MIX 575 - November 2024 by Future PLC

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Current

From the Editor

Mixing Prince on SNL—And The Limits of AI

This year’s AES Show in New York was a blast as always. The industry came together to gawk at gear and network, and thousands of students were onhand to discover their future (see page 17 for more). I mentioned this issue’s Audio Education cover story to a number of industry veterans there, however, and more than one essentially said, “If I’ve done this for decades and am worried about being replaced by AI, what chance do these students have?”

I’d say their chances are pretty good; their jobs will just look very different. The early 2000s’ arrival of live sound digital consoles culled scores of touring engineers who wouldn’t give up their analog desks. A decade earlier, ADAT recorders kicked off the home studio boom and the beginning of the end for massive multi-room facilities. In both cases, pros willing to change with the times survived and thrived. Generations of students have entered the field since then and continue to work and innovate, using skillsets far different than their predecessors’. Odds are that’s what will happen with AI, too.

Also, there are some things AI can’t do—like winning over a tough artist or knowing the best way to save the day. I was reminded of that at a recent panel discussion inside Audio-Technica’s gorgeous new NYC marketing salon, Technica House. There, Josiah Gluck, co-music engineer for Saturday Night Live, recalled working with Prince on the TV show, and while it made for a great tale, he perfectly illustrated why AI may always have limits. Here’s the story in his own words:

“Prince comes on the show in November, 2014, and it’s a little nervewracking—because it’s Prince! In the course of setting up, he says that he wants my air mix to be sent to both FOH and fold back monitors on stage. Now I have to think, ‘Okay, how am I getting a stereo fold-down mix to him?’ because what if he wants to hear more or less of something? If he wants to hear a ton of kick, I can’t push that up without compromising the broadcast. I devise a standard ITU fold-down across three stereo aux-sends and then send that to FOH and monitors via MADI tie lines, and it all works quite well

“Then on Saturday, Prince comes in to listen in the mix room because he didn’t come in on Thursday. He has a very firm handshake and he’s cordial, but all business. As we’re listening, Prince turns to his mixer who he’s working with and asks, ‘Where are the doublers on the guitar?’

“His mixer replies, ‘We don’t use doublers on the guitar.’

“And Prince says, ‘Oh, yeah, we do; we do have doublers on the guitar.’

“Earlier, we had been listening to a rehearsal recording from Paisley Park, and I think what Prince had fallen in love with was the slapback coming into the mics from the big room, so I say, ‘Well, I have this vocal doubling effect.’ I toss it on, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s good; that’s fine. Let’s do that.’

“Then he’s asking me, ‘Can we get these guitars crunchy?’ I know he

wants me to overdrive an analog preamp, but I can’t do that—I’m at a digital console, so it would just crap out. And then he wants the snare drum really dark, but I ask, ‘Could you meet me halfway?’ as it’s getting too boxy, and he says, ‘Yeah, do what you’ve gotta do.’

“In the meantime, I keep hearing the phone ring and my boss answering it and saying, ‘Well, no, not right now’ and hanging up the phone. I can see on the main monitor that we’re ready to do the run-through of the opening montage and monologue and I need to switch over to the house band.

“I say to Prince, ‘I’m really sorry, man, but I gotta do this other thing.

“He says, ‘No, it’s okay—ya gotta listen to [SNL musical director] Lenny Pickett!’

“So I ask, ‘Well, are we cool here? Because, honestly, I think we’re gonna singe all living matter within a quarter-mile radius of this place tonight.’

“And he starts laughing! ‘Yeah, that’s cool. I like that—all living matter, yeah!’ I consider that one of my greatest career achievements: getting Prince to laugh!

“Then on-air, is where it gets nuts.

“The plan is he starts camera right on a keyboard, and then walks to center stage and picks up his guitar.

“Right before we start, I hear over the PL: ‘He’s going to plug in his guitar when he gets to center stage. Don’t open up the guitar yet.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, fine.’

“When he walks over and picks up the guitar, I open up the fader—and I don’t hear guitar! I’m trying not to freak out. ‘Where’s the guitar?’ And then I hear over the PL, ‘He didn’t plug in! He didn’t plug in!’

“I whip the fader down, and I’m watching and listening. You see him give a knowing look, plug in, and start to play. Then—and this is taking more time to discuss than it actually took in my head—I try to figure out where he is musically so that he doesn’t just cut in.

“I’m telling you this story because few years ago I was at a symposium in Detroit, and someone was talking about using AI for mixing. I was like, ‘Excuse me,’ and I recounted this tale of Prince not plugging in—and then I said, ‘Now, I don’t know if AI can accurately say, “Oh, he’s not playing. Let me bring this down. Let me listen to where we are in the music. Let me call on my vast nanoseconds of experience and see when I think I can open this fader up.”’

“So to me, I feel there are certain things that we do where the human touch, the human experience, and the base of knowledge are simply not going to be superseded…. This one moment with Prince is an example of where experience, keeping your head on and not freaking out will you get through it.”

Clive Young Co-Editor

Current // news & notes

Producer/Engineer Ken Caillat Sues Broadway’s Stereophonic

By Clive Young

New York, N.Y.—Recording industry icon Ken Caillat has launched a lawsuit against the playwright and producers of the Broadway hit, Stereophonic. In a complaint filed October 1 in New York, Caillat and writer Steven Stiefel allege that the David Adjmi drama, which won five Tony Awards this year, including Best Play, is “an unauthorized adaptation” of Caillat’s 2012 memoir, Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album, co-written with Stiefel. A veteran producer and recording engineer,

Caillat is best known for his work on numerous Fleetwood Mac albums, including 1977’s 45-million-selling Rumours. The storied record and its fractious gestation is the stuff of rock legend; as Pro Sound News recounted in its 2012 review of Caillat’s book, the album “took a year to make, during which everyone in the band broke up with his significant other—which in four out of five cases, was someone else in the band. Pile on record company pressures, feuds, writer’s block, and jaw-dropping amounts of drugs and alcohol, and it’s easy to see how Rumours should have been a complete trainwreck instead of an unqualified success. On hand for each step of the remarkable journey was co-producer Ken Caillat, who recalls every detail in his new memoir.”

Many of those details wound up in Stereophonic, according to the lawsuit. The play follows a similarly structured U.K./U.S. band and its production team as they spend a year in the mid-1970s recording their magnum opus while facing numerous interpersonal crises. The play, which Mix reviewed during its off-Broadway run last fall (obliquely noting extensive templating off a famous band’s tale), follows the production team as it ingratiates itself with the band, becoming sounding boards, confidants and occasionally punching bags in the process.

Particular incidents that happen onstage, such as an engineer being promoted to co-producer, a guitarist choking that engineer in fury, another band member dressing down the production team for not paying close attention to takes, an extended sequence recounting difficulty recording drums, and more arguably appear in the book. The full 29-page legal complaint

lists numerous other potential similarities and extensively cites both works, remarking on everything from studio design and architecture to specific dialogue and conversations that it claims were lifted from the tome’s pages.

Adjmi has noted in numerous interviews since the play’s debut that he took elements from a variety of sources, citing Fleetwood Mac but also Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin and other classic rock acts. While the playwright has not commented publicly on the lawsuit at press time, he told The New Yorker in September, “When writing Stereophonic I drew from multiple sources— including autobiographical details from my own life—to create a deeply personal work of fiction. Any similarities to Ken Caillat’s excellent book are unintentional.”

As it happens, this is not the first time Adjmi’s work has led to a lawsuit. In 2014, DLT Entertainment, which created and owns the 1970s sitcom Three’s Company, threatened to sue for his play 3C, claiming copyright infringement. However, the play was deemed “a highly transformative parody” by the court the following year and was thus protected under fair use doctrine.

Caillat and Stiefel’s Stereophonic lawsuit seeks unspecified damages, and estimates that the play has grossed more than $20 million since it moved to Broadway in April this year. ■

Ken Caillat at NAMM 2020.

Photo: Clive Young.

Caillat alleges that Stereophonic is essentially an unauthorized adaption of his 2012 book, Making Rumours.

Current // news & notes

Augspurger Trademark Dispute Is Resolved

Hanover, Mass.—A trademark dispute over the use of the name Augspurger in relation to pro audio has been resolved. Hanover, MA-based Professional Audio Design (PAD) and studio and speaker designer George Augspurger have jointly announced that litigation has been resolved and PAD owns the Augspurger trademark.

PAD has manufactured and sold its Augspurger Monitors brand for more than 20 years, but the company’s announcement of the legal resolution noted that “in recent years, certain third parties questioned the authenticity of PAD’s premier speaker brand, which resulted in litigation.” PAD founder Dave Malekpour commented, “I am proud to continue PAD’s legacy of designing, building, and servicing the world’s finest speaker systems: Augspurger Monitors.”

Professional Audio Design Inc. is a pro-audio retailer and studio design group providing studio design, systems integration and technical services. The company launched its Augspurger Monitors brand in the early 2000s, and the speakers have

3G Teams With Chimney Rock

Las Vegas, Nev.—3G Productions LLC has received a strategic investment from Chimney Rock Equity Partners to help the company build its national brand, including through acquisitions, adding new locations and expanding market share.

The 3G management team will remain in place, and all current employees will be retained. Additionally, all active owners are retaining their board positions and reinvesting alongside Chimney Rock, a Texas-based private equity firm.

In tandem with the announcement, 3G unveiled that it has now doubled its warehouse space at the Las Vegas corporate headquarters from 50,000 to 100,000 square feet, adding a previz room, more floor space for prepping large-scale tours and events, and increases in capacity for audio, lighting, video and rigging inventories.

Recent 3G event production projects have included major stadium tours for Blackpink and Grupo Firme, tours for Aventura, Carin León, Jo Koy and Gabriel Iglesias, and festivals such as Portola, Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC), and When We Were Young. ■

since been used by the likes of Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and Alicia Keys. Meanwhile, George Augspurger is a pioneering audio engineer who began working at JBL in 1958, establishing the division that became JBL Professional. He left the manufacturer to found Perception Inc., his own consulting office, and has since gone on to design multitudes of recording facilities and gear. Augspurger Monitors of Hanover, Mass., is not affiliated with George Augspurger or Perception, Inc. ■

PAD founder Dave Malekpour (left) and audio designer George Augspurger.

Photos courtesy of PAD and George Augspurger.

Music

‘Another Sunday Morning’ at Parchman Prison

Producer Ian Brennan Gives Voice to Those Who Are Rarely Heard

By Robyn Flans

If Ian Brennan is not on your radar, he should be. He has been making music since he was five—well, seriously since he was 20, caring furiously about the world in which we live and giving voice to the disenfranchised masses. Mix was fortunate to speak with him on the phone from his home in Italy, where he resides with his wife, photographer/ videographer Marilena Umuhoza Delli.

After working on records in the 1980s and field recordings in the ’90s, Brennan was nominated for Grammy Awards in the early 2000s for numerous traditional folk albums he produced. He then dove into

international musical documentation in 2010 with Yigoli Y’ Izahabu, The Good Ones in Rwanda. He traveled with his wife and her mother, who is Rwandan, returning for the first time after losing her family in the country’s horrific period of genocide.

To date, Brennan has amassed more than 40 international recordings over five continents, having learned how to produce projects with very little equipment. In fact, he says, on that first outing, all the equipment broke: “We ended up recording it with three microphones into stereo, and for what it was, it worked amazingly well.”

Included in those international works was Zomba Prison Project in Malawi, nominated for a Best World Music Album at the 2015 Grammys. The story was covered all over the world, including by Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes. The segment won two Emmy Awards. Then, in 2019, Brennan turned his attention back to the U.S.

“We traveled the world and particularly had been to Africa a lot, but also Asia, South America and Eastern Europe, and it became clear that if you are representing minoritized people, those exist in America too, to a very stark degree,” he says. “Four or five years ago, we did a project with the homeless community in Oakland, where I was born.”

Right before Covid hit in early 2020, he produced a project focused on the disabled community, of which his sister is a part. “Literally, two weeks later, the world shut down and my sister suffered some real horrors and was never the same after that.”

ENTERING THE PRISON

Years earlier, Brennan and team had contacted Mississippi’s Parchman Prison, interested to see how a musical venture might differ since the famed Alan Lomax’s last recordings there in 1959. The chaplain was receptive to the idea of Brennan’s visit, but the administration was not. After Covid, the administration changed, and last year there was a sudden back and forth; with less than a week to prepare, Brennan got the go-ahead.

Not knowing who would participate musically, or what was going to actually occur, Brennan walked through those prison doors all by himself—a crew of one—on a Sunday morning in February 2023. Sixteen inmates from different areas of the large maximum-security prison were brought together, many of whom were strangers and therefore cautious with one another, and shy about singing in front of each other.

Brennan gave them a broad canvas on which to participate—no boundaries to the kinds of songs, their lengths, or who would be the

Ian Brennan recorded 16 inmates from Mississippi’s Parchman Prison for the Parchman Prison Prayer album.

collaborators; it was entirely up to them.

Parchman Prison Prayer—Some Mississippi Sunday Morning was released September 15, 2023, to what Brennan says was unexpected global attention.

Because of that, the prison was receptive to a return visit almost a year later to the day, on Super Bowl Sunday, 2024, to record with 12 men—a mixture of some of the same inmates and five new recruits—for a project titled Another Mississippi Sunday Morning, to be released in summer 2025.

There were some differences during this second trip. Instead of two hours, Brennan had four. Photos weren’t allowed the first time, but with some discretion, some pictures were permitted during the second visit. Because of the previous meeting, there was a lot more ease and trust, as well as enthusiasm on the part of the participants, and at the end of the session, Brennan had a big lunch brought in to share with them.

“It was fewer men,” he notes. “Certain people who were involved the first time became very prominent this time; they were also more motivated to write their own songs, so a lot of them had done that in advance. A couple of those from before were really eager to do song after song. Everybody sang at least one song.”

RECORDING IN THE FIELD

Brennan’s equipment on such a project is sparse: one Zoom F8 multitrack recorder, one Sound Devices MP-1 battery-operated, single-channel, portable preamp, one Brauner Phantom Classic mic, two EV RE-20s, two Sennheiser MKH 416s, one AKG 414, one Telefunken M80 (for the lead singer to hold when singing with the full electric band) with mic splitter between P.A. and

recording, one Neumann TLM 103, and multiple line splitters for electric instruments between the P.A. and recording deck. It takes Bennan only about 20 minutes to set up, and he can usually break down in five.

The recording took place in a chapel with a 20-foot ceiling, with one wall almost entirely glass—sonically, not ideal. “The reverb that’s on the records is the reverb from the room,” Brennan explains. “There’s no reverb put on the vocals themselves.”

Regarding post-production, Brennan asserts that “on one hand, it’s quite simple because there’s fewer elements; on the other hand, I’ve come to learn that it’s harder; that it’s not as easy as it seems because every element carries so much weight. If things have gone serendipitously with the elements and the microphones and the performances, the mixing is about keeping it as it is; not doing anything to it.”

Brennan mixes everything in the box with Pro Tools, using a minimum of effects—almost no compression, minimal EQ and rarely any reverb at all. “But lots of panning!” Brennan says, with emphasis. “This one ended up being what the first record was mostly supposed to be, which was a cappella, people playing maybe one instrument, or two or three people doing harmony. In the case of the single (‘Parchman Prison Blues’), it’s six guys improvising together.”

There were some external factors that created certain differences from the first to the second project, as well. On the first visit, Brennan notes that it was a cold, but sunny day, while the second time around, it was dreary, overcast and rainy.

“There’s a song called ‘Let It Rain’ that’s really

on the roof right when he’s singing it. The first time, there was definitely a tremendous amount of sadness. They had just come through Covid, which had affected everybody, but also this huge crisis at the prison with multiple murders and suicides and horrible conditions with the food—and that had been corrected to a large degree, but it had been recent. Now conditions are better, so people are in better spirits; they are being treated more humanely and I think they were proud of what had happened with the first record and were happy to have a Sunday and free time to be able to do this, which was, in and of itself, out of the ordinary and something positive, so there was a lot more positivity. Also, one individual was about to get out, and since the first record, one did get out, so there were those differences as well.”

Conversely, one of the best singers, now 66, is serving a life sentence, having entered Parchman in his early 20s. “He’s been there almost his entire life, and I think if most people met him, they would see that this is somebody who did his time,” Brennan asserts. “It’s not about excusing [what he did] one way or the other, but if prison is supposed to serve a function of correction, you can see that this is a person who is less inclined to be violent than the average person. It’s heartbreaking.”

Brennan hopes that these projects— the voices in particular—humanize the inmates and demonstrate the possibility for emotional growth and redemption. “These recordings help make corporeal the nuance of trauma,” Brennan states. “Every person on every side of a violence action is diminished by it, including (albeit to a lesser degree) the perpetrator.” n

The first album’s success led to recording Another Mississippi Sunday Morning, to be released next summer.

Ian Brennan has produced more than 40 international recordings in countries such as Bhutan (seen here) and Rwanda.

PHOTO: Marilena Umuhoza Delli

Music // Profile

Monitoring at Sound Factory

George

Augspurger collaborates with KRK

By Steve Harvey

In the December 1964 issue of Billboard magazine, a brief news item reported:

“Moonglow Records has begun recording at its own studio, 6359 Selma Avenue.” Within three years, the label, established in 1958 and briefly home to the Righteous Brothers, would be sold off. However, the recording studio, now better known as the Sound Factory, never closed, and this year is celebrating 60 years of

on a new main speaker system

continuous operation in the heart of Hollywood.

Former RCA and Warner/Reprise staff engineer and producer David Hassinger renamed the facility when he bought the building in 1969, attracting Marvin Gaye, the Jackson 5, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, James Taylor and a host of others to record there. In 1980, Paul and Tutti Camarata, owners of Sunset Sound Recorders, just a block or two away, acquired the

facility at auction. They subsequently grew the client list to include everyone from Sheryl Crow to Red Hot Chili Peppers.

In 2017, ownership quietly changed hands again, and the Sound Factory entered the latest chapter in its history, adding a new generation of artists to the client list: Doja Cat, H.E.R, SZA, Lizzo, Mark Ronson and Dua Lipa, to name but a few. Bringing things full circle, the new

George Augspurger (center) updated the studio monitoring of Sound Factory’s Studio B, working with studio manager Cameell Hanna (right) to measure and test the space before designing enclosures to fit the control room’s soffits.

Courtesy of Gibson/KRK.

owners have also launched a label, Sound Factory Records. Leo Mellace, studio partner, music producer and label president, comments, “It’s the natural evolution of the incredible history of championing new artists that this studio has had.” The label has signed and developed two new artists who both have one billion streams.

Maintaining the legacy of one of Hollywood’s iconic recording studios while continuing to build the brand was part of his pledge to Paul Camarata, Mellace says. “One of the things that I think tipped the scales on the studio sale was that I told him that we’re going to keep the studio going for many years to come. We’re committed.”

“Over the years in L.A. we had taken over quite a few older studios,” says studio manager Cameell Hanna. One day, while giving uberproducer Mark Ronson a tour of Serenity West Recording in Hollywood, he recalls, “Mark said, ‘My desire would be to be at a place like Sound Factory.’ That was the week we were closing on Sound Factory; nobody knew we were purchasing it. So Mark came in with us on day one.”

With Ronson in Studio A, the B room, outfitted with a custom API console from a 1970s studio expansion, became Sound Factory’s

flagship commercial space. Ronson moved out some years later and music technology company Splice, which offers a royalty-free sample library, moved into the A room. Studio C, equipped with an SSL Matrix Delta, is available for writing, production and overdub projects. Along the way, a former mic locker and amp storage space became Studio D and is now the record label’s headquarters.

Part of Mellace’s commitment to the Sound Factory brand includes making sure that the studio’s technology supports modern production demands. For today’s hip-hop, R&B and pop artists, he says, that meant beefing up the B room’s main monitors. Renowned veteran acoustician and studio designer George Augspurger had been involved with the studio’s buildout in the past, and Mellace and Hanna were pleasantly surprised to discover that, even though Augspurger is in his nineties, he’s still working.

“We were initially just looking for a room tuner,” Hanna says. It turned out that Augspurger still had an intimate knowledge of the facility and a list of recommendations that never were fully realized.

As with many rooms of the period, much of the design work was custom, including the

size of the main monitor front wall soffits. “George came down for a day and spent time with the assistants, measuring and testing and designing enclosures to fit into the soffits,” Hanna reports.

Typically, Augspurger would design a studio’s monitors, then have a trusted manufacturer custom-build the enclosures for each project. For Sound Factory’s upgrade, Hanna contacted his friend Rae Vinton, who oversees entertainment relations at Gibson Brands and with whom he had collaborated on other projects, to see if the company would be interested in working with Sound Factory and Augspurger on this unique project. Gibson was an ideal fit, having acquired speaker manufacturer KRK while also maintaining a prototype shop in Nashville for the brand’s guitars. Vinton reported back that the company would be pleased to partner on Sound Factory’s Augspurger monitor project.

“With the addition of these incredible speakers through this collaborative work with Gibson/KRK and George, we have a room we are really proud of that keeps the look and feel of this historic place but sounds modern and has that signature sound of the loudspeakers for which George is so well known,” Hanna says.

To give the low end a little extra oomph for today’s clients, Sound Factory turned to BassBoss, which demonstrated the company’s ZV28-MK3 dual 18-inch subwoofers to Hanna and team at the NAMM Show. “We were just floored; it was exactly the impact we were looking for,” he says.

Few clients have had a chance to experience the newly completed room yet, Hanna says, but he is happy to share his opinion of the monitor upgrades: “I feel like I’ve been punched in the head—in the best way possible!” n

At the invitation of Hanna, KRK was brought in to custom-build the Augspurger-designed enclosures for Studio B’s control room.

Courtesy of Gibson/KRK. Courtesy of Gibson/KRK.

Music // news & notes

The Audio of Adele’s Munich Residency

Munich, Germany—At first glance, the idea of custom-building a temporary 80,000-capacity open-air stadium for a 10-show, one-month residency by a single performer seems like the stuff of fantastical daydreams. After all, how would it be technically feasible, and who could fill that many seats anyway? And yet, Live Nation made that happen this past summer in Munich—and moreover, it was a resounding success. Much of the event’s technical support came from Clair Global, and the artist, of course, was Adele.

The residency was blueprinted on the 100-million-album-selling artist’s Las Vegas residency. For the Munich run, led by production manager Paul English, the Clair Global organization handled Audio, Comms, Radios and Production IT, all overseen by account executive Andy Walker.

DiGiCo Quantum 7 consoles were deployed at both front of house and monitor positions for Adele’s long-time mix engineers Dave Bracey and Joe Campbell. Out front, systems engineer Johnny Keirle mapped out a sprawling 36-hang, 14-delay-tower L-Acoustics K1 / K2 / L2 design to cover the large urban site with a traditional L-R/dual mono system.

“This P.A. design was a complex process,” said Keirle. “There was a huge emphasis on creating a visual experience that was as clean as possible, with stage design central to the show. This required finding solutions for high trim heights at the main stage end, and finding discreet, tidy audio solutions within the audience areas. The main stage system was flown incredibly high to clear the video wall, with flown K1SBs and K1s, flown

KS28s, and adjacent K2 downfill hangs to achieve nearfield coverage without introducing destructive interferences or losing HF integrity in the main K1 system.”

With the stage thrust extending 100 meters into the audience, and a passarelle (catwalk) looping from stage right to left, the team had to place delays beyond the golden circle and passarelle, relying heavily on the main stage K Series. The main stage system comprised six positions: main L-R, side L-R, and outer L-R. An additional two rings of L2 delay speakers picked up coverage outside the passarelle, with six positions in the first ring and eight in the second.

Given the massive size of the venue, RF concerns were paramount. “A key difference working in this venue is the long distances over which we have to transmit and receive RF for the in-ear monitors and radio microphones,” said monitor engineer Joe Campbell. “We’re using RF over fiber for the first time with this artist and have opted for a Wisycom system, which has been superb.”

In all, Clair deployed 20 Wisycom MFL RF antennas, all overseen by monitor and RF system designer Thomas Chip Valentino, who worked with four RF nodes in different positions around the passarelle: one at the B stage, one central to the thrust, stage left and stage right.

A vital aspect for the show’s connectivity was its hidden networking. Clair event support engineer Laurie Fradley explained, “We had to feed all our equipment positions for P.A., Comms and IT—some situated in the middle of the large audience—ensuring there were no clear cable runs. We took the decision to deploy a multistrand fiber network throughout the site for both our team and other departments that needed to service these areas. In total, we ran around 1,200 fiber cores throughout the entirety of the site.”

Navigating a Riedel Communications ARTIST-128 digital intercom network on AES67 audio networks was communications system designer Patrick Taghavi. Looking after communication and audio signal distribution needed for 230 crewmembers, Taghavi explained, “We simply couldn’t run a show of this size without a robust, clean system; it’s critical to everyone’s safety.”

With the Munich run successfully completed, the singer concludes her Vegas residency this month after more than 100 shows, to be followed by an indefinite hiatus from her musical career. n

The Adele Munich residency sported a high-hung L-Acoustics P.A. provided by Clair Global.

Looking after audio were (Back Row, L-R): Jay Walton, Eiran Simpson, Joe Campbell and Johnny Keirle; (Front Row, L-R): Brooke Paterson, Chip Valentino, Dave Bracey, Juan Beilin and Claus Köpplin Orrán.

PHOTO: Alex Waespi

PHOTO: Mark Cameron

Music // Seen on the Scene: AES

Show 2024

New York, N.Y.—This year’s AES Show in New York City brought the industry together to see the latest gear, educate young audio pros, and reconnect in person. Say what you will about online meetings and social media, but they don’t hold a candle to trying out equipment in person, watching a panel of pros offer audio advice, or making the rock-solid connections that will lead to your next gig. Next year will see the AES Show head to California for the first time since 2016, setting up shop in Long Beach. Until then, here’s just a taste of what we saw at this year’s edition; you can find more on mixonline.com.

One of the biggest highlights of the show was the extensive Q&A with 11-time Grammy Award-winning producer, artist, songwriter and musician Jack Antonoff and his longtime collaborator, five-time Grammy Awardwinning recording and mix engineer Laura Sisk.

In Genelec’s demo room, producer/engineer/ professor Susan Rogers (Prince, BNL, David Byrne) held an Enveloping Masterclass for a packed house. Just outside, the company was presenting its growing UNIO Audio Monitoring Ecosystem, highlighting the 9320A SAM Reference Controller.

At the ADAM Audio booth, Mark Cummins, Head of Product Marketing, walked an attendee through the company’s new D3V desktop monitoring system, aimed at emerging pros and audiophiles.

Not all the action was on the show floor—or even at the show. Merging and Neumann took up residence nearby at Lounge Studios, where they could present their latest offerings in more nuanced settings. Merging, seen here, offered a first-look deep dive into its Pyramix 15 DAW, due out in mid-December.

Audeze had a packed booth throughout the show, with hundreds of people discovering the company’s headphones each day.

Gary Thielman, president of Harrison Audio, discussed the company’s new channel configurations and frame variants for its 32Classic analog console.

PHOTOS: Clive Young

Strait Into the Record Books

By Clive Young

George Strait never does anything small, but the country star’s concert in June at Texas A&M’s Kyle Field was massive even by his standards. The in-the-round show drew 110,905 fans, setting a record for the mostattended ticketed, non-festival concert in U.S. history.

“I heard rumbles for a couple of years that they wanted to do something at Kyle Field,” recalled Strait’s longtime FOH engineer, George Olson. “Around November last year, we heard it was going to happen. I don’t know if they were shooting for the record or not, but it didn’t take us very long to pull up the specs on the building

and go, ‘That’s a really large room!’”

Covering that many fans presented a variety of production challenges that had to be addressed. The decision was made early on to present the show in-the-round with the stage placed at the 50-yard line— a move that was a change of pace for Strait, as he’s played arenas in-the-round for decades, but typically uses a stage in the end zone for stadium shows.

“We’ve done so many in-the-round shows that I’m actually more comfortable with that than I am on an end-zone stage, mainly because people are half the distance to the P.A.,” said Olson. “You don’t have to drive the rig as hard

to reach people in the upper seats and it still translates well. We walked the room listening to the P.A. the day before, and even at the very top of the place, we were 400 feet away but it didn’t feel like it. It felt like a really large arena—you were there, not in another ZIP code.”

Helping fans feel closer, too, was the lack of delay towers blocking their view. Instead, the P.A., video screens and lights were all hung from the roof of a 70-by-70-foot G2 Structures stage.

“It was literally eight hangs of P.A. to cover the entire stadium,” said Olson. Provided by Spectrum Sound (Nashville, Tenn.), the various d&b audiotechnik hangs were as big as the

Photo: Alive Coverage/Messina

Touring Group.

George Strait’s concert at Texas A&M’s Kyle Field drew 110,905 fans, setting a record for the most-attended ticketed non-festival concert in U.S. history.

show itself. While there was a surfeit of SL-Subs on hand—a half-dozen flown in each corner, bolstered by 32 on the floor—facing the end zones were pairs of long-throw GSL hangs, each one comprised of 20 GSL8s and four GSL12s. Similarly, for the short-throws facing the stadium’s sides, each hang was made up of 24 KSLs. “We needed the vertical coverage,” said Olson. “Each box is 10 degrees within itself and that was the only way we could get from top to bottom.”

The setup was based around a P.A. arrangement that’s worked on Strait’s arena shows for years, covering the crowd while lessening its impact on the stage. “When you’re in-the-round in the arenas, you start cramming eight hangs at 18 boxes deep in a 40-foot circumference—and that’s a lot of low frequency drivers hanging out in one area, so the summation off the back of the speakers becomes a tricky thing to deal with,” said Olson. “With the KSLs and GSLs, that side-firing rejection becomes a great benefit, and helps keep things on stage from getting excited with all that extra low-end energy that comes off the back of the boxes.”

Changing things up for Strait and his 11-member band, the stage itself rotated. When they play arenas in-the-round, the band faces one direction while Strait walks from corner to corner between songs. For the Kyle Field show, the band had to fit into a rotating disc 56 feet in diameter—as opposed to the usual 80 feet it takes up on an endzone stage. The stage itself took roughly eight minutes to do a complete 360, making two full spins before stopping and going the other direction.

“With the rotating stage, you start to hear things from microphones as they move around with the stage, getting closer to one hang than the other and or closer to a front fill,” said Olson. “That changing proximity to speakers can become a little bit of a challenge, but you figure it out; we didn’t have any issues.”

While the concert may have been one for the record books, Olson approached mixing it the same as any other George Strait show. “I try to keep it as true to the album mix as I can,” he said. “I like to take the crowd on that catalog journey of ‘This is what this song was mixed like on the album back in 1980, and this is what the new song sounds like.’ Our audience is usually four generations—the demographic is 18 to 80. It’s nothing for me to see grandma, mom, daughter and great-granddaughter all sitting in a row, so

you need to appeal to everybody there; you can’t run it like a full-on Metallica show, because you’re going to upset three quarters of your audience.”

That house mix gets created on a DiGiCo SD12 console, joined by a Waves rig used primarily for reverb and delay plug-ins; channel processing and everything else is handled within the console itself. “For outboard gear, I’ve got an old Waves MaxxBCL that I use as a tap compress and limit,” said Olson. “It’s more of a visual to me, where I can just look over and make sure I’m not doing anything I’ll live to regret later. Also, I’ve got a couple of Lake LM44s that I use for my own I/O into the main P.A.”

Keeping tabs on the dozen musicians onstage was monitor engineer Michael Bangs. A veteran monitor pro, Bangs took over the role in 2017,

adding it to his full-time position at Allen & Heath in the U.S. “I run the touring division, and I’m part of the development team for dLive,” he said, “but I still get to run around with George and have fun. Every show we do with George is big numbers, but I didn’t know it was a record until George said it on stage. I had no idea; it was just another day at the office for us.”

While Bangs tackles mixes on an Allen & Heath S5000 surface, the pick is by choice. “There’s so many things it allows me to do that no other platform can,” he explained, adding quickly, “Yes, I do work for the company, but it’s worth noting that I chose the platform and was passionate about it before it was my job, and it’s why I allowed it to become my job. When they said, ‘Hey, can we pay you to tell people about this desk,’ I thought that would be stupid to turn

Photo:

George Strait heard himself via 64 Audio

A12T in-ear monitors on Shure PSM 1000 wireless systems.

The Kyle Field show was performed on a rotating disc 56 feet in diameter that took roughly eight minutes to do a complete circle.

down since I genuinely do love it.”

Accordingly, he uses the S5000 to build 14 in-ear monitor mixes heard via 64 Audio A12T earpieces on Shure PSM 1000 wireless, along with five mixes that go to d&b M2 wedges powered by D80 amplifiers, plus a d&b single-15 drum sub. Roughly half the band uses Allen & Heath IP8 remote controllers—a

network-based remote that the musicians use to adjust their mix in the monitor console. Also expanding the in-ear mixes is a judicious use of ambiance. “Depending on the show, I’ve got between four and eight channels of ambiance mics because no one likes to be trapped in a cage of their own thoughts in their in-ears,” he mused. “I’m not the guy that

puts shotgun mics out to pick up the audience; I never understood that, because the crowd is in every microphone on the stage. I’m trying to get just the vibe in the environment of what’s happening in the stage, so that they all feel engaged and connected to one another.”

Miking is largely a mix of tried-and-true choices from a handful of brands. Strait’s vocal is heard via an Earthworks SR40V hypercardioid handheld, and the drums are likewise captured with an Earthworks DK7 drum kit system. While the background vocals are heard through Shure Beta 58s, a broad selection of Royer ribbon microphones dot the stage for guitar cabinets and drum overheads, and all DI inputs are handled with Rupert Neve Designs RNDIs.

While the Kyle Field record will surely stand for a while—the Grateful Dead previously held it for 46 years—it’s just the latest in a long list of notable George Strait concerts. “I’ve always heard that we’ve opened more arenas than any other artist out there,” said Olson, “and I remember when we opened up AT&T Stadium for the Dallas Cowboys back in ’09; we were literally loading-in with hard hats and construction vests. But almost 111,000 people at Kyle Field? That’s a big one. It was once in a lifetime show, that’s for sure—at least for now.” ■

Monitors for Strait and his 11-member band are mixed on an Allen & Heath dLive S5000 surface.

Photo: Alive Coverage/Messina Touring Group.

The P.A., video screens and lights were all hung from the roof of a 70-by-70-foot G2 Structures stage.

Live // news & notes // presented by

Giving The Bitter End A Fresh Start

New York, N.Y.—New York City is world-renowned for its music venues, but while stages like Radio City and the Garden host acts as big and established as the venues themselves, it’s the smaller clubs that are the real heart of the city’s music scene. Over its more than 60 years, The Bitter End on Bleeker Street has hosted everyone from Stevie Wonder to Lady Gaga to earnest young folkies Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Not bad for a venue that didn’t have a P.A. when it first opened in 1961—although it eventually upgraded to a single mic and a speaker.

The P.A. system grew sporadically over the years, becoming a hodgepodge of loudspeakers until recently the venue’s creative director, Theodore Pagano, felt the club would be best served “by investing in really good equipment. I thought, ‘Let me start at the top.’ I sent a cold email to Meyer Sound, and they called me an hour later.”

The Bitter End’s new Meyer Sound system centers around four Ultra-X40 compact loudspeakers and two 900-LFC compact low-frequency control elements, supported by two Ultra-X20 front fills and managed by a Galileo Galaxy 816 network platform. Meyer Sound’s Bob McCarthy, who designed the new system, explained, “Ultra-X40s have plenty of power to cover this space, but they open up really quickly, which you want to have because you’ve got people right up close. We were able to put them on their sides and mount them up high to get a nice, low profile and keep them out of sight.”

The long room (100-by-25-feet) has the stage against a long wall,

Gabisom Rocks in Rio Once Again

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—Rock in Rio celebrated its 40th anniversary this year, and once again, São Paulo-based Gabisom Audio Equipment was deeply involved in the event’s sound. As part of that, the company fielded Yamaha RIVAGE PM consoles and Outline’s audio systems on three of the festival’s stages, as it has done in the past.

Outline’s GTO, GTO C-12, Superfly and Mantas 28 models, driven by Outline power amplifiers, were deployed across the New Dance Order, Global Village, and Supernova stages. Gabisom has made significant investments in Outline audio technology in 2023 and 2024, following earlier purchases that included a substantial GTO C-12 system and Newton processors in 2020 (in fact, Gabisom is currently the world’s largest owner of Newton inventory).

“The first time I worked with the GTO and C-12 system, I was impressed by the headroom and clarity, particularly in the high frequencies, without harshness, and the strong, tight low-end response; this is ideal for high-energy concerts like EDM,” commented Danilo Costa, one of Gabisom’s system

resulting in a shallow audience area that inevitably makes the monitoring part of the room’s sound. Says Pagano, “You have to take that into consideration, so we put in some Ultra-X20s to cover the front space.” Meanwhile, 900-LFCs support the low end, he adds: “What I love about these subs is that they allow you to feel the punch of the kick or the bass guitar, and hear those frequencies nicely placed in the mix rather than them beating you up or confusing the mix.”

Helping keep the stage monitoring tidy are flown Ultra-X40s and UltraX20s: “They’re mounted up high, so they’re close to your head and very easy to hear,” Pagano says. “They’re so super clean. It’s fantastic.” A pair of MJF-208 high-power stage monitors provide additional support.

The result has been better listening experiences both in the crowd and onstage. “People notice it as soon as they walk in the door, which is important,” says The Bitter End’s owner, Paul Rizzo. “I’ve asked most of the musicians who play here on a regular basis what they think, and every one of them has said it’s a great improvement.” ■

engineers, reflecting on his experience at the New Dance Order stage. That stage featured four PAs with 10 GTO boxes each, 48 DBS 18-2 subbass units, and 12 Mantas 28 units for front-fill, all supported by Newton processors for precise matrix management of two Yamaha consoles. ■

A mainstay of New York City’s music scene for more than 60 years, The Bitter End recently upgraded its audio with a Meyer Sound Ultra-X40 P.A.

São Paulo-based Gabisom Audio Equipment was deeply involved in Rock In Rio’s sound.

Live // news & notes

Knock Presbyterian Church Upgrade Audio System

Belfast, Ireland—Knock Presbyterian Church in Belfast has been updating its audio system over the last few years, working with regional integrator Rea Sound. When the topic of finding a new front of house console to replace the existing 12-year-old mixer came up, the church’s technical team, led by Brian Ditty, conferred with Rea and ultimately went with an Allen & Heath dLive desk.

As part of the decision-making process, Knock Church had to consider not only its current needs but also what some of its audio requirements might be in the future. At the time, the church had 48 inputs on the stage and used 16 at front-of-house for wireless receivers and more. The sanctuary also featured seven distinct audio zones, using matrixes fed from the main LR mix. With future-proofing in mind, however, the church wanted a minimum of 64 input channels and hoped to facilitate both multi-track recording and, taking into consideration an upcoming major building project for its halls the following year, sending further audio feeds to the new halls.

Roger McMullan from Rea Sound met with the church’s technical team

to answer questions and arranged for the team to attend an Allen & Heath dLive and Avantis demo tour, where the team could interact with the consoles firsthand. This experience led to recommending the dLive system to the church committee, which subsequently approved the purchase.

Today, the church has an Allen & Heath dLive CDM48 MixRack capable of 128×64 channels of 96 kHz audio, paired with a C3500 control Surface. The CDM48 provides 48 inputs and 24 outputs for use on the church stage, and a DX168 expander offers the additional 16 mic preamps and 8 line outs required at FOH. The MixRack was also equipped with a Dante 128×128 audio networking card to send audio feeds to the new halls following the completion of their building project and to enable multi-track recording and playback.

Rea Sound’s Gerard Wilkinson oversaw the installation, fine-tuned the P.A. and provided training on the new system. Since then, the desk has been welcomed by the audio team and parishioners alike, said Ditty, noting, “Many from the congregation and visiting artists noticed the increase in clarity, warmth, and overall better sound.” ■

Knock Presbyterian Church in Belfast has been updating its audio system recently and that includes the addition of a new Allen & Heath dLive desk.

Audio Education 2024

Reading, Writing and Rear Channels: Audio Education Goes Immersive

By Steve Harvey

Looking back, the June 2021 launch of Apple Music’s Spatial Audio service was a major milestone. Dolby Atmos had long since become commonplace in the cinema, starting with Disney/Pixar’s Brave in 2012. Five years later, Netflix rolled out its Dolby Atmos support and set off an explosion of new and upgraded immersive mix rooms worldwide.

However, Spatial Audio was a proverbial pivot point, supported and encouraged by the major record labels and various pro-audio manufacturers.

Line Studio at WMS

Eight years ago, Washington Middle School audio educator Sam Fong and principal Michael Harano launched an ambitious project to bring opportunities to under-privileged young people and local aspiring musicians in Hawaii who have very few opportunities to work in a professional-grade production studio. Backed by the Hawaii State Department of Education, the 1,600-square-foot facility at the Title-1 public school in Honolulu on the island of O’ahu was unveiled in mid-2024 and will officially open in 2025.

The Walters-Storyk (WSDG) design team handled studio design, acoustic design and isolation, technical interior design and systems design for the facility, which has been named Line Studio at WMS. All A/V components were provided and installed onsite by Boston, Mass.based AVN | SYS.

“We truly want to elevate the quality of life for our students and present them with opportunities that broaden their own vision of what their lives can become,” says Fong, the facility’s sound recording studio director. “Contextualized learning is a big deal for us, so it has to be relevant to young people’s lives and the dreams they will be pursuing.”

On the one hand, he says, “With students, we

Within a year of the launch, more than three-quarters of Apple Music subscribers were reportedly listening to immersive music.

Sound engineering and music schools teaching audio technology, dedicated to educating students in current and cutting-edge workflows, have responded. Just this year, a handful of educational institutions have launched new Dolby Atmos music mixing facilities, the better to ready students for jobs in today’s entertainment media industry. The following are just some of the latest to open. ■

Sam Fong, sound recording studio coordinator, brought the Line Studio at WMS project to fruition with principal Michael Harano and WSDG.

Photo: Mardi Savage / Tim Savage

could offer them a real opportunity to develop their minds and skillsets when it comes to audio and music that would be applicable whether they choose to work here or on the mainland. We also knew that by opening the studio up to public projects, we could enrich the culture for local musicians by providing opportunities that might not have existed before for them also in terms of recording and production.”

The room, at Fong’s insistence, is outfitted with equipment that would make any highend New York or L.A. studio envious: an SSL AWS 948 analog mixing console, custom Symphonic Acoustics speaker system, jointly designed by WSDG and George Augspurger, and an ATC 7.1.4 speaker array for immersive production and mixing, enabled by an Avid MTRX and a NewTek Tricaster. The outboard racks are stocked with devices from Bricasti, Empirical Labs, Teletronix, Tube-Tech, UA, API, Avalon and others.

“With students, we could offer them a real opportunity to develop their minds and skillsets…. We also knew that by opening the studio up to public projects, we could enrich the culture for local musicians.”

While the space is a professional recording studio, it also has to function as a classroom. Advanced predictive analysis was provided by REDIacoustics NIRO software to aid in the layout design of the space while providing an optimized acoustic environment in each of the facility’s rooms. Those spaces were created with room-in-room construction to aid in acoustic isolation. The facility also has multiple ISO booths, a sizable equipment storage closet, and a sound lock with wheelchair access

Honoring the island environment, WSDG echoed the local karo plant’s trunk and leaves in the tracking room’s rear-wall wave diffuser and other acoustic treatments. Local materials were heavily favored in the construction process. ■

Appalachian State University

Appalachian State University in Boone, NC was somewhat ahead of the curve, building out a Dolby Atmos control room even before Apple took immersive music mainstream with its Spatial Audio service. Being in the vanguard came with challenges, admits Scott David Wynne, professor and chief recording engineer at the school’s multi-room Robert F Gilley Recording Studio. “We had the same growing pains as everybody else did—but we did find out we could effectively teach the Dolby renderer with binaural on headphones and it would do a reasonable job.”

The focus of the immersive room was postproduction and game sound, he continues: “My students and I built it to be effective and efficient. We didn’t want a control surface; we had a keyboard and a mouse, with the renderer on the computer.” Dolby provided a license that the school put in the cloud, enabling students to learn Atmos mixing at home.

However, it soon became clear that automating Atmos mixes by mouse was not ideal, so Wynne and the students installed an Avid S6 console and added a Genelec 7.1.4 monitor setup. “It was a great experience for the students, because they got to see how all the components go together, and interact with the manufacturers,” he says. “We really take the time to teach the students all the steps and the flaws—and let them see us make mistakes as well.”

Involving students in the process also teaches them that not all job opportunities are necessarily in the studio: “If you are excited putting together S6 modules, you could get a job with Avid.”

Sound with picture is important to the school, Wynne says. Where immersive music is concerned, there are lessons to be learned from the jump from mono to stereo and stereo to 5.1, he believes. “We need composers, artists, producers and content creators to start thinking about this immersive format. What are the problems that [immersive music] creates? What are the creative avenues that we can take? How do we create an envelope in an environment that also translates to earbuds? Content creators need to start thinking about how, musically, they want to write the parts— but I don’t know that they are thinking that far ahead.”

Meanwhile, Wynne and the students have gutted Studio B, a 5.1 mix suite, and, in collaboration with acoustician Wes Lachot, are readying it for a new 64-channel API Vision console. After that, Wynne hopes to build an immersive broadcast room around an existing Lawo mc²56 desk to stream the school’s 200 annual concerts in stereo and binaural. “We may mess up, but it’s an educational facility, and we’re trying to expand what we do and give the students all these great experiences,” he says. ■

Professor Scott David Wynne and students built an Atmos room with an Avid S6 console and Genelec 7.1.4 monitor setup, and are working with acoustician Wes Lachot on an upcoming 5.1 mix suite.

Photo: Bobby Mason

Long Island University Roc Nation School of Music, Sports & Entertainment

Long Island University’s Roc Nation School of Music, Sports & Entertainment, founded by Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter in 2008, recently unveiled a new Dolby Atmos studio on its campus. Not only is Roc Nation School the first program in Brooklyn to offer a fully integrated Dolby Atmos Music curriculum—in partnership with the Dolby Institute—but the facility is also one of the largest professional Atmos music recording studios in New York.

Designed by Walters-Storyk Design Group (WSDG) and integrated by Pro Audio Design (PAD), the 2,400-square-foot facility features a large tracking space with four iso booths and a 750-square-foot control room. According to John Storyk, WSDG founding partner, “This project is an amazing example of what happens when you take the best of what we do in higher-ed facility design and hip-hop studio work and apply it towards something that benefits

the growth of future industry leaders and artistic creatives.”

PAD president Dave Malekpour, who previously designed Baseline Studios, where Jay-Z recorded numerous projects, collaborated with Grammy Award-winning audio engineer and producer Gimel “Young Guru” Keaton on the facility’s audio technology choices. Young Guru, JayZ’s longtime engineer, joined Roc Nation in mid-2022 as director of the Music Technology, Entrepreneurship & Production program.

The school offers undergraduate degrees in applied music; music technology, entrepreneurship and production; sports communication and marketing; and vocal performance to about 300 students, half of them from New York state. “Every detail in the facility was methodically curated for our students,” Young Guru says, “and I’m excited for them to maximize their learning experience on campus and prepare to enter the workforce with an unprecedented advantage.”

The studio is outfitted with an SSL Origin analog mixing console flanked by custom Zaor studio furniture with a 9.1.4 Augspurger monitor setup comprising stereo Duo15-Sub18 speakers with additional Duo8 speakers for the center, surround, wide and rear zones. A pair of Avid MTRX Studio interfaces and a Grace Design M908 monitor controller manage the immersive system. The outboard racks house pieces from Neve, Pultec, UA, Empirical Labs, Avalon and API. The Avid Pro Tools Ultimate rig offers plug-ins galore from the likes of Waves, Antares, SoundToys, Celemony and Universal Audio.

“Our new facility will enable students to gain immersive experience using the latest technology to put themselves in the strongest positions to thrive after graduation,” says Tressa Cunningham, dean of the Roc Nation School of Music, Sports & Entertainment. “It also creates a new opportunity for the school to engage with the larger creative community.” ■

Gimel “Young Guru” Keaton, Jay-Z’s longtime engineer and now director of the Music Technology, Entrepreneurship & Production program at Roc Nation, collaborated with PAD president Dave Malekpour on the facility’s audio technology choices.

The large tracking space is adjacent to four iso booths and a 750-square-foot control room.

Photo: Joe Janisheski of Lightroom Studios

Stephen F. Austin State University’s School of Music

Stephen F. Austin State University’s School of Music unveiled a new recording studio equipped with an SSL T S500 console and a 7.1.4 immersive monitor speaker setup at its East Texas campus at the beginning of 2024. The room, Studio B, is part of an expansion of the school’s Griffith Fine Arts Building, which houses the sound recording technology, filmmaking, theater, dance and musical theater programs.

James F. Adams, associate professor of music, director of sound recording technology at the School of Music, says that the new room complements Studio A, an all-analog facility, though he adds, “We wanted Studio B to be our modern studio. We knew that we needed to be on the cutting edge for tomorrow’s professionals. We also wanted it to be an Atmos room.” Studio B’s control room measures approximately 400 square feet and is attached to a 500-square-foot live room with a single iso booth.

Adams explains that the sound recording technology program is designed to empower musicians with a confident command of technologies so that they can excel in their artistry. “All our students are music majors. In addition to their audio technology courses, they’re taking music theory; they take instrument lessons and they’re in ensembles, so they’re all very active, trained musicians. Our students at the undergraduate level are pursuing a Bachelor of Music, then our graduate courses are Master of Music degrees, where we take things to a more advanced level. Usually, our graduate students want to work in music production, at higher levels of studio recording, get involved with record labels or aspire to be teachers one day.”

The new 64-fader System T console, which offers immersive monitoring and busing as standard and was supplied by Vintage King, is paired with

a Focal 7.1.4 monitor setup in the room. The console was chosen because, while Atmos is a focus, the room is multi-functional, Adams says, so it also must handle tracking and post-production mixing. “We also found that SSL’s flow and routing and everything about the System T fit our pedagogical styles and our goals. Plus, it’s a Dante console with the ability to control Dante-enabled stage boxes, et cetera, and our whole facility has a Dante backbone.”

Making the most of that network, he says, “The grand plan is to one day have our orchestra upstairs feed everything into the System T and be able to manage a live broadcast mix from the SSL in addition to recording it. Hopefully, one day in the future, we’ll be able to stream in spatial audio.” ■

The new Dolby Atmos studio at Stephen F. Austin State University in East Texas is part of an expansion of the school’s Griffith Fine Arts Building.

Studio B’s iso booth is attached to a 400-square-foot control room and a 500-square-foot live room.

Photo: Solid State Logic

Southern University

Southern University has opened a new recording studio next to the Recital Hall in the Tourgee A. DeBose Music Hall on the university’s main campus in Baton Rouge, La. that is outfitted for Dolby Atmos work. The facility was built to support a Bachelor of Music program focusing on music technology and recording arts that started in fall 2024. A Bachelor of Digital Media Arts with a concentration in recording arts is scheduled to begin Fall 2025.

The new control room, which has an adjoining live room and iso booth, is equipped with a 48-fader SSL Duality Pro-Station, which offers integrated Pro Tools control, and a Genelec 7.1.4 monitor system as well as George Augspurger-designed and manufactured stereo main monitors. WSDG Walters-Storyk Design Group provided acoustic design and construction. Rick Camp, owner of RC1 Productions & Designs in Las Vegas, NV, handled technical design and integration. The studio also connects to the performance hall over a Dante network.

“Our curriculum is heavily focused on our music tech and recording arts students, particularly those looking to build careers in audio engineering and production,” says Gerren Porch, M.M.tech, recording studio manager & instructor of music tech/recording arts in the College of Music. “Through our curriculum, students gain experience working with a variety of tools. They don’t only develop their creative skills in audio engineering, but they also work on the technical aspects, like patching external equipment, system calibration and even troubleshooting. This ensures they are wellrounded and prepared for all facets of studio work.”

Camp’s pre-pandemic design brief was for a stereo room, but when Apple Music’s Spatial Audio platform rolled out in June 2021, he persuaded the school to incorporate immersive capabilities.

With the SSL desk already purchased, Camp came up with a novel custom solution that combines Duality’s functionality with a Pro Tools system and third-party, Dante-enabled converters, speaker optimization and monitor management hardware components from Antelope Audio, DirectOut and Grace Design. “In the Duality, I’m using a 5.1 panner output with a stereo cue output to feed the side speakers; I’m using auxiliaries one to four to feed the ceiling speakers,” Camp explains.

Ultimately, Porch adds, “By the time they complete the program, our students will have mastered not only the technical aspects of audio engineering but also how to work fluidly between the SSL Duality and Pro Tools. This hands-on experience in hybrid workflows gives them the realworld skills they’ll use throughout their careers.” ■

“Our curriculum is heavily focused on our music tech and recording arts students, particularly those looking to build careers,” says Gerren Porch, instructor of music tech/recording arts.

Photo: Southern University

Full Sail University

In September, Florida’s Full Sail University opened what it says is one of the largest Dolby Atmos-enabled classroom facilities on a university campus. To celebrate, awardwinning industry legend Bob Clearmountain hosted two educational sessions in the space for students within the Recording Arts, Audio Production and Music Production programs.

There is a curiosity among consumers as well as entertainment industry professionals regarding immersive audio, says Brandon Egerton, education director, Audio Arts. “We’ve taken our time to understand the technology and how the industry intends to integrate it— even using active industry projects to immerse ourselves in the learning process. This classroom is the perfect complement to the plethora of existing real-world learning environments that allow our students to climb into the cockpit and experience industry-utilized technology firsthand.”

Full Sail has long been on the leading edge of tech, the better to prepare students for real-world opportunities. With this new classroom, Egerton says, “The benefit to our students is multi-fold. Not only can they experience music and audio in a new way, but they also learn how to implement this technology into production workflows and understand the deliverable requirements of companies, labels and DSPs. We believe this will lead to a competitive advantage for them in their career-building process.”

The new Dolby Atmos room features three Avid S6 consoles, together with Avid MTRXII and Sync X units, plus Martin Audio CDD, C8.1T and SX series speakers driven by Linear Research Dante-enabled amps. Full Sail’s inhouse design and technical integration team worked with Dolby on speaker placement and Dolby visited the school to verify and calibrate the system.

“We chose Martin Audio speakers for their asymmetrical dispersion pattern, which delivers even sound coverage throughout the classroom— essential for demonstrating Dolby Atmos in a large space,” explains Michael Orlowski, Director of Technical Services. “Our goal was to use a high-quality installation-class speaker system that provided excellent coverage and integrated well with our existing drop-ceiling.”

“The speakers are highly phase-coherent, and when paired with Linear Research amplifiers’ dedicated DSP, they make it easy to adjust the system response to meet the Dolby Curve,” he continues. “Utilizing the onboard DSP keeps the room correction EQ separate from the classroom demonstration software, DADman, preventing any accidental changes. This thoughtful setup ensures consistent sound quality during lessons while maintaining user-friendly control.” The room’s Dante audio network sits on its own VLAN but can connect to other facilities on-campus. “It is our mission to provide students with innovative education that prepares them for careers in the entertainment and media industries,” Egerton concludes. “Being on the leading edge of working with this technology is an important part of accomplishing that.” ■

2024 EDUCATION DIRECTORY

Students will utilize the new Dolby Atmos enabled facility for class sessions, workshops, listening experiences, guest lectures, and more.

Photo: Full Sail

FIDLAR IS BACK,

WITH A BIG, BOLD SOUND

Frontman Zac Carper on the inspirations for ‘Surviving the Dream’

By Lily Moayeri

Fidlar—drummer Max Kuehn (left), guitar/vocalist Zac Carper (center) and bassist Brandon Schwartzel—has returned with its first album in five years.

PHOTO: Alice Baxley.

The screensaver at Zac Carper’s studio in the Frogtown neighborhood of Los Angeles says, “Get Back to Work You Donkey.” Carper, the prolific songwriter/ producer and frontman of Fidlar, says this message is meant to keep him focused, but it’s evident from his output that he doesn’t need the reminder.

The Los Angeles surf-punk trio’s self-recorded and self-produced fourth album, Surviving the Dream, was released in September 2024, five years after Fidlar’s last long player. In the interim, Carper has produced a death metal band, a country album and an art pop/punk record.

“When I was doing a lot of drugs, I was so creative, but it would come out in bursts; I was not consistent at all,” Carper says matterof-factly. Substances have been phased out of the Fidlar stable, and with that, Carper says, “I can’t rely on inspiration that much. I have to rely on discipline. I call it ‘microfesting,’ like microdosing manifestation.”

Even though writing, recording and touring with Fidlar—an acronym for “Fuck It Dawg, Life’s A Risk”—is a full-time job, producing was Carper’s goal when he first moved to Los Angeles from his native Hawaii. Drawing from his experiences producing other artists, as well as from the varied producers the group has worked with over the past 15 years, Carper was in a good position to step into the role for Surviving the Dream

As Fidlar’s principal songwriter, Carper’s lyrics start with stream-of-consciousness writing so extensive that his notebook ends up black with ink. These pages keep his writing flowing. “It helps me figure out what I really want to say,” he says. On the flip side of this same notebook, he writes lyrics, which he initially approaches as poetry, then phrasing, then singing. Sometimes

he’ll have a “floating paper” where he writes lines, from which he pulls out words. There is also the Notes app on his phone to collect phrases he overhears.

On the road, Carper brings a laptop for recording, a ukulele and a cheap acoustic guitar, a Focusrite Scarlett Solo and a Shure RS230 microphone, “because it has an on/off switch,” he laughs. “I write a lot on tour because the routine is very military and it gives me space to write in my head. And every time I produce someone else, I always write a song or two. Working on somebody else’s art reminds me of making my own.”

While Fidlar’s no-holds-barred songs sound like a deranged all-night party where the members are playing their instruments at full speed in the room together, Carper’s focus when writing is the vocal melody and the lyrics. “Our heaviest, metal-ish kind of songs are me playing on the piano, one note at a time,” he says. “Ninety percent of the time, the songs start on ukulele.”

SONGWRITING WHILE DEMOING

The ukulele is Carper’s first instrument and the basis for the first iteration of a song he records. He then tracks an acoustic guitar version, a piano version, a speeded-up guitar version. He calls these “drafts,” and with each one, he might change the pitch or add a new section. He sets a 20-minute time limit on each version, does two or three takes and once the timer goes off, he stops recording that rendition. He does the same with bass and drums.

In this way, Carper moves steadily through his demoing process, which typically results in five to seven drafts. Once he has all the parts mapped out, he pulls the stems, usually written on Ableton, and puts them into Pro Tools to bring to Fidlar’s drummer, Max Kuehn, and bassist,

departed the group.)

“It’s only when I feel I can present it to my band members that I feel I have a song,” says Carper, who, with his bandmates, did most of the final tracking at Balboa Recording Studio in Los Angeles. “When it gets to them, I delete my drums, I delete my bass, and say, ‘Play whatever inspires you.’ The mantra is, ‘How do we make this go off live? How do we make more energy?’ Then I’ll go through the process of elimination. I don’t have more than one melody going on at the same time, or, if it’s a different melody, I make sure it’s a reverb or a bed.

“It’s crazy how much of it revolves around my confidence,” he continues. “A lot of it is being willing to fall and bounce back. If the song doesn’t work, you don’t have to throw it away. What do you like about it? Accentuate that.”

Carper records vocals on his own, using a Shure SM7B or 58 microphone (“I like holding it, and I can cup it”), going through a Chandler TG2. He keeps the chain clean to have more flexibility later. Soundtoys Decapitator and Yamaha SPX90 multi-effects processors appear often on Surviving the Dream. Carper used the symphonic setting number 15 on the latter, a tip from a Mix with the Masters video featuring Andy Wallace.

“I sing the song all the way through, and then I’ll do it over and over again, but I never double or triple things,” he says, noting that his vocals for Surviving the Dream were recorded in an Airbnb in Joshua Tree. “I sing it until it’s nailed in my head. Then I’ll take a new track and use the old takes as doubles and triples. I do a center vocal, just one lead vocal, and then a left and a right double and a triple, and the fourth one is chorus, and I tuck everything down.”

Brandon Schwartzel. (Guitarist Elvin Kuehn has

To record the new album, Fidlar set up at Balboa Recording Studio in Los Angeles’ Glassell Park neighborhood.

Engineer David Jerkovich made extensive use of the facility’s outboard offerings.

Photo: Brandon Schwartzel.

TRACKING THE BAND

The bass is captured via DIs, but Carper also nabs it through the Tech 21 SansAmp VT bass pedal and a 15-inch cabinet; nothing bigger, he says, as it tends to create phasing issues. Carper’s intention with drums is to get them as big as possible while maintaining a vintage sound. To achieve that, he uses primarily ribbon microphones, working from the bottom up, hitting each piece of the kit until it “sounds sick,” then miking it—a trick he learned from producer Ricky Reed. From his own experience, he has found that fewer drums in a large room are enough to get a big drum sound.

Guitars are also captured via DI with an array of amps: Marshall 4x12 or 2x12 cabinets and an EVH 5150 2x12 with a direct-out speaker emulator. Carper’s guitars of choice are the Music Man St Vincent signature and Schecter Sun Valley Super Shredder with Floyd Rose and Sustainiac Stealth PRO system.

“It’s like one big feedback machine,” he says. “I’ll play the chord, hold it, and record it through the whole song. There’s this feedback feel to it. I like to experiment with a lot of active pickups. I like drop tunings. I’ll layer those in to get different voicings. I run the acoustic guitar through an acoustic simulator. I like what I call ‘inspiration pedals,’ but I don’t like vintage-

sounding ones.”

“This forgotten gear from the ’80s really inspired me,” Carper says. “They’re badly made, really cheap. They’re not tube; they’re IC chips. I would run all the guitars through these things, not really knowing what I was doing. It’s like learning how to use a new DAW: I don’t know how to do it, but that makes me excited to learn, and I’ll often stumble across a new sound.”

Although Carper mixes the artists he produces, when it comes to Fidlar, he puts that responsibility in the hands of others. For Surviving the Dream, it was Lars Stalfors, whom he handed a rough mix that was as far along as Carper could take it.

Every instrument (including vocals) is sent to Pro Tools after passing through some type of classic gear from the 1980s. This era was a new discovery for Carper during the creation of Surviving the Dream. He namechecks Tears for Fears, A-ha and Ozzy Osbourne records, with their chorusing guitars, as sounds that caught his ear. He bought a bunch of old units, which are set up on every surface of his studio: Alesis

“I don’t go back to the second mix,” he says. “My theory is, I don’t listen to my own music, so I’m not my target audience. Doing my own mixes with Fidlar, I can rely on my ears and get it to a certain point. Once you start getting into the weeds, you trip yourself up. I’m all about the pass-off and trying not to be precious about it. The reason I can let go is because I get that done to me a lot through bands I produce. You have to check your ego.” ■

After 10 years of working with outside producers, Fidlar opted to self-produce its new album.

Fidlar recorded its first album using recording gear owned by friend Danny Noguerias; a decade later, Noguerias owns Balboa Recording Studio where the band created Surviving The Dream.

Photo: Alice Baxley.

Photo: Brandon Schwartzel

classic tracks: immersive music edition

Stevie Wonder and the Quadraphonic Pioneers

Fifty years before Atmos, Auro and RA360, Stevie Wonder’s classic “Superstition” was recorded and mixed using the original immersive music format.

By Robert Margouleff

Stevie Wonder, seen here playing live in 1974, often recorded his keyboards in the control room of Record Plant’s Studio B, riding the vibe created by quadraphonic monitoring.

PHOTO: Michael Putland/Getty Images

In 1972, Stevie Wonder, my producing/ engineering partner Malcolm Cecil, and I were looking for a studio in Los Angeles that we could call home. Gary Kellgren and Chris Stone, proprietors of the Record Plant, offered us Studio B.

We had a detailed conversation about our needs for Stevie and our epic synthesizer, TONTO (The Original Neo Timbral Orchestra), and they offered to rebuild the studio to our specifications, including space for TONTO and a separate and secure tape library for Stevie’s masters, if we booked the room for a year. It was exactly what we were looking for.

The plan was to upgrade Studio B to support the then-emerging Quadraphonic format, which offered a way to put a four-channel discrete master on a vinyl phonograph record. Quad was becoming a significant innovation in the audio industry at the time and was being embraced by several major labels, including EMI, Decca and RCA, as well as by recording artists such as Pink Floyd, The Beatles and The Who.

None of us had any experience with it, but the Record Plant always had to have the latest and greatest of everything first, so we happily dove headlong into the unknown.

When the Record Plant opened in 1969, Tom Hidley, who was then the facility’s chief engineer, built the original Studio B as a stereo control room. It wasn’t huge, but it was big enough. We didn’t realize then that its smallness served Quad monitoring quite well. It had wrap-around windows and Hidley’s specially designed monster audio monitors flush-mounted in soffits, almost at ear level. They later became known commercially as Westlake Studio Monitors, and they are still in use today all over the world.

With Gary’s blessing, we invited John Storyk, the architect and acoustician who designed Electric Lady Studios in New York, as well as TONTO’s unique housings, to join our dream team. It was the first and last time that Hidley and Storyk, the future giants in studio design, would work together. The room was a gem. It seemed that every record we did in it turned to gold!

THE QUAD CONTROL ROOM

The physical space was relatively easy to set up for Quad monitoring by putting two speakers in the back, just like in the front. The room already had a “compression” sloped ceiling because that was a part of Hidley’s original 1969 design. We constructed a “second-floor” bass trap built over

the back half of the control room ceiling that was cantilevered over the hallway behind the control room’s back wall, where the new rear speaker soffits stuck out into the hall. We had to put padding on them because they were at ear level! That one move invisibly doubled the cubic volume of the control room.

The good news was that the sloped ceiling and the additional trapping gave us an impressively powerful, phase-coherent, clean bottom end from the eight 15-inch JBL full-frequency drivers, two in each cabinet; a compression midrange driver; four JBL 2405 slot tweeters; and White 1/3-octave EQs on each speaker, which was essential for room tuning.

The bad news was that the sloped ceiling and the parallel sloped console surface created a subtle comb-filter effect at the mixing position. It was a slight reflection of the audio from the high-frequency waves bouncing off the console. It wasn’t apparent initially, and Malcolm and I only noticed it months later when we started mixing. We solved the problem by gaffer-taping a moving blanket over our mix position at the console.

Gary and Chris purchased a new API 16-bus console with a simple Quad monitoring section. The 550A EQs were warm and easy to use, and I loved that console. The master 16-track and 2-track tape recorders were 3M M79s running at 15 ips, then with Dolby noise reduction when we later upgraded to 24 tracks. The quality of the sound from these records speaks for itself to this day.

RECORDING AND MIXING IN QUAD

Sansui had just debuted the QS system for encoding Quad sound on vinyl records in March

1971, so that’s what was used; there weren’t a lot of competitors. My first experience feeling the power of immersive/surround audio was the QS Quad mix of “Superstition” that Malcolm and I did with Stevie in Studio B in 1972. The mix was printed on an Ampex 440B 4-track tape recorder, and the master sounded the way we intended.

Although Quadraphonic records enjoyed a brief blip of fame, QS was not successful due to its technical limitations, the primary one being that it could not store truly discrete analog audio on vinyl, only providing around 3 dB of separation. This meant that the four channels were partially independent and it compromised the listening experience. Additionally, specialized equipment was needed for playback, which further hindered its adoption. The technology was new and untested, and it was a failure in the marketplace, so the QS system was abandoned.

And that’s when I began thinking about why my brain knew where a sound was coming from. I found out that it’s due to Head-Related Transfer Function, or HRTF, and I realized that vectors could be as powerful as pitch and duration.

Basically, the unique, highly asymmetric construction of the human outer ear—and the fact that we have two of them, plus our very efficient brain to process the input—allows for a rapid and precise determination of where a sound is generated. The difference in distances (and therefore arrival times) and slight sound coloration by the ears and the head is HRTF, and it varies slightly from person to person due to ear and head shape, as well as the distance between the ears.

Almost by accident, I had discovered the principles behind what we now call immersive

The author, Robert Margouleff, at right, with Malcolm Cecil in Record Plant Studio B, 1972.

Courtesy of Robert Margouleff; colorization by Dan Salt

audio. It became of immense value in the control room for monitoring during the recording process.

MONITORING IN QUAD

For me, tracking in stereo provides a sound picture of the band standing on a stage in front of me, inside a proscenium arch, making the music objective, which was fine for recording a symphony orchestra. However, we were no longer listening from a distance with a third-person POV from the audience, with the soundstage in front of us. Listening in Quad made the audio subjective, with all of us occupying the same space as the music.

With Quad, the music’s POV was always in the first-person. There was a lead vocal in front of us, the background vocals behind us, guitar on the left, drums in front, the percussion behind, and perhaps doubled clavinet parts opposed at 180 degrees, to use one example. We could place the instruments around us in the speakers and listen to them “talk” to each other. Monitoring in Quad in the control room with Stevie made the recording process compelling and magical. It really tickled our HRTFs, and it changed my world!

The control room was small, but we had just enough space to place Stevie’s instrument stack in the center of the space, just behind the console. It consisted of a Fender Rhodes 88 with a Hohner Clavinet with a special bender bar on top, an Arp 2600, and an assorted collection of guitar boxes, including a MuTron Bi phaser and some other pedals.

We used an Ampex 440B 4-track tape recorder with a big power amplifier and a variable oscillator on the capstan motor for timing the echo, delay and eight channels of dbx noise reduction around it, with four in record and four in playback. We used this for our “delay effect”

on our stereo version of “Superstition,” and four returning in mono when we were mixing in Quad, along with two EMT 140 echo plates (they were portable if you had four friends to move one). We worked hard to create a space without resorting to a lot of echo or reverb. We placed the music around Stevie, close and dry in real-time, and refined the directionality of the sound. This brought a different kind of emotional energy and awareness to the music.

Quad monitoring at a high level on those Hidley monitors in the control room proved to be an effective tool in getting the best possible performances out of Stevie. You could feel the sonic energy pounding your chest and moving through your body. It was like being on stage! It brought more emotional energy to the music, and since most of the sounds were electronic, they weren’t sounds until they tumbled out of the loudspeakers. Once we had the basics in the can, we used the studio to overdub acoustic instruments, drums, guitars, vocals, etc., and we also monitored in Quad.

We found ourselves living inside the song, and the control room became a musical instrument where people could perform together in the same space as the music. It was a musical instrument that you inhabited! Having the artist in the control room during the recordings was a gift. We could stay focused, hear what would go to tape, and make the EQ and effects changes on the fly while tracking—no back and forth between the studio and the control room between takes.

It was compelling and magical, and once I started listening to Quad like that, it changed my world forever! It started with Stevie and then continued years later with DEVO in 1980. The difference for DEVO was that I had the entire band, except the drummer Alan Myers, in the control room, monitoring in Quad during

the recording process. It brought a kind of emotional awareness to the music. I still use that technique every chance I get.

IMMERSIVE AUDIO IS FOR EVERYONE

These days, with beds and objects and streaming music, we can put a “sound object” anywhere inside a 360-degree bubble and store it digitally. Our recordings are the native performances, and storing spatial information digitally is the big game-changer. With spatial audio on headphones, where a sound comes from can be a powerful and emotional part of the listening experience. We live with our music in a digital universe. Music is no longer a “take” or a “picture or a report” of a real-time event, but a mix of live and electronics that lives solely in the medium. Immersive music is finally in the consumer market. People everywhere are experiencing it on mobile devices and headphones. In fact, I recently remixed DEVO’s hit single “Whip It” in Dolby Atmos, and I think it makes an excellent record even more enjoyable.

This technology will shape how music is composed and performed like never before. You’ll often hear me say, “Technology drives the art,” because it’s always done that for me. I believe that the ability to create and deliver immersive music will inspire artists and producers the way that mixing “Superstition” in QS did for Stevie, Malcolm and myself more than 50 years ago.

Please stop thinking in stereo. Use immersive as a composing and recording tool, and mind your HRTFs! n

Robert Margouleff is a record producer, synthesizer pioneer and Grammy Award-winning engineer known for his co-producing and programming on Stevie Wonder’s classic albums Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale.

The rebuilt Record Plant Studio B in 1972, with a new API console that included Quad monitoring capability

Margouleff and Cecil performing in the control room while monitoring in Quad.

Courtesy of Robert Margouleff

Robert Margouleff;colorization by Dan Salt

Tech // reviews

beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO X LE

Clean, accurate dynamic headphones that can handle the SPL

By Steve La Cerra

MOST IMPRESSIVE FEATURE

Detailed, accurate reproduction.

Way back in 1937, 13 years after its founding, beyerdynamic introduced the first dynamic headphones, and since that time has continued to develop and refine headphone technology. In celebration of its 100th anniversary, the company has produced the DT 770 PRO X Limited Edition, a closed-back, dynamic headphone with a nominal impedance of 48 ohms. The DT 770 PRO X LE is intended for use in audio production, podcasting and streaming—just about any application requiring high-quality headphone reproduction.

Construction of the DT 770 PRO X LE is well-done, with a sturdy metal headband/yoke assembly securely holding the earcups. Cushy, gray velour pads surround the ears and gently hold the earcups in place. The top portion of the metal frame is covered with a padded, snap-on headband that is easy to remove or replace should the need arise. The cable mates to the left earpiece using a locking mini-XLR connector, while the other end is terminated with a 3.5mm TRS that accepts a screw-on ¼-inch adapter.

The DT 770 PRO X Limited Edition comes with a two-year limited warranty and ships in a reusable cardboard box containing the headphones, detachable cable (straight, 3 meters), ¼-inch adapter and a drawstring bag.

The system employs beyerdynamic’s Stellar.45 dynamic driver, which boasts a frequency range of 5 Hz to 40 kHz and is capable of producing SPLs as high as 112 dB. I brought the DT 770 PRO X LE on the road for a series of shows, using them at FOH with a variety of digital mixing consoles—all of which had no problem driving them to sufficient volume levels.

The earcups offer moderate isolation from external sound (ambient isolation is spec’d at 16 dBA), sufficient that I could hear sounds soloed in the cans while working shows with SPLs in the low-to-mid90dB range (A-weighted). The sound of the DT 770 PRO X LE would best be described as natural and uncolored. If you’re looking for headphones that hype the bottom and top, look elsewhere. The midrange and top end in particular are crystal clear, providing plenty of detail while not being fatiguing. Some people might find the bottom end to be lacking, but I did not feel that to be the case, and I found that the lows remained tight and clean even when played loud through the DT 770 PRO X LE.

The DT 770 PRO X LE is very comfortable even while wearing glasses for long sessions—which can be problematic with headphones that push too forcefully against the side of the head. At its smallest setting, the headband was still a hair too big for my taste; I would have preferred if I could adjust it to a slightly smaller size. Regardless, they stayed in place even when I used them for sessions while playing drums.

The DT 770 PRO X LE is not a compact headphone and doesn’t collapse for transport as do many other headphones. This is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, they occupied more space in my suitcase or work box, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t worry about the metal headband breaking due to constant flexing—and over a career of touring with headphones, I’ve found that the point of failure is almost always a collapsible plastic headband.

I also used the DT 770 PRO X Limited Edition in the studio for recording and mixing. When recording lead vocals, they isolated the cue mix well enough that leakage into a vocal microphone wasn’t an issue, even when the singer moved one earcup slightly to the side of their ear.

PRODUCT SUMMARY

COMPANY: beyerdynamic

PRODUCT: DT 770 PRO X Limited Edition Headphones

WEBSITE: www.north-america.beyerdynamic. com

PRICE: $199

PROS: Very natural and detailed reproduction; comfortable to wear for extended periods.

CONS: Headband does not collapse for transport; smallest headband setting may be too big for some users.

Mixing on headphones is not my favorite pasttime, but I used the DT 770 PRO X LE to mix a few songs with good results. My mixes translated very well across a variety of playback systems, though on a few occasions, I found the bass to be a tad loud on the other systems when compared to listening on the DT 770 PRO X LE. Most often, the big decisions—vocal levels, amount of reverb and delay, balance between instruments—were spot-on. beyerdynamic has done a great job with the DT 770 PRO X Limited Edition headphones. They offer accurate, transparent reproduction, plenty of detail, and play louder without distortion than you’ll ever need. Their transparency makes them an excellent reference headphone, and they’re reasonably priced. Any engineer would be happy to have a pair. n

Tech

// reviews

Audio-Technica ATH-M60X Headphones

Excitement, clarity and quality sonics in a slim and lightweight design

By Rob Tavaglione

MOST IMPRESSIVE FEATURE

The 45 mm drivers of the popular ATH-M50X in a slimmer and bettersounding package.

Iuse Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones for a lot of different tasks around the studio; the whole band wears them when live tracking, they’re often used for instrumental overdubs and sometimes for vocals, too. I check mixes and even masters on the 50X.

Sure, the frequency response is a little hyped, both top and bottom, but they are super-popular with my clients and other creatives. They’re effectively the closest thing I have to mimicking the end-user listening experience, along, of course, with an iPhone and its AirPods/earbuds.

So I was intrigued when I stumbled upon the Model ATH-M60X at Guitar Center. They’re closed-back and use the same 45mm drivers as found in the 50X, but with a significantly slimmeddown headband, much smaller ear cups, and low-profile ear pads that sit on, instead of around, the ear. I tried them on and then directly compared them to 50X (I love GC’s setup for this), and the differences were major: much lighter, easier on my eyeglass frames, and generally more comfy, even though they stayed put when I tilted my head.

The 60Xs don’t fold up for portability like the 50X, but they do include the carrying pouch, threaded 1/8-inch-to-¼-inch adapter and three detachable cables (long 3.0-meter straight, medium coiled, and short 1.2-meter straight). I’m glad A-T includes all three, as each proves useful at one time or another.

At 38 ohms, they get loud easily, even with weaker headphone amps; they handle up to 1,600 mW of power. Stated frequency response is from 15 Hz to 28 kHz, which is plenty low and amply wide. These specs are all identical to the 50X, although at 7.8 ounces, they are notably lighter than their 10.2-ounce big brother. There is a switchable limiter onboard, but it caps the volume at a rather quiet level, lower than you’ll likely need.

What really sold me on the 60X were the slight sonic differences when compared to the 50X. Unexpectedly, the smaller ear

cups and pads create smoother bass response (with more sub-bass, but much flatter response in the upper-bass region), less scooping out of boxy mids, and a taming of that upper-mid harshness of the 50X—while at the same time delivering more detail and excitement. This overall flatter response is still pleasantly plump, while being much more honest with crucial mid-mids and high-mid “presence” definition. The 60Xs are dynamically open, with a strong phantom center and seemingly wider stereo imaging over the 50X. With the smaller cups, of course, the isolation is slightly less.

PRODUCT SUMMARY

COMPANY: Audio-Technica

PRODUCT: ATH-M60X headphones

If you need a fleet of matching cans for clients, at $200/pair these are likely a bit rich, even if that’s truly midpriced, with a slim design that may or may not hold up to the abuses of studio life. Time will tell.

WEBSITE: www.audio-technica.com

PRICE: $219

PROS: Comfortable design, balanced frequency response, similar alternative to ATH-M50X.

CONS: Only moderate isolation, not very portable.

That being said, they are affordable enough, comfortable enough, truthful enough and beautifully sonically balanced. For you producers and mix engineers out there who are as picky about headphones as I am, I can heartily recommend the M60X as a very nice “gift to self.” n

The Audio-Technica ATH-M50X, left, and ATH-M60X headphones share near-identical components and specs, though the latter is 2.4 ounces lighter.

Tech // reviews

Minuendo Music Earplugs

Sleek Norwegian earplugs adapt to audio environments

By Clive Young

MOST

IMPRESSIVE FEATURE

Adjustable plugs can variably reduce sound

Earplugs are a crucial tool for audio pros, whether you work in live sound at cranked-up concerts, or in a studio where clients monitor louder than you’d like. In the past, you might’ve gotten smirked at for taking care of your ears, but with the industry’s increasing focus on self care, it’s far more socially and professionally acceptable to pop in some earplugs—which is a great thing.

That said, generic foam earplugs are hard for pros to work with because they are onesize-fits-all—not only in terms of physical fit, but also the amount of sound they reduce. Most off-the-shelf plugs block a fixed level between 22 and 32 dB, which usually is too high when you still need to accurately know what your surroundings sound like. If you’re in a dynamic environment, you’re forever putting plugs in and pulling them out, until eventually they get stuffed in a pocket where they aren’t protecting your hearing at all.

Enter Minuendo Music—high-end earplugs that can be manually adjusted on the fly to variably reduce sound. Each plug has a small lever that opens and closes an acoustic membrane inside the plug itself, letting you tweak the sound level as needed. At their lowest setting, the Minuendo Music plugs decrease levels by 7 dB, but with a slide of the lever, you can reduce as much as 25 dB. There are no batteries involved, no tools and best of all, no need to remove a plug from your ear to adjust it.

Minuendo Music plugs come with 11 sets of small, medium and large ear tips, giving you plenty of options. There’s also a cleaning brush, neck leash, user guide and a carrying case. In a nice design touch, the ear plugs themselves are magnetic so they can snap together—useful when they’re on the neck leash so they aren’t swinging around.

Put to the test, the Minuendo Music plugs easily handled a loud concert at Madison Square Garden; it was like having a volume knob for my surroundings. Standing at front-of-house, I had the levers midway for most of the show and could hear details and high-end with airiness despite what was a -15 to -20 dB reduction. Then, ducking out into the quieter concourse, a flip of the levers opened up the acoustic membrane and I could hear my surroundings without having to remove the plugs. Did they sound like I was wearing earplugs? Somewhat—whether you could wear them and perform analytic audio work is a matter of personal taste, but they were very tweakable and I felt like I heard the show as the FOH engineer intended. For non-critical listening, they were a home run.

That said, Minuendo Music earplugs are not cheap, running $179 (there’s also a fixed -17 dB version, Minuendo Live, for $99). My only quibble is that I wish the levers were detented in steps to indicate specifically how much you’re reducing the sound levels, but admittedly, that would make them less fine-tunable. Regardless, Minuendo Music earplugs are a solid win; being able to variably reduce levels in an earplug is a game changer. n

7 to 25 dB.

Open Channel

The Race Against Time: In Search of the Lost Chords

By Craig Anderton

There’s no question that some magical recordings have been lost forever. After a tape has been incinerated, or has deteriorated beyond recognition, it’s game over.

Sometimes recordings are lost in other ways, like in someone’s attic, a storage unit or in a box of long-forgotten safety copies. Sometimes serendipity hits, and these pieces of history re-surface accidentally, but more often than not, reclaiming our musical heritage falls to those racing against time to recover tapes before they disappear completely.

I’ve experienced both scenarios. When a record company wanted to rerelease the first album by Mandrake Memorial, a band I was in during the ’60s, they hoped I had at least a safety copy of the original master. Nope. After following multiple leads that went nowhere, eventually the label concluded the best it could do was find an unplayed vinyl copy (which in itself wasn’t easy) and then clean it up.

More recently, Damon Lyon-Shaw (Status Quo, The Who, Golden Earring) found the stereo mix for an album project he engineered for us at Olympic Studios. The album was never released because some of the songs ended up being repurposed for Puzzle, the band’s final album. The tape sat in storage for decades. After Lyon-Shaw found it, the tape eventually worked its way to Richard Morton Jack of Flashback Records, who was familiar with the band. Almost a half-century later, the album that was presumed lost forever was mastered and released.

vintage car fanatics who search through junk yards for a usable steering box. Even then, having a machine that can play back tapes still isn’t enough. If dbx or Dolby noise reduction was used, you need to decode the audio. And then there’s the infamous sticky-shed syndrome. Over time, magnetic tapes collect moisture. This breaks down the tape binder. Not only does the tape itself become sticky, but during playback, it leaves a sticky layer of crud on the tape machine’s surfaces (Ampex 456 has a particularly bad reputation).

Although sticky tapes are essentially unplayable, there’s a potential solution: “baking” the tape in a hot-air oven or food dehydrator. This can’t be done quickly—the digitization specialists at Round and Wound estimate two to three days for a 2-inch reel—but after baking, you (hopefully) have a window that lasts from several days to a couple weeks when you can play back the tape and digitize it.

Whether 10-inch reels, DAT, 2-inch multitracks, conventional masters, or DA88 cartridges, machines that can play back dinosaur formats are a vanishing breed. They must also be well-maintained…

Usually, though, you don’t get lucky. In 1999 Steely Dan’s Becker and Fagen offered a $600 reward for the missing multitrack tapes of the songs “Aja” and “Black Cow.” They were never found.

With the growing awareness that history is slipping away, Master Tape Rescue (spearheaded by industry veterans Brian Kehew and Danny White) is doing something about it. They’ve identified an “information gap” between archives holding tapes and the people who would want them—if only they knew the tapes still existed. Master Tape Rescue’s goal is to connect labels, artists and producers seeking lost tapes with the archives holding them. Looking through the archives listings on the MTR website reveals material by Elvis Costello, The Alarm, James Cotton, Greg Kihn, David Foster, Buddy Rich, Big Audio Dynamite, The Grateful Dead, The Blasters—and many more. However, finding tapes is only the beginning. Whether 10-inch reels, DAT, 2-inch multitracks, conventional masters or DA-88 cartridges, machines that can play back dinosaur formats are a vanishing breed. They must also be well-maintained, but the issues around maintenance recall

Baking is a “kids, don’t try this at home” operation. The temperature and timing has to be just right or you can damage the tape you’re trying to save. Furthermore, if there’s paper leader tape spliced between songs, it will likely have deteriorated so that it breaks during playback. What’s more, plastic splicing tape usually needs to be replaced. If a tape needs baking, it’s essential to seek out someone with a history of successful tape baking and transfers. You may get lucky and find a professional locally who’s done archiving work for a company like Sony or Universal so you don’t have to go through the anxiety of shipping tapes—but don’t bet on it.

Also, remember that not all tapes ended up in archives. Many tapes are owned by curiosity seekers, collectors and those who were in the right place at the right time. It’s rumored that after Virgin/EMI acquired Olympic Studios, boxes of tapes ended up in dumpsters behind the building, and artists were invited to dig through the trash to find what they could. Reportedly, collectors were tipped off about this, and someone walked away with unreleased Led Zeppelin material from the late ’60s. Others likely have tapes by the Stones and the Who.

Then there’s the story of how in the 1980s, CBS sawed off the metal reels that stored magnetic tape so they could sell the metal as scrap. Fortunately, employees managed to save some of the tapes. During a different CBS purge, masters and test pressings ended up in garbage cans. Anyone walking around midtown Manhattan who stumbled across them could take what they wanted. Where are those tapes now? Do they even exist? Did some garage band record over them?

Irreversible mistakes have been made in the past. Are we going to make the same mistakes in the future? Can we keep history from repeating itself? Check back for next month’s Open Channel. ■