive tools, 128 inputs and 96 kHz sampling as large productions, but at a scalable cost. Housed in a 3U chassis equipped with Neutrik connectors, L-ISA Processor II is remotely controlled by L-ISA Controller software. Boasting a multi-core architecture, the new device is equipped with Milan-AVB dualnetwork redundancy, and also features MADI

new products

connections, allowing signals to come in on MADI and exit via Milan-AVB. It is compatible with DeskLink, which places direct control of L-ISA objects on the channel strips of DiGiCo, SSL and Yamaha mixing consoles. L-ISA Processor II will begin shipping to customers in the first quarter of 2022.

Solid State Logic Live L450 and L650 Consoles Solid State Logic has announced a pair of new consoles for its SSL Live range—the L450 and L650. Additionally, the company has released its Live V5 software for all SSL Live desks. The new SSL Live L450 and L650 consoles find the L450 console improving upon the L350 in terms of processing power, while the L650 (seen here) is reportedly the most powerful SSL Live console to date. The layout of both desks will be based around the triple-wide fader bank configuration currently found on the L200 console. Cutaways for external screens are also incorporated to help maintain line of sight to the artist and stage. The L650 console shares the same knob-per-function Channel Control tile as the L550 Plus, while the L450 features a tablet panel for use with SSL Live’s control app, TaCo. While no set timeframe has been announced for the new consoles’ release, an SSL statement says the company “will begin rolling out” the desks as more tours and events come back. The new Live V5 software is available now, adding native Meyer Sound Spacemap Go Immersive control, as well as onboard control of key features within Shure ULX-D and Axient Digital microphones.

Audix A231 Studio Vocal Microphone Audix has introduced the A231, a large-diaphragm studio vocal microphone. The A231 features a 33-millimeter, true condenser featuring a precisiontensioned diaphragm with gold deposition all the way to its far edges. According to Audix, this produces a diaphragm area approximately 25 percent larger than that of a typical largediaphragm condenser mic. Meanwhile, a cardioid pickup pattern offers a predictable proximity effect and off-axis rejection. The capsule feeds circuitry designed for quietness, while an active driven shield is employed in an effort to protect the signal path from interference and capacitive coupling. A specially designed internal shock mount is also used to dampen handling noise, enabling the A231 to be used for both studio and live applications. ■

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Tech // reviews NUGEN Audio Paragon ST Convolution Reverb Plug-in With Tons of User Control By Steve La Cerra

ntroduced late last year, NUGEN Audio’s Paragon reverb plug-in was the first 3D-compatible convolution reverb, supporting up to 7.1.2 channels of audio and making it suitable for use with Dolby Atmos and other immersive audio applications. NUGEN recently introduced Paragon ST, a stereo version of the plug-in. Aimed at the music production market and priced more affordably than the multichannel version, Paragon ST is the subject of this review. Paragon ST is a true convolution reverb that offers the wide range of control normally associated with traditional algorithmic reverb. It uses resynthesis technology (developed by Dr. Jez Wells at the University of York) that allows reverb decay and room size parameters of the original space’s Impulse Response to be significantly altered without the use of time stretching, which can cause undesirable artifacts. Paragon ST also provides features typically not found in

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convolution reverbs, such as modulation, control over stereo width and microphone distance. Paragon ST requires an iLok for authorization. It supports AAX, VST3, AU and AudioSuite plug-in formats (64-bit only) on Mac OSX 10.9 and Windows Vista or above. The user interface for Paragon ST displays one of three panels: Main Panel, IR Panel or I/O Panel. Regardless of which Panel is viewed, a control bar at the top shows Bypass, Undo/Redo, a Preset Browser, A/B memory comparison, About, and an Update Icon. Presets are auditioned by scrolling through preset names using the arrows, or by clicking on the Preset Management button to open the preset library. THE MAIN PANEL Parameters for a preset are accessed from the Main Panel and include highpass and lowpass filters, pre-delay, decay, size multiplier, brightness, stereo width, crosstalk, modulation and microphone distance. Most of the parameters are self-explanatory, but a few of them merit explanation. The stereo width control defaults to 100%, but when set to 0%, it collapses the reverb to mono. Conversely, when set to 200%, left-toright separation is exaggerated. Microphone distance adjusts the balance between early and late reflections. Lower settings increase the amount of early reflections, while higher settings increase the amount of late reflections. Modulation adds a chorus effect to the reverb tail. Adding high levels of modulation depth to a vocal reverb produced a nightmarish, out-of-tune effect that would be appropriately disturbing for use in a horror flick. Crosstalk determines how much dry signal from one channel is fed into the opposite reverb channel. If crosstalk is set to 0%, then the position of the reverb follows the pan of a stereo send into the reverb. For example, if you pan the send left, the reverb

returns on the left side; if the crosstalk is set to 100% and the reverb send is panned left, the reverb returns on both sides, though the effect is more prominent on the left. This can be used to create interesting ambient effects where the dry signal is panned to one side and the reverb is panned to the opposite side (more on crosstalk below). The resynthesis process is not-quite-realtime, so there may be a brief lag while Paragon ST resynthesizes a model. During that time (or when switching presets), the NUGEN update icon in the control bar switches to a circular progress meter. The manual states that changing a parameter in a preset results in a star being displayed next to the preset name, but preset names often displayed a star even when first recalled from the library.

THE I/O PANEL The I/O Panel is where you’ll find settings for mix, trim, HPF/LPF and “global” reverb parameters such as pre-delay, decay, crosstalk for input or output, and wet on/off. The HPF/LPF, pre-delay, decay time and crosstalk have independent settings for each channel, but the channels cannot be linked, which is a bit of a drag. Some of these parameters have the same names as parameters in the Main Panel, which can be a source of confusion. For example, the settings for pre-delay and decay in the I/O Panel are separate from those on the Main Panel. The actual pre-delay or decay in a preset will be the sum of the values on the I/O Panel and the Main Panel, so it’s possible to see a pre-delay value of zero in the Main Panel and still hear pre-delay,

mix, adding a realistic sense of space without taking over the mix. Modifying it with a shorter decay time and less pre-delay created a great impression of a smaller room. “Bright Chamber” is a wonderful choice for snare and toms, and even sounded good on kick drum, producing an incredibly natural ambience that had presence in the upper-mids without being splashy. Testing NUGEN’s claim that the resynthesis process doesn’t create artifacts, I cranked the decay and size parameters on this preset to x2 and x3, respectively. The result was a larger space that still sounded natural and maintained a smooth reverb tail. The top end of Paragon ST is very smooth, and I didn’t have to chop off the high frequencies the way I often do with algorithmic reverbs to

Paragon ST is not about providing a vast library of IRs for convolution; it is more about providing a manageable number of IRs that can effectively be transformed into a wide variety of useful spaces. THE IR PANEL The IR Panel is where you load, audition and make changes to impulse responses, though you can’t load in your own IRs. Along the right side of this panel is a set of controls for Test Sounds, a library of built-in music and sound effects files that can be used for auditioning IRs. This should be standard issue for every reverb plug-in. The center of the IR Panel can show either a spectrogram view or the main EQ settings for the IR. The power of the modifier window lies in the EQ nodes that can be applied to either the amplitude or decay response of the IR (up to five nodes each). You simply grab a node and drag it to make changes to the IR. The amplitude modifiers change the reverb EQ (no surprise there), but the decay modifiers make frequency-dependent changes to the decay rate. Click the + button to add an EQ node in the decay window, drag the node along the X-axis to the frequency range you’d like to change, then drag it along the Y-axis to change the decay time in that frequency range. This is a powerful feature for tweaking IRs that’s very easy to use. Pressing Reset in the modifier window does not reset the modifier to factory default settings; it resets the response curve to flat.

depending upon settings, in the I/O Panel. Crosstalk on the I/O Panel also influences the amount of bleed between channels. The effects of varying crosstalk settings on the I/O Panel and the Main Panel can be a rabbit hole; leave the crosstalk values at the factory defaults and move on with your life. MAKE ROOM I used Paragon ST for sessions running under Digital Performer and Pro Tools, and—UI quirks aside—the results were impressive. While listening to some of the presets for use on a female vocal, I landed on “Large Club,” which is absolutely stunning. It sat perfectly in the

PRODUCT SUMMARY COMPANY: NUGEN Audio PRODUCT: Paragon ST WEBSITE: www.nugenaudio.com PRICE: $299 ($149 until Dec. 6, 2021) PROS: Produces beautiful, natural-sounding reverbs. Allows significant modification to IRs without producing audible artifacts. You can dig deep, but you don’t have to. CONS: Minor inconsistencies in the UI. Some of the editing parameters don’t link channels. Does not allow importing IRs.

keep them from getting “zippy.” The default setting for the HPF in many of the presets allowed more low end in the reverb than I prefer, but this was easily remedied by raising the HPF frequency to a value between 250 and 500 Hz. One particular mix I worked on had a stereo premix of the drum tracks, without any effects. I wanted to place the drums in a space but was concerned that adding ambience to the entire kit would turn it to mud. Not so with Paragon ST. “Medium Tiled Room” (is that a nod to the PCM70?) gave the drums a lifelike space in which to breathe, without compromising clarity. Changing the mic distance parameter in this model not only affected the balance between early and late reflections, but also impacted the stereo image: As mic distance was reduced, the left-to-right imaging of the kit became more defined, making it perfect for this application. NUGEN Audio’s philosophy in creating Paragon ST is not about providing a vast library of IRs for convolution; it is more about providing a manageable number of IRs that can effectively be transformed into a wide variety of useful spaces—and the company has achieved that goal. The models are realistic and natural, and can be modified beyond the constraints of conventional convolution reverbs while maintaining those qualities. Definitely recommended. ■

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Tech // reviews Reverb Foundry Tai Chi Innovative Reverb Plug-in and Sound Design Tool By Barry Rudolph

ai Chi, a Chinese martial art dating back more than 700 years, is practiced today as an intense, whole-body exercise using artistic poses, Qigong breathing and energy methodologies. Tai Chi is also the name of Reverb Foundry’s newest algorithmic reverb that breathes new energy into conceptualizing reverb sounds, modernizing sound design and creating novel synthesizer augmentations. Tai Chi is the third release in Reverb Foundry’s software reverb product line. It joins M7 Link, a standalone software remote controller for the famed Bricasti M7 hardware reverb, and the HD-Cart reverb plug-in, which emulates the classic Lexicon 480L hardware unit. What? You’ve not heard of the company? Reverb Foundry was founded in the UK in 2018 by Matthew Hill, its lead product developer, and David Bryce, head of sales and marketing. Hill’s other software plug-in company is LiquidSonics, with its Seventh Heaven Impulse Response reverb (a software version of the Bricasti M7 hardware reverb), an algorithmic reverb called Cinematic Rooms, and Reverberate 3 software for combining impulse responses to create wholly new reverbs.

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Tai Chi is a 64-bit processor (iLok-authorized) and requires an Intel or AMD processor or Apple’s M1 using Rosetta 2. Native Apple M1 support is said to be coming soon. NAVIGATING TAI CHI The no-nonsense, monochromatic look of Tai Chi’s GUI, appearing only in black and orange, works well for accessing and adjusting all parameters. I found the manual indispensable for fully understanding Tai Chi’s powerful capabilities. If you don’t want to bother reading, or are just in a hurry, all of the familiar reverb parameter controls are there, with 75 (and counting) starting-point presets included. Getting to know Tai Chi and its GUI is easy because it is organized into three horizontal rows. At the top, just under the requisite plug-in frame with its preset selection, A/B preset switches and preferences/settings area, is the first row, which shows five selectable tabs or subsections. They are named from left to right in somewhat of a hierarchy of importance: Master, Advanced, Dynamics, Fidelity and Equaliser. Clicking on any of the five tabs changes the names and functions on the second row’s six controls to the parameters required for that tab. Always visible and available on the GUI’s right side are the input/output meters and the Output Mix section, with Wet/Dry, Reflection/Reverb balance, and Master Gain controls. Rather than using the typical send/return reverb setup, I found it better to use Tai Chi’s internal Wet/Dry Balance—especially for creating signature “hook” effects. Tai Chi works great on stereo submaster buses in Pro Tools, especially for elements such as drums, keyboards or backing vocals. The third row occupies the entire bottom half of Tai Chi’s GUI. There, you’ll find the Multiband Reverb Time Multipliers. This looks and operates like a multiband EQ, but it controls the RT60 decay times within carefully defined frequency bands. You can select either three or four bands, or bypass it.

For global reverb frequency sculpting, there is a Treble Contouring section with its semi-parametric 6, 12, 18, 24 dB-per/octave lowpass filter, while the Bass Contouring controls enable either dampening or exaggerating the reverb’s low frequencies. I used these sections as finishing touches when programming a new reverb. MASTER, ADVANCED TABS When Tai Chai first instantiates, Master is the default tab, with controls and parameters most will recognize immediately. Reverb Time has RT60 values up to 89.9 seconds, culminating in a Freeze feature; Pre-delay is either tempo-synched or variable up to 500 ms; and I loved the Width control, which uses Mid/Side techniques to vary the stereo width from mono up to 150 percent. Next in the Master tab is Reflections, where you may select the physical space for Tai Chi to emulate, be it a Room, Hall, Church, Garage or Stadium. A control called Pattern works with another control called Spacing; together, they set the reflectivity, or number of reflections, and the time between reflections. Back in the Output section, the Reflection/Reverb balance control sets the balance between the reflections of the selected space and its reverberation. This is a powerful design tool that controls the reverb’s core properties and sound. Using the Wet/Dry control at fully wet, I found it easier to adjust the ratio of reflections versus reverberation. Reflections are the discrete actual “slap” or flutter echoes in a space. There is a big difference between the number, spacing and color of reflections in Tai Chi’s Room emulation versus its Stadium! Selecting the space is the most important first step in designing a new reverb preset. Once I had a space picked out in the Master tab, the Advanced tab opens up granular access to more arcane reverb parameters. The manual explains in good detail: Density, Diffusion/ Diffusion Size, Chorus/Mod Rate and Wander. The Density control sets how smooth the reverb sounds—how well the reflections are heard within the reverb’s tail. I found sustaining synth pads or strings to sound better using high Density values, whereas percussion and drum kits with single, sharp attacks become flams. The Diffusion and Diffusion Size controls

adjust how much the reverb is time-smeared, with higher Diffusion values equaling smoother reverb. Finally, the Chorus, Mod Rate and Wander controls modulate the reverb loops within Tai Chi. The overall effect is to thicken the reverb without too noticeable pitch-shifting. Tai Chi has many of the same parameter names I recognized from classic reverbs I’ve always admired, such as the Lexicon 224 and others. DYNAMICS TAB The Dynamics tab has the controls of a stereo compressor because that is exactly what it is! With Threshold, Ratio, Knee, Attack, Release and Trim (makeup gain) controls, you can Compress or Duck either the reverb and reflections, or the reverb signal only. I immediately tried using Dynamics for a lead vocal in a Pop music mix. The problem was how to retain intelligibility and also have a lush, long, well-heard reverb. The singer sang percussively, with rapid-fire lyrics that quickly started to lose intelligibility as I increased the RT60 time. I inserted a Mono-to-Stereo instance of Tai Chi into the lead vocal chain right after heavily compressing it using Kush Audio’s AR-1 Lisson Grove plug-in. With the vocal track now stereo, I used an extremely long RT60 time of 7.6 seconds, no Pre-delay, 150% Width, and

PRODUCT SUMMARY COMPANY: Reverb Foundry PRODUCT: Tai Chi WEB: www.reverbfoundry.com/tai-chi/ PRICE: $199 MSRP; Tai Chi Lite: $99 PROS: A sound-design plug-in with many possibilities beyond reverbs. CONS: Deep dive for some but worth learning; a little CPU needy.

selected the Stadium space with Wide Reflection Spacing. I then used Duck mode to compress the reverb only and not the reflections (you have a choice) whenever the vocal track exceeded the threshold setting. Using the Reflection/Reverb balance control, I favored the reflections over reverb so that the vocal had a slapback effect, but the reverb tails were suppressed whenever the singer sang. However, when the singer stopped singing, such as during a break before the next verse, the super-long reverb continued to sustain through that break! I used the Multiband RT Multiplier to lengthen the reverb decay in a broad midrange area, but went much shorter in the bass so that the vocal track could be “tucked” into the track yet still be understood. Fidelity is for designing the overall sonic quality of the reverb by distorting the input signal to the reverb processor for the crunchy sound of many vintage 70s and 80s digital reverbs. Controls here include: Input Bandwidth; a Bit Crusher section adds dirt selectively to the Output, Reverb or Reflections in any amount(s); and the Recirculation controls affect the way the reverb loops around itself. The Equaliser does not touch the dry signal and offers 6, 12, 18, 24 dB/octave shelving filters. LOCK IT IN One of many new ideas carried out well in Tai Chi is Parameter Lock, which facilitates searching and toggling through different presets by allowing you to lock down any parameter from change, as is normal when switching presets. I was looking for a room (or plate) reverb with a RT60 of around 2 seconds, no pre-delay and a darker sound. By locking Reverb Time, Pre-delay and the 500 Hz 24 db/octave rolloffs in both the Master and Reverb Contouring sections, no matter what preset I switched to, those basic parameters stayed the same. And there is a way to reset all parameter locks with one click—awesome! Tai Chi has proven to me to be more than a reverb plug-in by way of its imaginative design and extensive, deep parameter control. Brilliant ideas and products like this don’t come around that often, and I think Tai Chi should be standard kit in any plug-in folder and/or session template. Highly recommended! ■

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Tech // review shorts Warm Audio WA-8000 Mic Warm Audio excels at re-creating vintage microphones and outboard gear, and selling the units at affordable prices. The company describes its latest product, the WA-8000, as Serious bang “a professional large-diaphragm tube-driven for the buck studio condenser microphone.” What they can’t say for legal reasons, but imply heavily, is that it’s an emulation of the Sony C800G, the legendary and expensive mic (a new one costs over $10K and vintage ones go for over $20K) that has long been a favorite in the hip-hop and R&B worlds, particularly in the 1990s. The WA-8000 comes in a large, heavy-duty, plastic hard-shell case. Inside is the mic, a shock mount, a power supply with an IEC cable and a 7-pin cable made by Gotham Switzerland. The metal shock mount seems solidly made. The mic looks a lot like the C800G, with a similar external heat sink, although it is somewhat smaller. The heat sink isn’t just window dressing; when the mic is on, it gets warm. According to Warm Audio, the WA-8000’s internal components are “true to spec” with the original. These include a Lundahl transformer, a brass K-67-style capsule and a 6AU6 tube. One wonders how Warm can match the parts at a tenth of the cost, but that’s the kind of thing the company has been doing successfully for a while. Like the C800G, the WA-8000 features both cardioid and omnidirectional polar patterns. Alas, I don’t own a C800G to compare with the WA-8000. The only comparison I could make was of their frequency response curves. Although they weren’t identical, Warm Audio engineered the WA-8000 to have a largely similar response to the Sony, both in cardioid and omni modes. The most significant difference I noticed was in cardioid, where the WA-8000 has a presence boost that peaks at about 5 dB at 12 kHz, which is several dB more pronounced than the Sony’s peak in that area. Specs aside, I was impressed when I recorded with the WA-8000. I tracked several different vocals, and the WA8000 provided a detailed, present sound, which is what the C800G was renowned for. The vocal tracks I recorded sounded clear and nicely balanced. They were a little less beefy in the bottom end than I’d expect from a tube mic, but that worked well on vocals. The recordings sounded more finished, even before I

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applied any EQ or compression. Getting a good vocal sound with the WA-8000 was close to effortless. Warm Audio says the mic is also well-suited for capturing acoustic instruments. I tried it on a couple of acoustic guitars, a mandolin, a tambourine and a shaker. The acoustic guitars came out clean and present. The mandolin sounded overly bright, but it became nice and punchy once I rolled off some highs. The mic did a good job on the shaker and the tambourine, nicely capturing their transients. I was also curious to try it on a guitar cabinet. I placed it about five inches from the speaker of a Twin Reverb, aimed a little bit off-axis, and recorded myself playing clean rhythm on a Strat. I was quite pleased with the clarity and realism. Without having a C800G to compare it to, it’s hard to judge how close the WA-8000 is to the original, but it certainly seems to capture the vibe. If you want a mic that gives you a forward and present sound for vocals and other sources, Warm has succeeded once again in creating an excellent product that performs above its price point of $1,199. —Mike Levine

Morton KickTone Microphone The Morton KickTone microphone is designed to capture high-SPL, low-frequency sounds. As its name implies, the KickTone mic is for the drum kit’s bass drum, but it works great Try adding in picking up the sound of any drum, bass KickPort! instrument, keyboard or even vocal. The KickTone starts with a dynamic element with a 5.25-inch polycarbonate diaphragm encased in a tough, ABS plastic case that measures 6.5 inches in diameter and 3.5 inches deep. The mic weighs about 2 pounds and is slightly conically shaped, with a strong stainless steel mesh in front of the dynamic element inside to protect it. It also has nine mesh-covered, oval vents surrounding the side. The KickTone actually contains two microphone elements, with a high-frequency mic (in the 4 to 7 kHz range) mounted just over the center of the main element. The two elements’ outputs are summed together using a passive resistor network to the output. KickTone has a rated output impedance of 100 ohms. The KickTone mic has a male Neutrik XLR output connector mounted next to a standard threaded microphone mount. This mount swivels and locks down for exact positioning in front of a kick drum. The microphone is rated from 10 Hz to 10 kHz, with a sensitivity of 87 dB SPL measured at 1 meter. Maximum SPL is 175 dB. The KickTone has a slide bracket, or flange, on its front

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that matches a KickPort, a popular bass drum enhancer that is installed in a 5.25-inch hole in the kick drum’s front resonant head. This makes KickTone usable in two ways: on a short mic stand in front of the kick drum or attached directly to the KickPort itself without a stand. No stand offers a cleaner stage look, and, as the mic is mounted directly on the front head, there is less leakage picked up from the rest of the kit, as well as from the stage. We tested the Morton KickTone microphone in a few different positions in the studio on the same Ludwig 14 x 22 bass drum. First up was to replace our usual microphone in a similar position out in front of the resonant front head. We got good subsonic energy, but felt we needed a more high-frequency attack to cut through the song we were recording—a second mic in phase with the KickTone would take care of that! We then tried it exactly over the hole in the head and got a little more attack with the same sub energy. I was dying to try the KickPort, so the third test was with KickTone attached to it. This is an instant winner; just slide the KickTone on, and with the bass drum sealed up and somewhat deader, we obtained much more subsonic energy and more high-frequency attack as well. In addition, my drummer noticed a different (playing) feel with a noticeable difference in the way the beater hit the head. There was also much less leakage from the rest of the kit. Any live sound mixer will love the minimal leakage and also love the option to drive the subwoofers to whatever the music demands. This was our favorite sound and use of KickTone. But we also tried removing the front head and moved the mic to near the center of the drum and about halfway inside. The mic picked up a lot less sub, with a midrange “honk” in the 700Hz range. This sound would require using an equalizer to pull the sound more into a usable state.

One note: The location of the XLR jack on the mic causes the XLR mic cable connector to be in the way of the swivel mount. This limits the angles possible for the mic on the end of a short boom stand. I enjoyed using the KickTone microphone, and my drummer/engineer/producer, who was skeptical about it, is now a true believer. So am I! Highly recommended, especially for live sound work for a fast, no-brainer and consistent sound pickup of kick drums. Slide the KickTone on the KickPort and you’re good to go! —Barry Rudolph

Austrian Audio Hi-X65 Professional Open-Back, OverEar Headphones Since it was founded in 2017, Austrian Audio has steadily introduced a strong line of microphones Colorless neutrality and headphones, and its without getting Hi-X65 Professional Openharsh Back Over-Ear Headphones are the latest offerings, released this past July. Intended for both engineers and audiophiles, the Hi-X65 headphones are designed to provide a clean, uncolored listening experience while remaining comfortable enough that they can be worn for extended periods. In both these cases, the headphones nail it. Inside the sustainability-minded packaging, you’ll find the Hi-X65s, a fabric carrying bag, a 1/4-inch adaptor and both 4-foot and 9-foot cables that terminate in 3.5mm plugs. The headphones make a great first impression, sporting a sleek, modern design. Weighing 310 grams (about 0.7 pounds), there’s a nice sturdiness to them, no doubt aided by the use of mostly metal parts. The ear cups are positioned at an angle to the bow, so that the vented bow pad doesn’t sit on the very top of your head; instead, it rides a bit forward, making for a far more comfortable listening experience. The cups’

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adjustability is simple, too, sliding into detents on the bow so that they stay where you set them without slipping out of position over time. Once you get the headphones on, the memory foam in the bow pad keeps things resting comfortably on your noggin without getting irritating after a while; the Hi-X65s don’t have a lot of heft, but what little there is, is well distributed so that neither your skull or ears bear too much weight. The earcups, which sport memory foam as well, are comfortable without being claustrophobic. To be fair, that’s largely because they are also open-backed, so there’s little isolation from external sounds, but that also means air passes through from behind the drivers , avoiding low-frequency build up within the earcups. Speaking of those drivers, Austrian Audio uses what it terms to be a proprietary High Excursion technology (hence Hi-X65) based around a 44mm driver in a ring magnet system. According to the company, the ring magnet, combined with a copper-clad aluminum voice coil, reduces the weight of both the voice coil and the membrane, resulting in a more responsive impulse reaction from the membrane, aiding detailed response. To test them them out, I listened to some favored, meticulously recorded albums such as Love And Money’s Strange Kind of Love, produced by Gary Katz (Steely Dan), and Thomas Dolby’s Aliens Ate My Buick, produced by Dolby and Bill Bottrell (Michael Jackson, Sheryl Crow). In each case, the X65s served up reasonable airiness and accurate low end that made the most of complicated, bass-oriented tracks, while still reproducing high frequencies with detail and smoothness; mid-range was crisp, if seemingly tucked back slightly. In keeping with Austrian Audio designing the X65s to be suitable for use in mixing and mastering, the headphones were amicably neutral, dutifully replicating source material as-is, but without creating a harsh, wearing listening experience in the process. With a street price of $429, the Hi-X65s are not cheap, but for pros who need to work with headphones on, they present a very reasonable, aurally reliable option for getting things done. —Clive Young

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Open Channel Watch Your Language!

earch on “binaural”…go ahead, I dare you. The top hit is “binaural beats,” which is a new-age-meets-potentially-real-medical-stuffbut-could-be-snake-oil method of playing tones in both ears that have a different tuning. This supposedly produces a completely different third sound that can alter brainwaves. (The theory is that, for example, with alpha By Craig Anderton brainwaves being around 10 Hz, then a 10 Hz difference between what you hear in each ear will promote alpha brainwave production.) Next up: Wikipedia’s blurb on binaural recording, which says it’s a method that uses two microphones to create a 3D stereo sound sensation when using headphones, but won’t translate over stereo speakers. Oh, so binaural recording is 3D sound…got it. Next up is a hi-fi website, which describes binaural recording as making your audio more immersive. Oh, so binaural recording is that “immersive” audio I keep hearing about. Cool. But then I see that binaural signals use a conventional stereo delivery medium, with left and right channels. So I guess binaural is actually immersive, 3D stereo that can alter brainwaves. Or maybe not, because Hooke Audio says that binaural audio is not stereo, because it can localize sounds beyond just left and right. On Quora, one engineer says that immersive sound formats are DTS:X and Dolby Atmos, which are “literally ‘3D sound,’ although the proper term is ‘immersive sound.’” Another audio-visual system engineer chimes in that 3D audio formats use surround sound settings, but add ceiling speakers to create a more immersive experience by including height. And another person states that a “7.1 surround sound system may fill your room with sound on a 360° basis, but strictly speaking will provide only 2D sound.” Venture into gaming sites for some different viewpoints, like “3D audio technologies are basically a means of simulating a surround sound effect in stereo headphones, while 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound configurations don’t necessarily need 3D audio effects since [they typically involve] the use of discrete speakers.” There are also discussions about downmixing 5.1 surround to binaural. But how can you do that, if binaural requires two mics recording in a very specific manner…especially because surround isn’t the same as binaural? So, the bottom line is binaural gives 3D sound, which is sort of like surround, but not really surround, and is carried as a stereo signal that isn’t stereo, but is immersive, although immersive audio is about surround sound, except when it isn’t. Okay…now I understand completely! Of course, this also confuses consumers. After all, if you’re listening to stereo speakers in your living room, you’re surrounded by sound, right? But it’s not “surround sound.” And if you’re using a stereo playback system to

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play back something recorded binaurally, then you’re listening to a stereo system, not a binaural one, right? And what’s this whole “spatial audio” thing from Apple, anyway? They say it gives multidimensional, immersive sound. Is multidimensional sound different from three-dimensional sound, or the immersive nature of binaural sound? Is it just “binaural” sound? Or is binaural sound not really immersive? And while we’re at it, if you want to search on filter topologies, do you look up highpass filter, high-pass filter, high pass filter, low-cut, low cut, lo-cut, or lo cut filter? As an industry, we’re pretty good about standardizing technical specs. I know my optical S/PDIF output can go into an optical S/PDIF input, and they’ll live happily ever after. My DAW can send MIDI messages to a synthesizer, and the synthesizer will chirp along merrily, exactly as expected. But when it comes to standardizing language…we suck.

So, the bottom line is binaural gives 3D sound, which is sort of like surround, but not really surround, and is carried as a stereo signal that isn’t stereo, but is immersive, although immersive audio is about surround sound, except when it isn’t. Publishers around the world use the Associated Press Style Manual or Chicago Manual of Style, and often require authors to abide by their standards for grammar, usage and other elements of editorial best practices. Then again, the English language has been around for a while, so we’ve had some time to work out most of the kinks. In the technology world, the neverending avalance of innovations generates new terms and descriptions, which are often driven more by marketing departments than engineers. So we have a bunch of well-meaning people trying to describe highly technical concepts that have no precedent, in terms that nontechnical people can understand, under timing constraints dictated by the marketplace. What could possibly go wrong? I know AES and NARAS have a lot on their plates, but maybe it’s time to think about how we can set up an industry style guide with best practices for describing technologies. Maybe all the audio industry publishers could “pull a MIDI,” and in a spirit of cooperation, create an industry-wide style guide for audio that AES and/or NARAS could bless. There are many technical terms we can simplify and standardize. Maybe it’s time to figure out a strategy of how to make this happen. ■

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