A pandemic-prompted studio relocation has seen spatial audio pioneer Herbert Waltl turn a former music school recital room into an immersive mix room with an 18-speaker Neumann KH Line studio monitor system.

Now located in Rolling Hills Estates, California, mediaHyperium was founded in 1996, based at Skywalker Sound in the Bay Area, operated for the past five years in partnership with, recording engineer and broadcast audio mixer Eric Schilling. Then the pandemic forced everyone into lockdown and the music school closed: ‘We said, the best thing, the safest thing, because of the pandemic, is to work out of here,’ Waltl recalls.

The 7.1 monitor set-up comprises seven Neumann KH 420 tri-amplified midfield mains plus a pair of KH 870 bass-managed subwoofers. Five KH 310 tri-amped near field monitors on stands – three across the front plus left and right height channels – support the overhead channels of Sony’s object-based 360 Reality Audio. Hanging from the ceiling, and positioned closer to the mix position per the recommendations of Dolby Laboratories, four KH 120 bi-amped near field speakers deliver the overhead zone for Dolby Atmos mixes.

Neither Waltl nor Schilling used the larger Neumann KH 420s, but both were familiar with the 310.

‘What I like is that the system has a lot of detail and you don’t have to play it loud to hear that,’ says Schilling. ‘I work at a pretty moderate gain for most of the day, or I’d get too tired. I’m probably running this system at 20 per cent of what it will do, in terms of volume, so it’s got a lot of headroom. And it’s nice having two subs, because the low end is a little more consistent. So it’s a very non-tiring system with a lot of detail.’

‘We have a second room, a listening room, where we put a Sennheiser Ambeo Soundbar,’ Waltl adds. ‘We can hear how the sound translates to a soundbar.’

And while Sony’s immersive format, based on Fraunhofer’s MPEG-H technology, was initially intended to deliver 3D music to headphones, ‘Sony 360 can now go to the Sennheiser Ambeo Soundbar and there are receivers that will send it out to a speaker system,’ Schilling says.

‘The Sony format asks for three speakers on the floor at the front,’ Waltl continues. ‘But there’s no way you can get an accurate and honest presentation if you have furniture or a console in front of you. So we built the room specifically for immersive.’

‘Mixing immersive music in a stereo control room is challenging, because you have a big console that sits in the way of the sub,’ agrees Schilling. ‘It’s not that it can’t be done, you just really have to work out where you’re going to place things. So this room is more like what I would find in a mastering room, where the footprint of my controller is very small.

‘We toyed with whether we put in a system with bars where we could move the overhead speakers. But it’s more efficient and faster to have separate sets of speakers.’

The room was virtually move-in ready as the walls and ceiling were acoustically treated, because it was a recital room. Schilling recommended additional standalone treatment, including bass traps. Now, says Waltl, ‘the room sounds wonderful’.

Schilling has been remixing Alicia Keys’ catalogue into the Sony 360 Reality Audio format and Dolby Atmos format, in conjunction with producer and engineer George Massenburg, and with Alicia’s long-time engineer Ann Mincieli.

‘We always want to be authentic to the original stereo release,’ says Waltl, who has been remixing music into surround and immersive formats for the past 20 years. ‘Our credo has been that we want it to feel like the stereo mix. I don’t want it to be a shock; it’s not a DJ remix. However, we should be using the opportunities of the space and I don’t want to be too conservative in my immersive concepts. We have a creative set of tools on hand and extend on the original vision. Therefore, the immersive mix should be a true alternative listening experience to the stereo version.. This is something we all should embrace.’

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