Via Mix Magazine
Founded nearly 65 years ago in southwest Olympia, Wash., South Puget Sound Community College unveiled its new immersive mix room at the end of September. The facility expands the capabilities at the public community college’s Kraken Studios, which offers media development services, including video production and post-production space rentals, to working professionals.
“One of our mottos is, ‘We can train you to do it, we can help you to do it or we can do it for you,’” says audio engineer Thomas Pell. “We’re on the non-academic side of the college; it’s a commercially available facility and part of our corporate and continuing education.”
The new room, one of very few community-accessible Dolby Atmos spaces in the country, was constructed within the building housing Kraken’s existing facilities at SPSCC’s Lacey campus, east of downtown Olympia. “It’s our only audio facility on this campus,” he says. “Adjacent to this room is a 34-by-35-foot video space with black, white and green screens, and we also have a small shop where we do rentals of all kinds of production equipment.”
Jessica Sanders, program development specialist for SPSCC’s Corporate and Continuing Education Program, initially reached out to Pell for his help with building a 5.1 mix room. Pell, who rose to become head engineer at Robert Lang Studios in Shoreline, Wash., before striking out as an independent nearly 20 years ago (and running his own facility for the past 12 years or so), suggested that the college should instead build for the future.
“Everything’s moving to Dolby Atmos and immersive audio, so it would do us a disservice to build something that’s slowly becoming antiquated,” he says. “I said, ‘Let’s think big’—and they greenlit the project.”
Pell, in turn, reached out to Smart Studio in Dublin, Ireland, which offers modular studio designs. L.A.-based Kaiser Comm Construction, which had previously built a Smart Studio room for Chris Lord-Alge, collaborated on the design. “They brought a crew up here, and we crushed out this modular build in a little over a month,” he reports. “We ended up with a 14-by-20-foot control room and two eight-by-10-foot iso booths. It’s an incredible-sounding space.”
The new room’s equipment, specified by Pell and supplied by Sweetwater and B&H Photo, includes a 7.1.4 monitoring system comprising Adam Audio A Series speakers with a pair of Focal subwoofers. With the focus on voiceovers and podcasts, the microphone complement includes a pair of Neumann U 87s, together with EV RE 20s and a few Shure SM7dBs with integrated Cloud Lifter electronics.
Currently, there is little outboard equipment; rather, the necessary mic preamps are provided by a 16-channel SSL Origin in-line console, which is outfitted with SSL’s UF8 DAW controller and set into Argosy’s purpose-built furniture. “I love the workflow and the ability to flip the faders, so I can have an input and output both going,” Pell says. Everything is wired with Mogami gold cable.
The loudspeakers are managed through a Digital Audio Denmark AX64 converter and router with a MOM monitor operating module. The setup handles up to 256 lines, offering almost unlimited expansion opportunities. “We can do automatic fold-downs, select different sources, different speaker outs,” Pell observes. “I’m also running two different calibrations—one that’s bass-managed and one that’s full-range—so you can switch between the music curve or full-range cinema.”
Pell has been working with Dolby regarding Atmos training, which, in Kraken’s case, needs to cover a variety of applications. “A lot of facilities are either focused on recording or mixing, or cinema or music, so to sell the project, it was helpful to try and meet as many needs as we could. And Dolby had a lot of good suggestions on how to teach it and how to make it a little more user-friendly.”