With more than 45m players across China playing its mobile and PC releases, the Shenzhen Leiting Digital Entertainment Company is among the country’s leading video game publishers A wholly owned R&D subsidiary of G-bits, the company aims to produce ‘unique and great games’, and recently commissioned a 5.1.4 game audio studio based around Genelec Smart Active Monitors.
‘For a games company like ours, an audio studio is a must,’ says composer and game sound designer Knuckles (Jianyu) Zhang, who led the studio project. ‘Our requirements are quite special, though – what we want is not just a recording studio, nor a standard mixing studio or a reviewing studio. To be precise, what we want is a Game Sound Lab to assist us in the conceptual design of games.’
Conceived as a surround sound studio, the space was developed with acoustic design and construction handled by Qiao Zhenyu of Huanyu Acoustics, who persuaded Knuckles to go fully immersive. ‘I knew that many games had already used the 5.1 format to produce sound, but Qiao suggested that since it was already 5.1, why not make it 5.1.4 by adding the four height channels? I realised then that immersive audio technology is no longer a new thing, and we as creators surely have to learn to master this format.’
The studio then engaged the system integrator DMT to install a pair of Genelec 1234As as its main stereo monitoring system, with a 5.1.4 immersive system comprising eleven 8330A two-way close-field monitors in all positions – complemented by a 7370A subwoofer. All the monitors were supplied in a striking Polar White finish, and the entire system was configured and calibrated by DMT using GLM loudspeaker manager software.
Knuckles’ choice of Genelec monitoring was arrived at after many years of experience of working with other monitors – and actively avoiding Genelec in his earlier years, believing them to be too flat: ‘I used various monitors to evaluate my work in different rooms,’ he recalls. ‘Sometimes, it would sound fine on my own monitors in my own room, but the results would often vary when I’d listen to material in other spaces. So I’d start to doubt what I was hearing.
‘It was then that I realised that I needed a genuinely truthful monitoring system to do my work. Genelec’s sound is very reliable. You can trust what you’re hearing, and you can be certain about what you create using them. When I use the 1234s to listen to material, I can immediately evaluate the quality of mixing.’
Knuckles is convinced that immersive audio is the format of the future for games developers: ‘In recent years, the domestic games industry has attached greater importance to the sound experience,’ he says. ‘As we look to the international market, we’re finding that more and more games with big-budget production are using immersive audio to create the sound experience. Because sometimes, we just want to step into another world and forget about real life, or even ourselves, for a while.
‘While others are still at the learning and building phase with immersive rooms, we already have the experience and a place to create immersive audio. Now we’re one step ahead, we’re ready to take the lead.’
