Changing
Rooms
Mixing and mastering with Trinnov
Trinnov Audio, established in 2003, is a French company renowned for its pioneering work in audio processing and room-acoustics correction technologies across a number of different domains, including professional studios, commercial cinemas, high-end hi-fi and home theatre systems. Founded by Arnaud Laborie, Rémy Bruno, and Sébastien Montoya, Trinnov began by focusing on immersive-sound research. The founders’ vision was to leverage the power of advances in digital signal processing techniques to significantly enhance acoustic optimization in playback systems, leading ultimately to the development of their Optimizer technology, first introduced to acousticians and audio engineers in 2005 at the Audio Engineering Society convention. Today, Trinnov boasts a diverse team of over 65 people across six different time zones, collectively bringing together decades of audio engineering and musical experience. This collaborative expertise has enabled Trinnov to install nearly 15,000 high-performance systems worldwide. At the heart of the company’s product line is the Optimizer, a sophisticated loudspeaker and room-optimization technology that employs powerful DSP to address both room acoustics and speaker performance. Their key ‘point-of-difference’ is that, unlike the traditional, real-time pink-noise and equalisation method that cannot address the time-domain aspect, Trinnov’s approach fully accounts for both time and frequency domains, providing a more comprehensive and inevitably more effective solution to acoustic optimization. Unsurprisingly, the technology is being widely adopted across
“Trinnov is ‘speaker-agnostic’: it will work with all makes of speaker, not just one.”
every applicable sector, with over 4,000 studios already using it for monitoring and mixing. Trinnov Audio designs all of its solutions in-house and holds numerous patents for unique technologies.
In the pro-audio domain, the Trinnov Product Portfolio consists of their D-MON series and Nova. The D-MON’s integrated monitoring processors combine the Optimizer room correction process with advanced monitoring functions, supporting configurations from stereo up to complex multichannel setups like 9.3.6 Dolby Atmos systems. Users can start with a basic setup and upgrade via software updates as their needs evolve.
Marketing Manager for Trinnov Audio Benoit Munoz: “We’re not a marketing company, we’re a technological research company. That’s where the money goes”.
Nova, the first of a new generation of Trinnov products, is based on a redesigned platform that offers greater modularity, higher performance, enhanced reliability, and native support for Audio-over-IP protocols such as Dante. It also serves as a comprehensive monitor controller, accommodating setups from stereo up to 5.1 surround configurations. Trinnov has indicated that it will eventually release a dedicated product to address high-channel count installations such as theatrical dubbing stages.
Technology and Research
“The thing with Trinnov is that we’re very focused on technology and research” says Marketing Manager Benoit Munoz. “There is only one marketing person, myself, a graphic designer and a small sales team, but there’s over 30 engineers. We’re not a marketing company, we’re a technological research company. We are currently building a new HQ and it’s really focused on research and development with labs and anechoic chambers. That’s where the money goes. Some of our engineers can tell you
a lot of things about your speakers without ever having been in your room or knowing anything about it — problems with furniture or with the room itself and maybe even guessing the type of speakers used because they are so used to seeing this data. It makes us seem almost clairvoyant sometimes! But there are always things that create early reflections in a room — that’s why mastering engineers are so cautious about their desk and the reflections around it — and the Trinnov system is really big on dealing with early reflections, and that’s something that will dramatically improve a phantom centre image straight away.
“Trinnov will make a positive difference on every system but especially with Atmos. The thing is, the more speakers you introduce, the more problems you introduce. Of course, there are other calibration systems in use, but we started doing this 10- or 15-years before any of them. And, of course, Trinnov is ‘speaker-agnostic’: it will work with all makes of speaker, not just one. Where Trinnov makes a huge difference
is in time and phase, and a lot of manufacturers’ ‘correction systems’ do not cater much for phase- and time-alignment problems. A big difference to start with is that we use our own four-capsule microphone based on the Ambisonics technology. If you are just using a basic omni-directionmal mic, you have to take multiple measurements, moving your microphone around listening to tone sweeps, which introduces the possibility of human error. With our system, we can let the microphone do this by itself, on a microphone stand with automated procedures. Trinnov can calibrate a simple stereo system literally in a minute, and that makes it really easy to do different presets for different listening positions in the room. There’s always been that problem of the difference between where a client tends to sit to listen to the mix compared to where the engineer sits. Now you can just make a preset for different listening positions and recall them on the fly from the Trinnov remote controller.”
The Trinnov analysis procedure may be superficially simple, but
Established in 2003,Trinnov now has nearly 15,000 installed systems worldwide and a team of over 65 people, working across six different time zones.
there are still different ways of using it. Benoit Munoz again: “We always like to offer people options: there’s the single measurement point, often preferred by professional users who tend to always be in the same spot, or the multiple measurement points version, where you might do one measurement in front of you and others off to the left and right. Once the Optimizer has all this information, you can tell it ‘the centre position is the most important, but the left and right are 60 percent important’ — you can give a weighting to them. That’s something we use more in home theatre or in commercial cinema, where the primary goal is consistency across a range of seating. But in professional audio, it still has an application for people working on a really big console where they’ll need to move out of the centre position, or producers that have synthesizers or drum machines in another part of the studio — they’ll want the sound to be consistent in that space, too.”
One thing the Trinnov system certainly doesn’t do is seek to homogenise the sound of all speaker systems to match some kind of of idealised response. Engineers, and particularly mix engineers, will often have become very used to working with the sonic signature of a particular speaker that they have used for a long time. Whilst Trinnov can easily correct any issues it may have, that’s not always what’s going to be wanted by the user.
“Yes, normally the idea is not to change the nature of the speakers: not to ‘Frankenstein’ the speaker, but to try to respect the way they behave and respect what the user wants” says Benoit Munoz. “We allow the user to set an ‘excursion curve’ where you can keep the ‘flavour’ of the original speaker response, and we tell the Optimizer to not touch part of the spectrum. You can tell it ‘I love what you’re doing on the low end, but I don’t want you to correct from 200Hz upwards,’ or ‘I love the low end and the highs, but I don’t want you to do anything in the midrange’. The user can just draw a curve to tell the Optimizer not to touch a part of the spectrum, or you can limit how much correction it can apply so it won’t ever be over-EQing anything.”
This level of highly sophisticated DSP-intensive number-crunching isn’t going to happen in real-time, of course, so the trade-off for monitoring accuracy is a significant degree of latency. The D-MON processor specs as “under 10 milliseconds”, but in the new Nova system that figure rises to around 20ms. “We are working on that to improve it in the future” says Benoit Munoz, “and we hope to bring it under 10 milliseconds, too, but if you want to correct for the lower part of the spectrum with
Using a four-capsule, tetrahedral array, the Trinnov calibration microphone can gather all the information necessary to analyse a 3D space in a single automated process.
very long wavelengths, we are constrained by basic physics. We’re working on a mode where you get latency under 10 milliseconds but still get some of the benefits of the optimization, just not all of it.” Of course, even 10ms latency is an issue for anyone recording in the control room and monitoring on speakers, so Trinnov includes a bypass option to go down to an imperceptible single-sample latency. Inevitably this will result in a change in sound of the monitors — even high-end users with nicely designed control rooms and great speakers will hear a difference when they bypass the Trinnov processing, but
the amount of change will depend on how much correction Trinnov system has been doing.
Absolutely Fabulous!
Producer and engineer Fabrice Dupont uses both a D-MON and Nova system at his multi-room Flux Studios facility, located in New York City’s East Village. Established in 2009, the studio has expanded over the years to occupy an entire building, offering a variety of specialized rooms tailored for different aspects of music production. “We’ve been so busy,” says Fab. “I’ve been blessed with a lot of cool records — I’m a client of my own studio now since I separated my personal music-production business from the operation of the studio. I’ve got partners and a management company now, and we’ve grown Flux from a two-room studio to an eight-room facility, which I couldn’t have done just by myself. We’ve gone from being just a cool, indie room to being a world-class place, but we’ve still got rooms that are designed to be affordable, and we do a lot of community stuff working with schools, donating
time so that kids can come and see what a recording studio looks like.
“The evolution of Flux has been incremental”, Fab explains. “Everything here has to happen in small touches because we’re always running. We can’t shut down for three months to re-do a room, so we have to do everything in little ‘band-aid’ patches. We created this Cloud9 Atmos room in four weeks of relentless work at the speed of light, and we actually took this Trinnov D-MON 12 out of another of the rooms here as this is quite a small space, and without the Trinnov system it just wouldn’t have been possible for it to be an Atmos room.
“The monitoring in this room is all Focal Solo 6s — I don’t subscribe to the idea of having bigger speakers in the front for Atmos. The last time I checked, everybody listens to Atmos mixes on headphones and there aren’t ‘bigger speakers in the front’ on headphones! I get great results using all the same speakers in an Atmos rig, and I love the Solo 6s, but it’s the Trinnov that was really instrumental in making it work, taking care of all the delays, the room compensation, and also swapping between stereo and Atmos, because Trinnov is
Producer and engineer Fabrice Dupont uses both a Trinnov D-MON and a Nova system at his eight-room Flux Studios facility in New York City’s East Village.
“No matter how good you get your room and no matter how much money you spend on it, you can always get it a little better with the Trinnov.”
not just great room correction, it’s also a very good monitor section that happens to ‘speak digital’.
“From our previous experience of adding an Atmos rig to our ‘Dungeon’ tracking room, I realized that that was a really bad idea. Having an Atmos room that’s also a tracking room is a dumb idea that’ll never work for a commercial studio. These days, you need a control room where the artist can bring in 30 of their closest friends to watch them record. But in an Atmos room, the mixing position needs to be so much further back that you eat up half your control room space. There can be no real overlap in functionality between a New York-style ‘classical-in-the-morning, rock-and-roll-in-the-afternoon, hip-hop-at-night’, recording room and an Atmos room. It was a really bad idea. I just didn’t know it at that time. So this winter we relocated the Atmos rig to our latest room called Cloud9, which
was designed to do ‘Atmos-plus-whatever’, as opposed to Dungeon which was designed to do ‘whatever-plus-Atmos.
“Although I designed Cloud9 to mix both Atmos and stereo records, it’s also kind of a community room for the crew. I thought it wouldn’t get booked that much, so I encouraged the team here — the principals, the assistants and the interns — to bring their personal projects to the studio and to use the rooms to make music and teach each other, because it helps them to get better at what they do. But clients are now booking this room for writing sessions because they love ‘the vibe’, so I implemented a little low-latency ‘workaround’ in the Trinnov, so when someone wants to write, it goes to zero latency, and then when they want to mix, it goes to fully accurate Atmos or stereo monitoring.”
For Fab Dupont there are no issues at all with bypassing the Trinnov processing to achieve zero latency when overdubbing in a control room. “Who cares if the sound of your monitoring changes when you’re tracking and the dude insists being in the room? Accuracy doesn’t matter then. It just needs to be loud as f**k. Everything else is irrelevant. I used to be such a purist, and now I’ve become a ‘practicalist’. Basically, I know what will work and what will lead to success for the recording session — the artist being comfortable and inspired, and the work translating to the outside world. It’s not that hard to do. It’s when you get to the end of the
Clients are now booking Flux’s Cloud9 Atmos room for writing sessions because they ‘love the vibe’, so Fab has implemented a ‘low-latency workaround’ in the Trinnov, so it can easily operate with zero latency whenever necessary.
session and you’re going to lay down a rough mix that it really matters that the monitoring system is extremely accurate. So having the Trinnov in there means that the room can do anything, because it’s a monitor section, a room correction system when you want it to be, and it operates as a hub for everything.
“This room also gets used as a reference point for the labels in town who need to check their Atmos mixes before they send them out. They book a couple of hours to come and listen to an Atmos playback because they know the monitoring is very accurate and they can trust what they are hearing in here. It’s working really well and a completely
unintended by-product of building this room. But that’s life! Whatever you intend is never what happens in the end.
A Room Of My Own
“Upstairs, in my room, I have the Nova. I think Nova is great because it ‘speaks all languages’ — all the digital formats including Dante. Now, my room is getting used more and more by other artists because it’s ‘pretty’: they walk by on their way to the Dangerous room and they peek in and they’re like, ‘whoa!’ And then the next time they request my room. When it was just ‘my room’ — a single operator room — I could do whatever I wanted, but once you’ve got other people coming in you have to get everything standardized, otherwise they’ll just get really confused. So, the Nova is really great because you can run it at zero latency with just one switch using the new hard bypass
Nova is appreciated for its extensive digital connectivity, as well as the ability to easily switch to zero latency when necessary.
Flux initially added Atmos monitoring to their ‘Dungeon’ tracking room, but soon abandoned the idea: “In an Atmos room, the mixing position needs to be so much further back that you eat up half your control room space”, says Fab Dupont.
that they have implemented. Having Dante in the Nova means I’m able to use Dante to go in and out of my UA Apollo 16D, and I’m able to do some really cool routing. I have brand new Universal Audio E2m Dante stations in the back that I use for headphones, which means I don’t have to have any complicated cabling and everything’s very modular. If something’s digital, I like to keep it digital. I go digital out of the Apollo into the Nova, digital out of the Nova into my Kii monitors. There was no other monitor section that I saw that could do everything — all the digital-to-digital-to-analog, analog-to-digital, analog-to-analog… It does it all, and the converters sound good, too. And it doesn’t have a fan! The remote control, too, is really great. It’s complicated to learn, but you can make it do just about anything.
“You can get really nerdy with Trinnov if you want — you can get inside the engine and lose yourself in there for a month. But, really, I just want stuff to sound good. The only thing I care about is that what I hear in my room will translate to the outside world and that I’m not being ‘lied to’. And that’s what Trinnov does, and that, for me, is worth the price of admission. With the flexibility of the routing and everything else as well, they really hit the nail on the head with the Nova. And when they turn on Atmos in the Nova, things are really going to change — once that happens, you’ll truly be able to do everything in this one box.
“The monitoring in my room is a Kii BXT system and that just sounds bananas by itself, but there’s still an extra ‘x percent’ with the Trinnov. And there’s always some people who want to bring in their own speakers, so I have an extra output on the Trinnov that they can use to optimise their speakers to the room if they want. The process is really quick. You just put the special Trinnov microphone at the mixing position, press one button, and it takes about 30 seconds, then it computes for another 30 seconds, and then boom! It’s done the measurement. From there you can decide if you want to change the curve to something you prefer to hear. Personally, I don’t like speakers to be too bright so I always have a little bit of a shelf on my speakers, so they’re gentle and talk nice to me. I have crazy-good DSP available in the Kiis already, and of course I used that before I had the Trinnov, but now I just use the DSP in the Trinnov, so it’s all in one place.
“I don’t monitor particularly loud for mixing — about 79dB SPL on the Kiis. And if I’m mixing a regular stereo record, I’ll spend half my time on a mono Auratone anyway — actually, it’s half an Auratone, as I had one cut in half so that it would fit in my computer bag for traveling. Then, if I’m still at all ‘iffy’ about a mix, I’ll do a final check on a pair of Airpod Pro 2 earbuds, because that’s what my client is going to listen on. But to use a tool like Trinnov, you really do have to get used
Dupont is finding that his personal production room at Flux is now getting booked by other artists for its mixture of cutting-edge and vintage gear, as well as its “pretty” decor.
Fab
to it: listen to your reference tracks on it, just integrate that reality into your body so that you don’t think about it. Settle on a listening environment that does what you need it to do. You may need to tweak the curve a couple times at the beginning until the mixes translate perfectly everywhere else, because that’s still a perception thing. But once you’re happy, don’t touch anything. Just let it be. You’ve done the due diligence at the beginning, so now you should just trust that your monitor system is always driving you in the right direction. Then the problem is when you’ve got to do a mix in a room that doesn’t have Trinnov. With all due respect to all the wonderful places where I work, I hate the monitoring system 100 percent of the time whenever I go into another studio now. Unfortunately, there isn’t a Trinnov or Kiis in every studio in the world, so I tend to try to do all my mixing here at Flux. People think that the top music mixers have it all figured out, but the reality of it is we have all just created a safe space in which we know we can trust what we are hearing. That’s why all the
pro mixers now mix in their own rooms, because you can’t get the same results if you start traveling.
A Better Place
“Overall, I think we’re in a better place today, but what we lack is the budgets we used to have — we don’t have enough time to make records the way we used to. If we had the same budgets we had back then with the gear we have now we’d make unbelievably good-sounding records. Obviously, some vintage gear has a certain sound quality, like mics and instruments, or a vintage synth — I just bought a Korg Trident and no plugin will sound quite like that — but we have plugins for most things, and it’s cool, even if the overall experience is different. But for monitoring, no, vintage is not better to me. Monitoring is not part of the creative process, it’s a tool — a means to an end.
“You should always get your room as good as you can and not rely on the electronics to fix something that can be fixed with a piece of sheet rock or a bunch of Rockwool. But no
matter how good you get your room and no matter how much money you spend on it, you can always get it a little better with the Trinnov. What it will do is match the system to the room, whilst still keeping the ‘voice’ of the speaker, as people do still have preferences for what they want a monitor system to sound like. Maybe you like speakers that have a bit of a dip at 300Hz or something, and that’s something that just works for the way you mix, but you can tell Trinnov not to fix something. Upstairs in my room with the Nova, my curves are very limited because I have an amplitude limit of 3dB of correction, and that works great. It’s just massaging the thing into being as close to reality as possible whilst still talking to me in a way that I understand. And phase is phase: you’ve got to align the phase.
“Atmos is great, but my problem is I know nobody’s going to hear what I’m hearing, and that’s really frustrating. To some extent you can say the same with stereo — I sit in front pair of Kiis and it sounds glorious, but then you give it to the artist, and if you listen to it how they are hearing it, on their
Users can set an ‘excursion curve’ that limits the maximum amount of correction that will be applied, achieving an improvement whilst still keeping the ‘flavour’ of the original speaker
headphones and their phone, you’re like, ‘dude…?’ I was working with this hip hop artist recently and he was saying ‘there’s not enough bass’. I said, ‘are you sure, because I think this is pretty bass-heavy already?’ But he’s still saying ‘no man, there’s not enough bass.’ So I say ‘what are you listening on?’ ‘ I’m listening on my phone’ he says. ‘Yes, but what headphones are you using, I say. ‘No, I’m listening on my phone… on the phone…’. And I just said ‘get yourself a pair of headphones’.
“But I think we’ve made some progress. I actually think the Apple Airpod Pro 2 earbuds are
awesome. I think they’ve brought a sort of audio baseline to the world that doesn’t actually make me angry, and they are relevant both for stereo and Atmos. And for me that’s wonderful because now when I do big records with people, I go and buy a pair of Airpod Pros and give them to them as a gift: ‘Welcome to the project: great working with you. Do you have a pair of these? You don’t? This is my gift to you.’ And then I say, ‘do me a favor: when I send you a mix, listen to it on these.’ Then we can talk about the same thing together and we reach a point where, at the very least, the base playback
system for the average civilian is good enough.”
Brian Lucey’s Magic Garden Mastering
“I live and work in the same building, I’m ‘a lifer’ in music” says Brian Lucey speaking from his Los Angeles-based Magic Garden Mastering facility. “I’ve also had studios that are separate from where I live, so I’ve done it both ways and prefer the schedule flexibility, convenience and overhead of this set up”. A former professional musician, and a successful mastering engineer for the last 25 years, Lucey inhabits
Mastering engineer Brian Lucey: “Mastering is the transition moment between what we thought we were going to make, and something that we will be judged by forever.”
a distinctive four-storey building with two curtain walls of glass and two walls of concrete.
“This place is a bit of a novel concept,” he explains. “My studio sits on the ground floor of this open floor-plan, multi-level structure. The studio area is quite a small space but the low-end energy goes through these RealTraps walls and up into the building, so it’s as if you had a big warehouse and you put some mid- and high-frequency treatments in the middle of the room and just let the lows escape naturally. It actually makes for a fantastic low end. I’ve got diffusers above and behind me with bass traps everywhere. Even so, you couldn’t do high end mastering in a 12 x 15-foot room, but you can do it in a 12 x 15 room that’s really a 3,000 square-foot structure. I like this place because it’s very open and very human — during the day I may hear the FedEx trucks or people who are walking by, but it doesn’t bother me. Mastering is the transition moment between what we thought we were going to make, and something that we will be judged by forever. I don’t need a pin-drop quiet environment. The main thing is that it’s not a windowless cave with
Magic Garden Mastering sits on the ground floor of an open-floor-plan, multi-level structure. “The low-end energy goes through these RealTraps walls and up into the building — it actually makes for a fantastic low end.”
six-foot thick walls and bad air — I hate that kind of space. I often work at night and it’s 30dBA in here after 10pm, which is pretty darn quiet.”
Lucey describes the Trinnov system as “an absolute necessity for Atmos”, yet he doesn’t use it for his stereo mastering work. “But I do have a lot of experience using it in stereo, as I spent countless hours experimenting with it and testing it out of curiosity and because it had been so incredible for some of my clients, before deciding to not use it myself. My room is good and I don’t need it: I use these beautiful Evolution Acoustics MMThree speakers designed by Kevin Malmgren in San Diego, with two 15s, two Accuton 7s and a ribbon tweeter on each side, and it’s +/-5dB across the whole frequency range. However, when I got into doing Atmos, Trinnov was the first thing I thought of. Trinnov for Atmos rooms does in five minutes what probably $40,000 in treatments and four people could not do in two weeks.
“I was in another studio nearby that doesn’t have Trinnov and panning an object around the room you could easily pinpoint the speaker locations. That’s not a good immersive image. We want pinpoint accuracy at the listening position, and I just don’t
think you can do real immersive otherwise. You can do ‘surround-sound-plus-ceiling-speakers’… but that’s not truly immersive. A lot of people working in Atmos are doing this kind of minor evolution of surround sound, and for them that might be adequate, but to me it’s not sufficient. And the headphone product is usually terrible. Many people are doing something that is still focused on the proscenium: the front-wall approach where most of the energy is in the front and it comes back into the room like surround would do, only now with the addition of height speakers. That’s a very common thing, and for me it falls far short of the mandate for the format.
“I spent three years investigating Atmos because I’m fortunate enough to have a successful career in stereo mastering, so I didn’t have to immediately start making money in Atmos using the common techniques. I’ve been able to really look at it anew and experiment to find fresh ways to work that are truly immersive. What I found was some physics-based principles: not ‘Brian Lucey’s ideas’ but physics-based principles that allow me to work as I do now.
“Apple Music has been giving these ideas away to engineers globally for almost two years now. The goal is a headphone product that’s punchy and powerful and ultimately superior to stereo, and of course a room full of music, not just front loaded. This format at its best can be the future of headphones, and also fill a large room with punch and power in every part of that room. So, in process steps, we do our stereo mix first of course, using the 70 years of shared learning that we have in that format, and we don’t think about
“For Atmos/Spatial audio to make sense to the larger world, it has to be the ‘preferred consumable’ by billions of regular, music-loving people on cheap headphones.”
Atmos/Spatial at all. We just do the stereo mix and get it to be amazing, and send it to someone like myself or whoever is mastering the stereo. From there we begin the Atmos/Spatial process by breaking out some stems. Not too few and not too many. And we fill the whole room with energy, not just the front-end dominant thing. To be truly immersive in a room and get a great headphone product with punch and power the first step mentally is to centre the image on the chair, which also centres it in the headphones. We can then get the whole room activated in all directions. It turns out that the Dolby and Apple software likes this. It turns out that rooms like this. And we can overcome the phase smear. The main problem with the new format is the phase smear in a headphone or earbud messing with punch and groove and power that basically results in a ‘swimming pool of alternative adventure’. It’s not something that can compete with the stereo headphone when done with ‘surround plus’ ideologies. Now, a lot of people are actually okay with that and they say, ‘it’s a different product’ and they over-emphasize the creativity of the format. Dolby
“None of my Atmos investigation would have been possible without having the Trinnov D-MON 12”, says Brian Lucey. “Unless you have the kind of accuracy of imaging in all directions that Trinnov gives you, you are stuck with doing ‘surround-sound-plus’.”
and Apple have also accentuated this for years. They’re marketing people not engineers, so they sell ‘creativity’. It’s a new world and we don’t have skill in the aggregate for the engineering to do a great job beating the stereo in headphones and filling the whole room. For Atmos/Spatial audio to make sense to the larger world, it has to be the ‘preferred consumable’ by billions of regular music-loving people on cheap headphones. And if there’s a playback party in a huge room, it needs to fill the whole space while still being cohesive and punchy. Imagine having a playback party in a large theatre and the low end is mostly coming from the front of the room. That’s not immersive, that’s ‘surround-sound with-height-speakers’.
“Groove, Vocal, and Momentum”
“Experimenting with some new ideas we can overcome the low-end lack of punch, the phase-smear problem, and overcome the vocal being a washy mess. It’s common to pan low-end only in the front two or three speakers and use a stem pair of wet vocals. The vocal will never resolve in headphones to a strong central image, and the punch is weak in headphones from the
Magic Garden Mastering employs a pair of highly distinctive Kevin Malmgren-designed Evolution Acoustics MMThree speakers with two 15s, two Accuton 7s and a ribbon tweeter each side, driven by Allnic Audio tube power amps.
phase smear. And when the average listener hears a weird-sounding vocal, or a groove that’s not as punchy as in stereo, they are immediately turned off. Death to the format right there. Music is fundamentally groove, vocal, and momentum, which includes cohesion.
“The best thing about stereo headphones is that everything that’s panned down the centre is really punchy, and the worst thing is that they don’t give you an image like you have with speakers in a room. Stereo headphones sound like you mixed it with the speakers three feet to your left and three feet to your right and then you strapped two drivers on your head with a coat hanger. But the punch of things that are panned in the centre is always amazing, and that is ironically the weakest part of the Atmos/Spatial format. So we must overcome the phase smear in the headphones. Trinnov makes this possible by eliminating the location of the speakers and creating a fully cohesive image centred at the chair. Which very conveniently is also where our heads sit wearing headphones that use DSP to create the illusion of a room. With punch and power in the new format
“If you listen to the things you’ve been mixing in a compromised environment for the last 20 years, you will now hear every single mistake you made.”
it’s possible to actually beat the stereo master. If I’m beating my own stereo mastering work with Spatial/Atmos, that’s significant.
“In practical terms I recommend folks go with 10 to 20 stem pairs generally speaking, because you’re only trying to deconstruct the stereo just enough, and yet not too much — there’s a Goldilocks number in there. And we definitely need to have a dry vocal pair and the ‘vocal-effects-only’ on their own pair, as well as bass and drums and all the normal splits. Then, in terms of placement, we want to get some low-end in all four corners. I call this overall idea-set ‘Cardinal Points Quad’. Which is a nod to the original expanded format of Quadraphonic, where today we need low-end in four corners. Then the cardinal points of Atmos are very important for minimizing phase smear. In stereo, of course we know the cardinal points are LCR (left, centre and right) and those are the punchiest pan locations — if we made a three-track recording and we panned it LCR, it would always be beautifully clear and punchy. Think ‘Kind of Blue.’
“Similarly, if we are in an Atmos room with any configuration of speakers from 7.1.4 upwards, and we start by looking forwards, there is an LCR in front of us; if we turn 90 degrees to the left, there’s another LCR there as well; and if we turn to the rear, there’s an LCR there, and one to the right as well. Then, if we turn our head sideways towards the corners, there are LCRs there, too, vertically. So this is the matrix of all the immersive cardinal points. We can’t just put the low-end only in the front speakers ‘because that’s where the big drivers are’: it will smear from the DSP, and if we turn the Left-Right binaural to Off, we move the image in a crazy way, and we create a huge discontinuity between Apple and Dolby, so we’ve got to get low-end in the rear corners as well. Now, obviously, we’re going to have to high-pass the rears a bit, because the speakers can’t handle it. But even if it’s high-passed, it’s okay, because frequencies and harmonics above 50 or 60 Hz still tell us there’s low end. We’ve got to get some low-end back there because we’re trying to
reset the image to the chair and to the middle of the headphones, versus it being on the front wall, as in stereo, with the centre of the image between the two speakers. For true immersive audio we have to move the centre of the image to the chair in the middle of the room. We’ve got to get energy behind us and above, and on both sides: all around us.
“None of my Atmos investigation would have been possible without having the Trinnov D-MON 12”, Brian Lucey asserts. “Unless you have the kind of accuracy of imaging in all directions that Trinnov gives you, you are stuck with doing ‘surround-sound-plus’. In most people’s Atmos rooms, you can hear where the speakers are, and if you can tell where the speakers are in an Atmos room, it’s really not ready to do work in. And that’s what Trinnov solves in five minutes! Plus, you can add a target curve to get just the right frequency response. With the Trinnov in an Atmos room, you now have an analogue and mirror of the headphone. A room full of speakers plus DSP ends up being very similar to two drivers plus DSP. When we no longer hear where the individual speakers are located in the room, we’ve got a similar cohesiveness to headphones/earbuds that will allow real immersive work. Without that cohesion and phase accuracy in the room, the lack of a cohesive image with invisible driver locations, we are just doing surround sound and releasing it in an Atmos wrapper.
A different opportunity
“When Apple and Dolby put this thing into our world, I thought it was annoyingly rude. It wasn’t something asked for by artists. It was very inorganic and corporate. Very ‘top down’, which I hated. Yet I saw that it wasn’t going to go away — Apple doesn’t do anything on a lark, so I started to investigate and spent those first years figuring out ways to do it different to the approach that comes from surround sound. Initially, a lot of people took the ideas that were available from surround sound, added some height speakers, and got to work. Then they got on the internet and they taught this to somebody else, and then something got an award from that work and someone else said, “How did you do it?” and so this whole thing kind of led directly out of surround sound. But it’s a different format with a different opportunity, and the opportunity begins when we centre the image on the chair and get quad low-end in the four corners, and energy in the whole room.
“As a mastering engineer my mindset is ‘this thing needs to sound great everywhere’. That’s a mastering mindset: an overview mindset — ‘this needs to sound consistent and great everywhere’. But when this format was rolled out, they rolled it out to mixers, and with great respect to mixers, they are understandably identified with their mix. And when you’ve worked on a mix to make it amazing, as soon as you start stemming it and then spreading it out in the room, it’s like pulling teeth because it’s messing up your
‘Before’ and ‘After frequency and phase plots from the
work. But, for me, as a mastering engineer, I don’t have that crippling attachment. My thing is, ‘let’s blow it up a bit, respectfully’ because I want the headphone translation to be respectful to stereo yet superior to the stereo. I’ve worked with many mixers who are just gnashing their teeth while they’re mixing in Atmos, at having their stuff deconstructed: they’re like, ‘as soon as I start moving objects, it falls apart.’ That’s absolutely true, but with a little bravery and some different techniques, we can have a little bit of reckless abandon, rely on the principles, experiment, and then work back to the details of the stereo master. Let go of it for a minute, spread the thing out just enough with the stems, and then come back and say ‘OK, let’s EQ the drum group’; EQ the vocal group; let’s EQ or compress the whole thing’. So you come back to it in the end and get those nuances, so that the differences between the stereo and the new format are so small in headphones that they are overwhelmed by the size and the dynamics. If you get all those things going then you’ve done the job of music engineering which is positive compromise. You’ve done enough to have chosen more exciting things than detrimental things. We are at step-one of this immersive journey in pop culture. We as engineers need to make a 3-D representation in the headphones of the stereo track that the Artist is familiar with… and someday, down the road, we can get creative, but we’ve got to learn to walk before we can run. So that’s what I figured out, and it all starts with the Trinnov.
“Dolby’s got their frequency-curve ideas, but I did what seemed intuitively right to me: the Trinnov spits out the natural frequency plot of all the speakers. I drew the curve of my left and right back into the left and right as close as I could. In other words, I’m not ‘correcting’ them because I use them in stereo naturally all the time, It’s +5dB at 50Hz and maybe -3dB at 20kHz. Sloping down with some stair steps within. So I drew that back into the left and right and got my Cranesong Avocet and tweaked it to get it as close as I could to sounding like there was no Trinnov DSP on the left and right. Then I took the average of the left and right playback curves and drew that third curve back into every other speaker. That gave me an Atmos room that sounded like my stereo rig on ‘day one’, so I didn’t have to re-learn my room. And you can only do that with the Trinnov because it has that Target Curve facility per channel and it does all of this pinpoint-accuracy measurement down to sample accuracy in five minutes.
“I put myself in an arena of familiarity with the Target Curve and an arena of proper imaging in all directions again with
Trinnov software.
the Trinnov D-MON 12. Only then did I start to think ‘how can we make this new format work better from a creative standpoint: a consumer-headphone standpoint?’ How could we engineer to empower the artist versus the label that wants to spend $350 on an Atmos song? I think Trinnov is actually great value. It might initially seem like a lot of money, but you’re getting a big speaker and room upgrade, you’re getting the Target Curve and you’re getting all that you could get in terms of what DSP can do for you. There are some very famous and very expensive rooms that don’t sound very good because they don’t use the Trinnov. Ultimately, we are going to have to have some DSP in our system anyway, so we might as well get a Trinnov, because Trinnov does DSP better than anybody.”
Hearing Things You’ve Never Heard Before
But, as Marketing Manager Benoit Munoz, admits, there’s an emotional attachment consideration in this area that the science sometimes has to overcome. “Yes, some people just really like the phase anomalies in their speakers! The craziest thing, to me, is when I hear people say ‘I know my room and the problems it has, so I’m able to compensate for that in real time’, and I just think ‘why do you want to do this’? Surely you want to get rid of what your room does to your speakers, because usually it’s not a good thing. But some people just want no digital processing in the signal chain at all, so those ones we’ll never be able to convince. But when people say they ‘don’t like Trinnov’, it is very often because whoever did the calibration didn’t really know what they were doing, or there was something really odd with the room. Sometimes people have only heard a Trinnov processor where someone has tweaked everything to the max and over-processed everything. Then, when they hear it done properly for the first time, it is truly shocking to them — they often have no idea how bad their room is. The thing we always say to people when they first install Trinnov is ‘do not listen to your own mixes. Listen to a reference track: whatever works for you’, because if you listen to the things you’ve been mixing in a compromised environment for the last 20 years, you will now hear every single mistake you made. That kick drum you always push too hard. That snare that you always EQ the wrong way. That vocal that is always to the left. They will all be in your face. Some people have even said that they really enjoy listening to music again after installing Trinnov, hearing things they’ve never heard before because of masking from early reflections.”
Simple logic suggests that if you totally trust the accuracy of your monitoring environment,
“The remote control is really great. You can make it do just about anything.”
there is surely no longer any reason to even have a secondary speaker system, or take the traditional trek out to the car to ‘check how your mix sounds there’? “Yes, I actually ask that question now of a lot of top engineers” says Benoit Munoz, “and most of them say, ‘no, I don’t need to do this anymore, because now I know my room is accurate’. And I have actually seen some engineers get rid of their second set of monitors because they say ‘I took my mix to the mastering room or the dubbing stage and it sounded exactly the same’. So, if you have a really good listening situation in your studio, you’re going to be making good decisions, not over- or under-compensating for anything, and therefore whatever the consumer is listening on, even if it’s earbuds, they will hear something similar to what you heard in your room.”
Acknowledgements
www.trinnov.com
www.fluxstudios.net www.magicgardenmastering.com
Text: Dave Lockwood
Special thanks to: Benoit Munoz, Fab Dupont and Brian Lucey