Part of University College South Denmark, Sonic College offers bachelor degrees in audio disciplines for the media and entertainment industry. Recently relocated to a purpose-built, multi-storey building, a 32-fader Solid State Logic S500 mixing console is the heart of a Dolby Atmos 7.1.4 immersive music production room on the third floor.
‘We decided pretty early to go for a digital desk,’ says audio technology specialist Lars Tirsbæk, a teacher and technical consultant at Sonic College. ‘Our job is to educate the students for the future, and the future is digital.
‘We also wanted to have an Audio-over-IP infrastructure to be able to move stuff around. For studio builds, Dante is the right thing right now – Audinate has the biggest market share, period. We wanted a network-based desk and our specification was that it should be able to do AES67, so we thought it was a good idea that it should be Dante-based.’
The college covers sound design, sound-for-picture, music production, game audio and podcasting, and also conducts research into sound in welfare technology. The new facility focuses on immersive audio, from the central atrium fitted with 180 loudspeakers and a live performance stage with a 7.1.8 PA, system to the many Dolby Atmos mix-to-picture and mastering rooms.
‘It was always the dream to have an Atmos music studio but the biggest issue when monitoring in immersive is that, if you’re going through Pro Tools and the Atmos renderer, you’ll have latency,’ Tirsbæk says. ‘You can’t use that for recording purposes. It was obvious that we needed something with a mix bus capable of doing 7.1.4. ‘When we decided to buy a console, there was only one capable of doing this – the System T.’
As a university college, the aim is to offer an education that combines theory with practical application. This entailed looking around the country at the mixing consoles being used by future employers.
‘Solid State Logic has a really good history in Denmark.’ Tirsbæk reports. ‘Danish Broadcasting Corp bought the System T for its new studios and broadcast facilities, and later we heard that had also bought System T desks for all the music studios. So this is the only console that has been bought for music studios in Denmark for years.’
In addition to Danish Broadcasting Corp, TV 2 Denmark has also installed a number of System T production systems.
Tirsbæk and the college’s technical team developed a basic template to help students get started on their sessions. ‘We could pretty quickly evolve the template to be really, really complex, but it can also just be a really simple inline console,’ he explains. ‘If you plug a microphone into channel one in the live room it will come into Pro Tools on channel one and it will return on channel one. You don’t need to do anything, that’s just the way it behaves.
‘In the standard template, the cue system is just a copy of the stereo mix you have in the control room, so if you can hear it in the control room, it’s fed to the cue system. It’s a totally simple way of working.’
Eight months into this school year, Tirsbæk says that he is already seeing the results of advanced recording course students benefitting from working on the new System T. ‘They are pushed a lot more to learn stuff,’ he says. ‘It’s amazing to see how they use all the possibilities that are in front of them with the System T. And they find it really easy. They don’t think about it so much, they just do it.’
Those advanced students have learned quickly, too: ‘They started in February and learned how to use the console in just two or three weeks. They’re configuring the console as they want and doing all kinds of amazing stuff. It’s amazing how well they are using understanding the concepts of using a console.’
See also:
Sonic College deploys Dante at new facility
More: www.solidstatelogic.com
