The prestigious Beijing Film Academy’s School of Sound has added a film music mixing studio to its facilities. Integral to the new studio is Merging Technologies’ Pyramix audio workstation with a MassCore engine and Horus audio conversion.
The system supports ultra-low audio latencies and enough power to mix very high track counts simultaneously, with Horus providing excellent AD/DA conversion quality at up to DSD256 and DXD (352.8kHz PCM) standards. The high number of I/O channels necessary are accommodated via the sytem’s use of Ravenna/AES67 protocol, which uses one Cat5e/Cat6 cable to connect to Pyramix. Channel routing can be done remotely using the same connection, providing the ultimate in convenience with superb sound quality.
‘Once we start a session with the Merging equipment, we enjoy an improvement in production quality,’ say the Dean of the Sound School, Professor Tong Lei. ‘This equates to something similar to the best classical music recordings.’
The Beijing Film Academy Sound School has also built China’s first movie postproduction studio specifically for researching standardised 3D sound.
This studio is configured with 40 output channels connected to 40 loudspeakers for playback. The position of these speakers is fully adjustable allowing different configurations to be easily studied. The purpose of the lab is to find a solution to standardising 3D immersive movie audio for China – avoiding being forced to accept foreign standards and seeing any monopoly emerge. Pyramix software features embedded 3D panning which is essential for the research studio’s investigation and evaluation. This panning engine saves significant amounts of time and effort and supports any multiple speaker configuration including the existing competing international formats.
The Pyramix 3D panner allows the immersive listening environment to be customised by adjusting the room size and the speaker positions without the need for third-party plug-ins. This makes the task of constructing room environment models far easier.
‘The Pyramix DAW’s native 3D panning functionality allows us cast off the shackles of the existing immersive sound formats,’ Professor Tong Lei says. ‘This has given us unprecedented convenience and gives us the possibility to undertake our 3D sound research far more efficiently.’
More: www.merging.com
