The Stephen F Austin State University’s School of Music has opened a new recording studio offering 7.1.4 immersive monitoring at its campus in East Texas. Centred on a Solid State Logic System T S500 console, the studio is part of a recently completed expansion of the Griffith Fine Arts Building that houses the college’s sound recording technology, filmmaking, theatre, dance and musical theatre programmes.
The System T is resident in the Studio B control room – a fully analogue room – which is attached to a 500sq-ft live room with a single iso booth for vocals and solo instruments. It was supplied by Vintage King, and features an S500 64-fader, 4.5-bay integrated with a range of SSL’s SuperAnalogue Network I/O including, A32 and dual SB i16 interfaces. Additionally, an outboard rack contains an SSL Ultraviolet EQ 500 series module.
‘We wanted Studio B to be our modern studio,’ says James F Adams, Associate Professor of Music and Director of Sound Recording Technology. ‘We have a graduate programme as well, so we knew that we needed to be on the cutting edge for tomorrow’s professionals. We also wanted it to be an Atmos room.’
Behind the school’s decision to install the System T platform is the college’s previous experience with an AWS948 console and SSL’s service support. ‘The support is fantastic,’ Adams confirms. ‘The whole team is very responsive and provides swift support. That’s a really big thing for a state institution like ours.’
The features and functionality of System T fit the needs of the School of Music’s teaching staff : ‘It’s designed for music, so its ability to very easily track and do postproduction mixing was a big deal to us,’ Adams continues. ‘We also found that the SSL’s flow and routing – everything about System T – fits our pedagogical styles and our goals. Plus, it’s a Dante-native console with integrated control of the stage boxes. We don’t have to leave the console to go to Dante Controller to make our terminations, you can do it all from the console. Our whole facility has a Dante backbone, so it just made sense.’
With the room completed only recently, Adams and the Sound Recording Technology programme staff are just starting to become familiar with System T’s features. ‘We’ve recorded and done some basic mixing, but mostly we have been familiarising ourselves with the console and preparing for this semester,’ Adams says. ‘One of the really powerful things about the console is that we can set up templates for a variety of situations for the students to get a kickstart. We’ve made a tracking template, a split console template for DAW playback while tracking, and then we have a mixing template for when they’re just using Pro Tools as a tape deck into the system.’
Since the school’s new facility incorporates a comprehensive Dante network there will be opportunities in the future to extend applications System T is used for. ‘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, in addition to recording it,’ Adams reveals. ‘And we know the console is ready for us to stream in spatial audio one day in the future. We also have a fairly good-sized performance theatre where we have touring acts come through. We’re integrated with that facility. We haven’t lit that up yet, but the wires are there.’
More: www.solidstatelogic.com
