MIX 528 - December 2020

Glenn Gould’s ‘Uninvited Guests’ ★ Producer Michael Moritz ★ Classic Tracks: “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” December 2020 \\ mixonline.com \\ $6.99

>REVIEWED

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ANGUILLA MUSIC ACADEMY RECORDING PROVIDES OPPORTUNITY FOR CARIBBEAN YOUTH

THE MIX TOP 20 Audio Products of the Year

12.20 Contents Volume 44, Number 12

8 TECHNOLOGY 30 The Mix Top 20: Audio Products of the Year

BY THE MIX EDITORS

MUSIC The

TOP 20

36 Review:

Audio Products of the Year

Benchmark Media Systems HPA4

BY BARRY RUDOLPH

38 Review: AKG K371-BT Headphones

BY MIKE LEVINE

40 Review: Earthworks SR314 Handheld Vocal Microphone

BY STEVE LA CERRA

8 Glenn Gould’s Uninvited

Guests: Toronto-Based Team Reimagines Pianist’s Vision—With Hip Hop

BY BARBARA SCHULTZ

12 Classic Tracks: “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me),” Whitney Houston

BY ROBYN FLANS

16 Music News & Notes: Herbie Hancock Remastered for Vinyl

42 Back Page Blog: Taking Advantage of AI; One Semester Almost Done!

DEPARTMENTS

BY MIKE LEVINE AND STEVE LA CERRA

Importance of Vision

FEATURES 18 On the Cover: Anguilla Music Academy—Recording Provides Opportunity in the Caribbean

BY TOM KENNY

22 Producer Michael Moritz: Pop, Theater and Benefit Concerts—Remotely

BY JENNIFER WALDEN

26 Rick Camp Brings Live Sound Technologies to New Dolby Atmos Suite

BY STEVE HARVEY

6 From the Editor: The

On the Cover: Producer/musician/educator Darius James with a group of students in the live room at the new Anguilla Music Academy, designed by Wes Lachot, with technical direction by James McKinney and Scott Jacoby of Eusonia Productions.

Photo: Kevin Archibald.

Mix, Volume 44, Number 12 (ISSN 0164-9957) is published monthly by Future US, Inc., 11 West 42nd Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10036.

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28 The Record House: New Dolby Atmos Facility for Music, Home Delivery

BY TOM KENNY

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Vol. 44 No. 12

December 2020

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Current From the Editor

The Importance of Vision It is a true testament to passion and perseverance that the Anguilla Music Academy, along with its associated Recording Center pictured on this month’s cover, was even built. Anguilla is a small Caribbean island, only 35 square miles, with a population of 19,000, nearly half of them under the age of 18. It’s not a poor island, it’s not necessarily a rich island. But, as studio designer Wes Lachot says, it’s a place where “the people have music in their bones; there’s music in the air they breathe.”

Still, it’s one thing for a wealthy rock star or record label to build an island retreat studio and host sessions for artists at a premium rate, complete with lodgings. It’s quite another for the notion to spring from the sand up in the minds of a few people, who then knock on doors and convince others that they have a good idea, a vision for a musical hub, and then bring that very vision into being on a world-class scale. Over the course of eight years.

Darius James, a drummer from the Dominican Republic who came to Anguilla in 2009 on vacation and decided to stay permanently, was the man with the vision. He was a gigging musician who had spent two-anda-half years on cruise ships before he ever entered a real studio, his first experience taking place in New Jersey, where he ogled the mixing console and soaked up all the possibilities a studio brought to the creation of music.

He started thinking along a different career path.

After returning to the island and forming another band, he set up a Vision Board. One of the photographs was of a Grammy Award, another was of a world-class studio that he found through a Google search. At the time, he had an iMac, an interface, a keyboard controller and a pair of KRK monitors, tucked into a spare room at his new house, which he shared with his wife, a singer, and their newborn son. Vision and Energy and Spirit are important in his life, and the Vision Board gave him direction.

Then he started thinking beyond the studio. He started thinking about music and education and opportunity for the island’s youth. Then he started thinking beyond just Anguilla, to the Caribbean at large, and he found that there was both a lack of professional facilities and a lack of technical know-how. What if, he thought, we could break down the barriers to cultural exchange and provide a musical hub for the Caribbean at large, something to benefit all the islands?

From there, as you’ll read in the story, it became an eight-year journey of refining the vision, along the way gaining the support of Brian Sheth and Joe Watson of the Sheth Sangreal Foundation. Sheth, and later James McKinney and Scott Jacoby of Eusonia, helped to garner the support of the Grammy Museum Foundation and the Grammy Summer Camps program.

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The government of Anguilla stepped up in support. McKinney and Jacoby came aboard as technical advisors. And Wes Lachot, who happened to design the studio on James’ Vision Board and whom James had cold-called back in 2011, talking about the dream of a studio, was brought in as the studio designer. The stars aligned, the vision became reality. The studios officially opened in November 2019. And there’s more to come.

The culture of music ripples throughout the Caribbean, in many and varied forms. Anguilla is certainly a part of that, and perhaps even one step up on its neighbors because of a tradition in music education and a solid bedrock in performance.

“There's one teacher, Miss Jacobs, who's taught three or four generations of parents and children and grandparents, and she just retired last year,” McKinney explains. “She's been integral to us getting students for a summer camp and everything else. Most of the kids have a very high level of music education and understanding. And every kid is a multiinstrumentalist who can sing!”

“Basically, everyone plays steel pan, which is what you might expect,” Jacoby adds. “And then people play piano, people play all of the orchestral instruments. That’s because of Miss Jacobs. At the summer camps, we had kids between the ages of, say, 11 and 20. We’d ask them, ‘Who's got experience making beats, who has experience setting up a microphone?’

Close to zero. Then you ask, “Okay, who plays an instrument?’ And the whole place raises their hands, both hands!”

This is only the beginning, in one sense the first completed step in an ongoing vision quest. James talks of plans for adding computer coding and other programs. He is also interested in reaching out internationally, making it easier to obtain visas on a practical level while promoting cultural exchange on the artistic level.

It’s been a grand vision coming out of the mind of Darius James and fulfilled by a team of outside experts, inside artists and supporters, and lots and lots of children. Who would have thought eight years ago that 11,000 square feet of studio space on the island of Anguilla would end up being nominated for a 2021 NAMM TEC Award?

Then again, maybe it was on Darius James’ Vision Board all along.

Tom Kenny Editor

Music Glenn Gould’s Uninvited Guests Toronto-Based Team Reimagines Pianist’s Vision—With Hip Hop

By Barbara Schultz

T

hirty-eight years after his death, the great pianist, brilliant Bach interpreter and classical iconoclast Glenn Gould remains one of Toronto’s—and the classical music world’s—favorite sons. So, in a sense, a producer is taking some serious chances in sampling Gould’s recordings.

“He’s a national hero. There are buildings named after him and statues of him in Toronto,” says producer Billy Wild. “But when a DJ I know, DJ LRS, asked me to do a dance remix using some of his samples, I didn’t know that much about Glenn Gould.

“This was seven years ago, and there was a symposium retreat that was going to happen

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where a bunch of different people were going to speak, perform, and do demonstrations,” he continues. “Bob Ezrin was going to be there and Lang Lang—lots of people doing different things, all based around Glenn Gould’s vision for the future.”

Here’s where some irony creeps in, because Gould’s interpretations of Bach are held to be sacred by many. Yet, Gould famously predicted that technology would increasingly render music the domain of the listener: “In the future, the audience will become the artists and their life, the art…. they will become the uninvited guests at the banquet of the arts.”

“For the symposium, we put together a

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PHOTO: Taylor Geisel

Recording vocals for the single “No Roses” are AARYS, Your Hunni and Ro Joaquim.

PHOTO: Taylor Geisel

25-minute exhibition about how we used Ableton to stretch the samples [in our remix] and turn them into dance tracks,” Wild explains.

“It was supposed to be a one-time thing, but I did think, ‘I can really sink my teeth into this.’

I started to learn more about Glenn Gould, and the more I researched him as an artist, I realized: All the things he was predicting? That’s how I work now.”

Not all Gould aficionados were onboard with fusing Gould’s Bach recordings with pop and hip hop beats and vocals, but the more Wild learned about Gould’s love of the studio, the controversial nature of Gould’s attitude toward classical music and his predictions for the future of mixing (“He predicted this stuff in the ’60s,” Wild notes), the more confident the producer became that nothing was off the table.

“I got in contact with the Gould estate at that point and said, ‘I have this idea about creating a modern album out of Gould samples,’” he explains. “Right away, they gave me the rights to use his name and likeness, but from there it took a long time because the rights to the music were held by Sony Masterworks, and they were not

Co-producers Gabe Pick and Billy Wild in their Division 88 control room.

about to jump right in and let me use samples from the most iconic classical pianist of the 20th century for some hip hop songs and such.”

Wild pretty much gave up on the project coming together, but he kept playing with the samples and he created a mix tape—an underground collection that he shared online

for free—and was pleasantly surprised by the positive feedback. He kept thinking, how do we make this an album?

His way in came when the Glenn Gould estate was purchased by Primary Wave, a company that manages the legacy catalogs of Bob Marley, John Lennon and others. Primary Wave was onboard

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PHOTO: Taylor Geisel

IDs AARYS, Chief Awuah, DOPE FA$E, Gabriel Pick, Your Hunni, Ro Joaquim

and engineered the album tracks from samples that Wild had previously loaded and cleaned up in Ableton.

Two of the nine songs on the album—“Gettin’ That” (feat Cheif Awuah) and the instrumental “Redlight”—came directly from Wild’s free mixtape, but for the rest, the pair started fresh.

In an instructional video that he made with Ableton (watch at mixonline.com), Wild explains that every Gould recording first had to be broken down in MIDI to separate Gould’s left hand (bass notes) from his right (melody). In the video, Wild then demonstrates the way he would repeat a Bach theme the way a hook works in pop music. He also showcases examples of how Gould’s playing fit so well into the project, such as the bounce in Gould’s renditions of Bach’s more playful compositions, and how nicely that bounce sits with a funky bass line and PMC Studios crunchy percussion.

Very quickly, a classical motif morphs into a unique hip hop song.

In Ableton, Wild also turned bass notes into percussion parts, or removed the middle notes of a trill, for example, to make space for other sounds played on the studio’s Moog Sub 37, Fender Jazz Bass and Omnisphere VST. “It’s how a lot of production is done these days, using samples and all these “The wide selection of colours, sizes incredible sounds that and modularity of their panels were a you can warp and cut major factor in our decision to use GIK and do whatever you products.” can think of till the LUCA BARASSI, ABBEY ROAD INSTITUTE cows come home,” Pick says. It’s Gould like

with Wild’s ideas, and they began the process of clearing the samples.

“Once we got approval, we were off to the races,” Wild recalls. “But then the world stopped because of Covid and we were told the album would be delayed until 2021. But then, for whatever reason, things changed again and Sony called me to say they had an opening in October.

So, we were back on.”

When Wild first started experimenting with Gould samples, he had been on staff in Toronto’s Hive Studios, but by the time he had the okay to begin production on Uninvited Guests, he and his current production partner Gabe Pick (also a Hive alumnus) had their own studio, Division 88 (also the name of their record label) in the basement of a gallery in Toronto’s Kensington Market arts district. Wild and Pick co-produced

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you’ve never heard him before, but in a sense, the way Gould might have imagined.

By the time a good selection of musical beds were made, Canada began to reopen, and Wild and Pick could bring artists from their roster in to record vocals. “That’s when it became more like any other recording project,” Pick says.

All the vocal chains included the studio’s AKG C414 mic, API 512 pre’s and their Empirical Labs Distressor.

“The nature of this studio is that people are floating in and out all the time,” Pick says. “Like for the current single that’s out, ‘No Roses,’ I was in session on something else when [vocalists] Your Hunni, AARYS and Ro Joaquim were here, and I said, ‘Do you want to check out some Gould samples?’ Within two quick seconds, it felt really good! And probably within an hourand-a-half, we had the single.”

All of the Uninvited Guests tracks were mixed in Ableton by Pick using a collection of plug-ins from Universal Audio, Waves, Soundtoys, Slate and FabFilter. “I like Slate’s virtual mixer, the Pro Q EQ for precision, the SSL G EQ for presence,” Pick says.

Wild admits that he began the project unsure whether or not he was making a record for Gould fans, but he eventually left off worrying, or even caring, about what Gould purists might think about Uninvited Guests.

“When you dig into Gould’s writings, you realize he was one of the first classical musicians to implement splicing of his recordings,” Wild says. “At the time, people thought it was blasphemous that he would dare to cut two different performances into the same piece. But he argued, ‘So, does that mean a movie director should shoot the whole movie in one shot?’

“So in that spirit, we disregarded Glenn Gould fans. This album isn’t for them. But for people who have little to no idea who he is—whether they’re into rap or dance or trance or hip hop or pop—this is for that new audience. It has way more to do with Glenn Gould’s world view than with his music.” n

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Classic Tracks From left: Engineer David Frazer, Whitney Houston and producer Narada Michael Walden at Tarpan Studios, San Francisco Bay Area, 1987.

PHOTO: Courtesy of Narada Michael Walden

“I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” Whitney Houston’s First Platinum Single, Produced by Narada Michael Walden

By Robyn Flans Imagine how Narada Michael Walden must have felt while producing a project for Aretha Franklin—the Queen of Soul—and receiving a phone call from Arista Records A&R rep Gerry Griffith asking him to drop that record to work with an unknown 19-year-old singer he had discovered by the name of Whitney Houston for her self-titled debut album.

Well, Walden wasn’t about to ignore orders that came directly from record company head Clive Davis, and remembering the beautiful little 11-year-old girl who sat in the corner while her mother, Cissy Houston, sang background on

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Walden’s own 1976 solo album, Garden of Love Light, he dropped everything. Walden finished writing “How Will I Know,” produced the song and it became Houston’s third single from her debut album, and her second Number 1.

When it came time for Houston’s second album, Whitney, a year later, the artist was already a superstar. At the Grammy Awards the year before, she had won three statues, including Album of the Year, so this time Walden knew exactly what he was walking into and who he was going to be working with—and how. Walden ended up producing seven of her new tracks,

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including “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me).”

Walden says he first heard the song when Clive Davis played him a demo. He could hear the hit in the hook, but says the demo sounded almost country western. Definitely “white pop,” as he describes it. It became his job to make it “blacker, funkier and more raw,” he says.

The recipe for that, Walden asserts, was Randy Jackson’s Moog synthesizer combined with his own 808 Roland drum machine, which he and Preston Glass programmed. (Glass also programmed some other percussion, like that little castanet sound in the verses that Walden says he borrowed a la Phil Spector.)

This track was recorded at Walden’s Northern California studio, Tarpan, with David Frazer, who was an in-house engineer at the time.

(He still works independently for Walden.) The studio was equipped with a 48-input SSL G Series console and two Studer A80 tape machines.

SYNTHS AND DRUM MACHINES They began by getting a live track with Walden

triggering the Roland 808 while Greg “Gigi” Gonaway played additional tracks from an early Simmons unit. Walden explains that it was the time of Prince and Michael Jackson, and real drums didn’t have the cutting-edge sound for that track to go “Wow!’” Playing along with Walden and Gonaway were Walter Afanasieff on synths, Randy Jackson on bass synth and Corrado Rustici on guitar synth, with all going direct. Once they got the track, Frazer says they were 80 percent there.

“Once we’d cut it and edited it and put different takes together on multitrack, we’d edit them together with those four elements and come up with the track pretty much done,” he explains. “Each one would go in, and if they heard something they wanted to try to fix, they would go back and we’d individually do the bass or keyboards or guitars and so on. Our focus was really to get the band to move in time and feel together first, though.”

After the basic track was recorded, all the horns were overdubbed—Sterling on the synth horns and Marc Russo on real horns. “Real” cymbals, toms and hi-hat were also overdubbed, using the following mics: KM-84 on the hi-hat, on the rack toms Sennheiser 421s, AKG C24s on drum stereo overheads, and two Neumann U-87s for the room.

Then they laid down a reference vocal so that by the time Houston came in, it already sounded like a hit. Frazer believes that the scratch vocal was by Karen “Kitty Beethoven” Brewington.

“Houston’s vocals were cut with the AKG C24—one side only, we didn’t do it in stereo— into a Focusrite 110 module from a Focusrite desk, that stands alone for the preamp and EQ,” Frazer explains. “We did that primarily since we were recording on tape, knowing that we would have to lose a generation at some point and we were going to be bouncing it together and considering, of course, the effect of tape. We tried to compensate for that a little bit ahead of time so that we didn’t have to bring up the noise later on by adding top end. We tried to preload it a little bit in the upper mids and top end for tape. That’s what we used the Focusrite for.

It had a really nice preamp in it. And we went from there into a Neve original metal knob—the 33609—compressor.”

Other outboard gear Frazer says he leaned heavily on for the song included the AMS devices—the RMX 16 (reverb) and DMX 15 (delay). “The two AMS units were really popular

in the ‘80s,” he says with a slight chuckle. “But the reverb was the one that I thought really worked best with her voice. It was very bright and clear. We were really going for that very high-impact, very powerful upper-mid attack on it. That’s sort of where things were in the ‘80s; a lot of high-end impact. The AMS seemed to float it above the track; it didn’t get lost in the track at all. No matter what else was going on you always got this really pretty reverb her voice would ring out in no matter what. I really liked that. We also used the usual Lexicon PCM 41 and 42s for delays.”

RECORDING THE VOCAL, BACK TO FRONT Walden developed an interesting way to capture lead vocals early on in his production career.

He calls it a back-to-front technique to grab the gold. Houston would sing the song down from the top, maybe two or three times, and they would keep those. Then she would sing the song in segments, starting from the end with the outchorus and ad libs.

“We had about 12 tracks for her,” Frazer explains. “We made a slave reel with eight to 10

tracks of music stems, generally speaking, and 12 tracks for Whitney to record to and one track to bounce to. We would record her, fill up those 12 tracks, starting at the end of the song to get all the fireworks done early, which was Narada’s technique. ‘You’re fresh, you’re energetic, you’re excited, let’s get all the out-chorus moments and ad libs done and blow it up. Then go to the second chorus and do the same thing, less licks and so on, then first chorus and then start doing the tedious stuff of the real minute details on the verses.’ We always kept those original rundowns because we always used something from them.

You could have used any of the tracks as the song, she was just that good, and she would come up with parts during the song, too, like, ‘Let’s try this,’ or ‘Let’s try that.’

“One thing Whitney didn’t like was having to sing over and over again without any guidance,” Frazer adds. “If you could tell her what you wanted, she could sing all day. Just don’t say, ‘Sing it again.’’’

Walden says she was improvising on the outro and he wanted to make sure to capture that passion before recording the more “mundane”

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verses. He explains that he worked that way with Aretha Franklin, as well.

“Those artists come from the church,” Walden says. “You don’t want to wear them out like a racehorse, to run, run, run on verses and then you want fireworks and have nothing left that’s genius, fresh and pure. You always do the ending first. That’s what I learned. I get the ending fireworks first and everybody’s happy and the adrenalin is high, everything’s popping.

Then go to the first verse and first chorus and second verse and second chorus and not worry about the ending.”

AN “IN YOUR FACE” MIX Frazer says the direction he got from Walden on the mix was that he wanted the sound of the entire track “in your face.” When asked to define what that means in terms of how he approached that as an engineer, Frazer says, “It means whatever you are focusing on must be brought up and given its moment. In that song, the vocal and the big horns are the two big things. Obviously, with Whitney there was not a big problem of her cutting through with her power and edge and abilities. So it was just a matter of giving everything as much of a moment as possible.

“The synths, of course, were all very powerful, so you had a lot of powerful elements fighting each other a little bit, but we found a way to give everyone their moment,” he recalls. “A lot of it had to do, honestly, with me using every module compressor engaged on the SSL and then not really heavily compressing the stereo, but individually things were compressed to pull them up forward as much as I could in their moment to try to give everyone their space.

And the production really kind of allowed for everything to have its space; the track was pretty subdued in the verses and it’s all Whitney when the chorus hits; she and the horns are really slamming. Those two things needed to be the focus, and that was how I approached it and the way Narada wanted to hear it. There are a lot of SSL compressors. And I still use them today.

They immediately give everything a little bit of an edge and a bite—amazing devices.”

Frazer says that Walden was amazing at producing Houston and knowing just how to get what was needed. Walden made notes while they recorded so they could put a comp track together and do a rough mix that night so in the morning Houston could hear a finished song.

Walden says that was important to Houston, at least psychologically.

Whitney Houston embraced by Narada Michael Walden, with David Frazer at the SSL console.

PHOTO: Courtesy of Narada Michael Walden

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“We spent a lot of time on the comping,” Frazer says, “We had gone over the stems we created for the music already, as far as what he wanted to hear from everything; we had printed those and we were still working on the slave reel, so it really was, ‘Put those up and make it the way we like it, and work with Whitney in there with all the bits we just put it together.’ It was a very fast situation. The only problem I had, was keeping up with the two of them. [Laughs] There isn’t a machine that rewinds fast enough for Narada and Whitney. I would be pushing Rewind and they’d say, ‘Go.’ It would have been easier had it been digital.”

Frazer says that generally with Houston it was a high, happy energy and joyous in the studio.

Walden and Houston would talk about the song and then just create. Frazer was not surprised the song was a hit. He usually knew by the time he heard the track with the reference vocal, and says of course by the time he heard it with Houston singing, he knew it was in the bag.

“I Wanna Dance With Somebody” became Houston’s fourth consecutive Number One, selling over a million copies and making it her first platinum single. The song was her biggest hit in the U.S. at that time and it won the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance at the 1988 Grammy Awards. n

Herbie Hancock in his home studio, circa 1990.

Music // news & notes PHOTO: Mr. Bonzai

Herbie Hancock Remastered for Vinyl Bernie Grundman has remastered the new “VMP Anthology: The Story of Herbie Hancock,” an eight-album, 11-LP set curated by Vinyl Me, Please and Herbie Hancock himself. Grundman originally mastered a number of the original releases, including 1973’s breakthrough Headhunters and the 2016 Grammy Album of the Year, River: The Joni Letters.

Grundman recalls the original Headhunters mastering sessions: “When they brought that in, I was working at A&M at the time, running their mastering department. Well, that record was shockingly different from what I expected a Herbie Hancock album to be. His approach was different from just about anything I had heard before. Herbie modernized jazz pop music, and because of the mentality that he has and that he put into that, it makes it even more interesting. It had a lot more depth than most records I had heard up to that time.”

The new box set includes albums from every major era of Hancock’s career—from his early albums as a bandleader to his later fusions of jazz with funk and hiphop, and his Grammy-winning work from the 2000s.

The albums were remastered by Grundman from the highest-quality original audio sources available.

Bringing Music Back to Campus Safely

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The largest Gold Medal performance space was populated by those on string instruments and the piano, with each participant located two meters apart.

Photo Credit: Clive Totman.

Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London is one of the premier arts colleges in the world. Key to the school’s musical curricula is its annual award for The Gold Medal—a performance competition that began in 1915 and had taken place uninterrupted through 2019. Of course, because of the global pandemic in 2020, the annual May performance had to be put on hold as teaching moved online during the summer term.

“Because of Covid we needed to be swift in our response to ensure things like The Gold Medal could occur and, very importantly, that inperson classes could still take place with full-scale participation,” says Julian Hepple, Head of Recording and Audio Visual at Guildhall School.

“To make that happen we quickly turned to Dante and Dante Domain Manager. And, in September, as we returned to in-person teaching, we were able to hold The Gold Medal and broadcast the performance online.”

To adhere to social distancing requirements, The Gold Medal performances were constructed across four separate rooms. The largest space was populated by those on string instruments and the piano, with each participant located two meters apart. Woodwind and brass instruments were split up each into their own rooms, with three meters of space allocated between performers. Finally, the conductor was located in a fourth room. The challenge of this setup, of course, was collaboration between the multiple rooms.

To do this, 40 Neumann, Rupert Neve Designs, Schoeps and DPA directional microphones were strategically placed across the space to capture instrument audio. These feeds are brought into SSL and Yamaha preamplifiers where they’re translated into Dante-native channels. These

The lacquers were cut from the original masters by Grundman and the LPs were pressed on high-quality, 180g black vinyl and housed in heavyweight tip-on jackets.

“There is a certain kind of mastering mentality that you get into when you know eight very different recordings will be all together in a box set,” Grundman explains. “There are certain consistencies that you try to hold onto. You can’t really make them all sound exactly the same, but you can prepare the masters in such a way that you bring in all your experience to make the collection have a spectral balance.”

“There’s quite a range there,” Grundman continues.

“One album is all solo piano. And then there are albums that are more produced, and have more things going on, so they don’t have the same kind of presence. From that standpoint, it’s a matter of fundamentally optimizing how people are going to experience each album and the message that each album has.” n

Dante feeds then head to Cisco and Dell switch infrastructure across two buildings, and then routed to a Solid State Logic System T mixer that allows for broadcast-specific processing. The audio feeds are then delivered out to two locations: to the broadcast mix for live playout via a live production system, and to the other performers via headphones.

“With Dante we were able to deliver the correct mix to the different rooms with an imperceptible level of latency,” Hepple says. “Our conductor went into rehearsals on day one, and within 20 bars he said he was ready to go. This is someone who has decades of experience in the classical performance space, and it was an immediate acceptance of the new setup.”

Despite the unique visual—the setup across four different rooms—the production is a seamless performance. n

ANGUILLA MUSIC ACADEMY

on the cover

RECORDING PROVIDES OPPORTUNITY FOR CARIBBEAN YOUTH

By Tom Kenny

PHOTO: Kevin Archibald

Darius James surrounded by students, friends and family, including his youngest son in the foreground, at the API Legacy AXS console in Ocean Studio A. Inset: The view from control room to live room, with ATC SCM200 monitoring. lkes PHOTO: Zuri Wi

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I

PHOTO: Zuri Wilkes

t all starts with music. This world of recording, technology, studio design, microphones, business, promotion, monitors, circuit design, digital audio workstations, education, plug-ins, concert P.A. systems, audio networking, immersive sound, 24-bits and 192 kHz, emulations, samples and beats—it all starts with some guy on guitar, a woman classically trained on piano, an elder master of the oud or some kid on steel drums.

It all starts with music. And on the island nation of Anguilla, east of Puerto Rico and a short boat ride north of St. Martin, there is some damn fine music, and there has been for centuries.

But until recently, it’s mostly been about playing music and performing live. Anguilla is a small island, roughly 35 square miles with a population of Producer, engineer, keyboardist and instructor just over 19,000 with roughly 40 to 50 percent under the age of 18. Tourism Dennis Worrington performing in the live room. is the primary industry, and music certainly helps to feed that part of James, McKinney, left, and Scott Jacoby, the economy. Besides international partners in Eusonia Entertainment and banking and local services, there’s technical advisors for life at AMA. not much else. Opportunities for "What I saw from those youth are limited. kids was that this would be Anguilla is not a poor country by any means, and the eight-year more than just musical story of the birth of the Anguilla development; it was about Music Academy and its associated developing them as AMA Recording Center, which opened officially in its new space a person." in November 2019, is not a tale of some capitalists coming in and —Darius James offering up a studio palace for the poor, starving locals. This is a story about youth and talent, and exposing those kids—and their parents—to the larger opportunities out in New Jersey to record. “I realized that in 90 percent of the pictures from that trip I was standing and looking at the mixing board as opposed to checking the world, with music as the gateway.

“I can remember back to the first week of our first summer camp, about the drums,” he recalls. “So I was like, wow, this sounds like something I'm five years ago,” says Darius James, founder of the nonprofit Anguilla Music interested in. At that time, I had a brother who lived in New York. We talked Academy and by all accounts the visionary who brought all the pieces about it and he told me, if you can get me $2000, I can get you a studio set up. together. “This is an island culture, with a rich musical tradition. The He bought me an iMac computer for 800 bucks. He bought me an interface, students came in the first day and they all had songs ready. What I saw from a MIDI controller and two KRK monitors. That was my 2011 studio setup.”

After returning to Anguilla, he married a woman he had met a few those kids was that this would be more than just musical development; it years earlier on the cruise ship; serendipitously, they found each other was about developing them as a person.” again and moved into a new house to start a family. With his new band, True Intentions, he turned their planned “band space” in his home into a A DRUMMER WITH A VISION Darius James is a humble man with a magnetic and infectious personality, recording studio. There were a couple of other garage studios on the island, driven by a passion that demands total commitment to that which he but James was the only one who had a place where you could record live believes in. He speaks openly of God and Spirit, of Vision and Energy, of drums. He also started thinking about where else this engineering and studio Family and the Divine. He also speaks with passion of his first visit to a life could take him.

When the time came that he had to either move forward and grow his recording studio, and of imagining the musical possibilities.

Born and raised in a musical family in Dominica, James can still recall still-nascent idea for the Academy into something world-class or settle into as a youngster performing every Saturday what they dubbed Radio Under his comfortable life in a home studio, he found guidance from his newborn the Tree, where he and his brothers would set up under a tree and play live, son, who died seven days after birth.

“The way I kind of learned to cope at that time in my life is to take upon fielding requests from neighbors who called from a few houses away. From there, he worked as a drummer/singer on a cruise ship for two-and-a-half me my son's spirit,” he says. “And so I was always thinking to myself, ‘What years, then went to Anguilla for what he thought would be a short vacation. would my son want me to do? What would be cool? What would my son feel proud of?’ And I started thinking a little less about myself and a lot He’s never left.

Long story short, a band he was in at the time found the money to go to more about others. That's where my brain started to open up. Then I spoke

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to Mr. Sheth about the idea, and he introduced me to Mr. Watson, which helped me open my brain even more. And that's where the whole idea of Anguilla Music Academy came from.”

Scratch-a, scratch-a, scratch-a…Rewind! Mr. Sheth is Brian Sheth, who with his wife, Adria, founded the Sheth Sangreal Foundation. Mr. Watson is Joe Watson, who advised the foundation and would later introduce James to James McKinney and Scott Jacoby of Eusonia Enterprises and The teaching labs/production stations at Anguilla Music Academy.

PHOTO: Zuri Wilkes PHOTO: Zuri Wilkes

Eusonia Records out of D.C, and New York, who would become the technical advisers and ultimately project managers of James’ vision. But five years ago, James was still a homestudio owner and a gigging drummer who had struck a friendship with Sheth while playing in one of the Private Villas and told him of his idea, one that would one day benefit all the youth of the Caribbean, with Anguilla as a hub.

James had done his homework, researching other schools and liking the hands-on approach of The Blackbird Academy in Nashville. Things started to move quickly after that; well, quickly for island time. About six months after meeting with James, Watson approached McKinney and Jacoby, whom he had known through advising Eusonia as a company, about helping out on the Recording Center portion of the Academy. McKinney and Jacoby flew down to meet with James, not fully knowing what might be expected from “technical advisors.”

THE GRAMMY CONNECTION “I had never even heard of Anguilla when I first met with Joe,” McKinney admits with a laugh. “And when we flew down there, the Academy was just an idea. It was explained to us that we would be technical advisors, to help Darius fully form his ideas. But it’s hard for me and Scott not to dive in on everything that we do. So we ended up working with architects, managed construction, finances, and bringing our producer, engineer expertise right down to the equipment choices. We also brought our relationships, because our goal has been to really get the most bang for the buck as far as doing something really

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important for the region and for the youth of the region.”

“I think that James and I each have skills which we share and some that we don't,” Jacoby adds, speaking to their now ten-year partnership. “For example, James is really good at accounting; me, not so much. I have a lot of experience with gear and studios and acoustics. And then we have overlapping abilities and interests that complement each other.”

The other key relationship that McKinney and Jacoby brought was with the Grammy organization. Each had served as members of regional and national boards; each had served as co-chairs of the Producers & Engineers Wing of the Recording Academy, at separate times. It so happened that Sheth, founder of the Sheth Sangreal Foundation, also had an established relationship with and served on the Board for the Grammy Museum Foundation. More synergies, as McKinney says.

Today, there is a Grammy Museum Gallery as part of the Anguilla Music Academy, the first outside the U.S. And the impetus for the school itself, the first summer camp programs, were based on, and supported by, the Grammy Museum’s Music Revolution Project, a program that run throughout the States in the summer.

“What I think the Grammy connection does for the young people is give them some kind of hope, to say, “Okay, you can be from Anguilla and you can still win a Grammy Award,” James says. “You The control room of Sunset Studio B, based around and can still be associated or affiliated API The Box console, with such a prestigious brand. So, 12 channels of Vintech, again, that kind of connection is Focusrite and UA mic pre’s, and Guzauski-Swist monitors. exactly what we were looking for.

And that's the role that the Music Academy is trying to play. We call it the gap between the Caribbean and Hollywood.”

That first summer camp, called the Music Revolution Project, was essentially a proof of concept leading up to the full-blown Academy. At the time, 2015, they were operating out of a rented space where James had moved his studio, with anywhere between 25 to 40 students. McKinney and Jacoby and Grammy Museum staff would come down to teach and mentor, bringing their families with them and prompting the first cultural exchanges, which would become a part of the overall Academy mission.

THE STUDIOS For the next three years, the camps continued, the idea grew in scale, the concept was proven, and then another generous grant was committed by the Sheth Sangreal Foundation. The studios could proceed. Early on in the process, Jacoby and McKinney had proposed the idea of bringing in a professional studio designer to make the Recording Center world-class, setting up a Skype call with Wes Lachot and bringing together even more collective synergies.

It turns out that eight years earlier, when James first settled down in Anguilla and started to ponder his future, he set up a Vision Board above his desk. Among the collection was a photo of a Grammy Award and a photo of a professional studio he found on the Internet. He looked up the designer, Wes Lachot, and simply called him on a Sunday afternoon.

PHOTO: Zuri Wilkes

plans to bring in coding and other technology-based coursework to provide even more opportunity. The music and the players and the youth are there, and they are hungry for knowledge. McKinney, Jacoby, Lachot and James are all excited to provide it for many years to come.

“One of the things we talk to students about in the camps is what it means to have a career in music,” Jacoby says. “James and I broke down all of the various careers and the opportunities that sort of stem out from an interest in music. You could be in the publishing industry, , the songs industry. You can be a mixer. You could be a person who just makes beats. You could be a person who designs sounds. And the kids were super wideeyed. We show them 30 different possible career paths where they thought there were only one or two. That’s a big part of the mission to educate them on opportunity.

“I was always hoping for some sort of way to combine a number of the most prominent interests in my life, which include music, include other cultures and include philanthropy of a sort that helps others,” he continues. “I remember mentioning to my wife when I first met Darius—I was like, ‘Honey, I think this guy is going to end up being a friend for life, and a brother.”

McKinney echoed the exact same sentiments, calling James the brother he never knew he had, and the entire experience a commitment by he and his family for life.

For Darius James? “I was given a chance to make a difference, with the help of a lot of people,” he says. “They gave me an opportunity which inspired me to inspire others. And I hope that my life will inspire others, as well. And I want to give somebody else, all my students, that chance.” ■

An instructor and student, working on a project in the production lab.

They ended up talking for hours.

“I didn't know who he was, but I talked to him because, well, because he's a really great guy,” Lachot recalls. “We ended up talking for half the afternoon about his vision for the studio. He clearly didn't have hardly any money himself, but he kept talking about some funding that he was going to be getting. Then when I got on the call many years later with James and Scott, I said, Wait! I know this guy! We talked years ago! That was a real small-world moment. And Darius’ original vision was amazingly spot-on.”

One of the biggest decisions hammered out over the course of a few years was whether or not to go with a solid analog base. It would be more expensive, but all were adamant that putting in an API Legacy AXS console, with a stacked outboard rack at the producer’s desk, was the right call for a facility that wanted to both teach students the art and science of recording and attract engineers from around the world. API, McKinney says, was very generous in its support, as was ATC in making the SCM200 monitoring in Ocean Studio A affordable.

The two control rooms (Sunset Studio B has an API The Box and Guzauski-Swist monitors) needed to be big in order to accommodate students, but not too big that it would interfere with a proper reflection free zone, balancing between sweet spot and wider sweet spot. It was also important to have substantial live rooms; the musical culture of the island is all about playing together, musicians feeding off of each other. Lachot’s solution was to implement variable acoustics.

“I think it's important for the room because these days the state of the art is to be able to change the room around quickly, not have it be set a certain way,” Lachot explains. You need to be able to change the reverb time in a room—not drastically, but a reasonable amount of change. For drums, people like pretty loud sounds these days, and you want to let the sound bloom. You want to reveal. But there are days when you want to be dead for vocal recording. You can change a couple of the walls completely from absorptive to diffusive. And on different types of instruments, I think it's a real learning, learning tool.

“You can simply change the wall, and they can take care of a problem without having to tell musicians to move,” he continues. “Sometimes they might be in a circle or a certain distance apart because this is how they set up on stage. You don't want to mess with that if you don't have to.”

MORE TO COME There’s so much more to this story, including cooperation and support from the government, community outreach and involvement, and ongoing

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Producer

Michael Moritz Pop, Theater and Benefit Concerts—Bringing It All Together, Remotely

By Jennifer Walden

W

Producer Michael Moritz in Avatar, Studio G.

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hat’s in a name? For Annie Lennox, Stevie Wonder, John Legend, Gladys Knight, Barry Manilow, Idina Menzel, John Mayer, Sia, Dionne Warwick, James Taylor, Bette Midler, Adam Lambert, Cyndi Lauper, Peter Frampton, Andrea Bocelli, Melissa Etheridge, Paul Shaffer, Jordin Sparks, Micky Dolenz, Alanis Morrissette, and Josh Groban it’s musical prowess. And for Michael J. Moritz, Jr., it’s music production.

Over the past six months, Moritz—an Emmy and Tony Award-winning producer/record producer/music supervisor/music director/ arranger/Broadway music supervisor/performer/ pianist who specializes in the pop and musical theater genres—has worked remotely with all of those names in music (and many more) to create benefit concerts and fundraising variety shows to raise money for organizations like UNICEF and the CDC. “Back in late March, my good friend and music direction client Erich Bergen (Jersey Boys, Madam Secretary) asked me to consult and produce on a huge undertaking— a starry ‘virtual Passover Seder’ variety special,” Moritz says. “In preCovid life, Erich and I have toured the country with his solo show and with countless notable orchestras, including the Boston Pops.” In the weeks that followed, Moritz would continue to work in collaboration with actor-turned-liveevent producer Bergen.

Saturday Night Seder (which raised $3 million for the CDC) was a big YouTube streaming event with more than 50 celebrities partaking in an online Seder celebration with comedy and music. “The opening number was this theatrical wonderland that went from celeb to celeb to celeb to celeb. It was Jason Alexander, Darren Criss, Josh Groban, Rachel Brosnahan, and so on,” he explains. “We had a full band, a full brass section, reeds, strings… it was a full complement

Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox perform for a UNICEF benefit

of instrumentation and all of these people. This project is where I figured out this process of remote production.”

SETTING UP FOR REMOTE PRODUCTION Moritz was no stranger to working with topnotch music talent pre-pandemic. For instance, he produced the charity single “What the World Needs Now” sung by Broadway For Orlando (a group of esteemed pop and theater performers like Idina Menzel, Gloria Estefan, Matthew Broderick and Kristen Bell, who came together in support of the victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting in 2016), and served as conductor, music director and producer for both From Broadway With Love: A Benefit Concert for Orlando and From Broadway With Love: A Benefit Concert for Parkland.

Moritz’s 2019 Tony Award was for Best Musical as a co-producer of Hadestown. And he earned two Tony and Olivier Award nominations as a co-producer for Broadway/West End’s Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and On The Town. Other

“Getting to work with all of these people in the total upper echelon of the music industry has been really inspiring because they want to participate; they care about a cause,” notable Broadway producing credits include Big Fish, A Night With Janis Joplin and The Velocity of Autumn.

However, Moritz feels that his recent experience in remote production has been singularly satisfying. “I’m not a ‘star-struck’ person, but getting to work with all of these people in the total upper echelon of the music industry has been really inspiring because they want to participate; they care about a cause,” says Moritz. “They don’t need to stay relevant

PHOTO: Michael Moritz

Moritz’s modest home setup in Ohio.

Michael Moritz on piano, with Jakob Reinhardt on guitar and Jordin Sparks on vocals performing Whitney Houston's "Higher Love" for UNICEF

or tour right now. They’re doing these shows because they care. They put in the time and trust the people who are putting the programs together. And at the end of it, it’s to raise money.

It’s been a much more altruistic time for music and for me.”

When the pandemic closed studio doors (temporarily) in New York City, Moritz grabbed some essential gear and headed to his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio—where he previously owned a commercial recording studio and video sound stage and still owns a commercial music store. He set up a makeshift studio in his rental home but quickly realized it would need some serious upgrades. One huge disadvantage was a lack of acoustic treatment.

“I scrambled to figure out how to do some absorption and diffusion in a way that wouldn’t wreck our home and turn our living space into something totally different,” he says. “I found Overtone Acoustics. They make great acoustic panels, but they do something I’ve never seen before—they can print directly on the fabric. I worked with them to put together a treatment solution that solved my acoustic problems, but it also blends into our space in an unobtrusive way. They just look like great art.”

For studio monitors, Moritz picked up a pair of Eve Audio SC307s to replace his Mackie HR824 pair. The SC307 three-way speakers feature ribbon tweeters “that keep me glued to the mix room. With the ribbon tweeters, I can mix way longer than I should be mixing per day,” he says.

Moritz uses Metric Halo’s ULN-2 3d audio interface, which he says “is great for when we do live capture because there’s a MADI card option on the 3d that does copper MADI or optical MADI,” he explains. “When I do live capture, triple redundancy is the standard. I have the 4x copper MADI, so I can get two output splits from that and the third can go through MADI, or

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Dante, or AVB, depending on what’s going on.”

Other outboard gear includes the McDSP 16-channel Analog Processing Box and two UAD-2 Satellite plug-in boxes (OCTO model).

Moritz feeds everything into Steinberg’s Nuendo running on a 2017 iMac loaded with RAM. He says, “I’ve been using Nuendo for over 15 years.

I’ve found it to be unparalleled. It’s so intuitive.

With the visibility agents in the mix window, I really don’t find myself reaching for a traditional controller so much, like my Avid S3.”

Instead, he uses a set of small-format controllers—an Elgato Stream Deck programmed with macro shortcuts and a Loupedeck CT controller for left-handed work. “Loupedeck isn’t known in the audio world—I found them through a colorist friend—but the controller has a jog wheel and a bunch of OLED screens on it, and everything locks the application in focus,” he says.

MUSICIANS UNITE Since that initial remote production on Saturday Night Seder, Moritz has been perfecting his workflow on a string of star-studded, musicbased streaming events, from UNICEF’s We Won’t Stop on MSNBC to People Magazine’s Carousel of Hope Ball fundraiser in October. “It’s almost unthinkable that in the last six months I’ve done over 100 recordings,” he says. “Every week to week-and-a-half, I’m doing a one-hour show with my very small audio team, which sounds unreal. How is that even possible? It’s just not a normal time!”

Each project presented unique challenges.

For Annie Lennox’s performance in the UNICEF concert, Moritz had one mixed track with her vocals and piano. He says, “I distinctly remember on that one thinking, ‘How can I clear out the room, but also, from a single-source recording, maybe impart some reverb onto her voice but

Josh Groban, top left, with Jason Alexander, top right. Darren Criss and Rachel Brosnahan on Saturday Night Seder.

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Michael Moritz on piano, Jakob Reinhardt (guitar), Billy LaGuardia (drums), Adam DeAscentis (bass) for Sam Smith performance at Carousel of Hope Ball.

keep the piano dry?’ I played with iZotope’s Music Rebalance and essentially extracted her vocal and then used that vocal to feed a reverb at 100 percent wet, and then re-incorporated it.

You just have to work with what you have.”

Moritz did a mix for Stevie Wonder for another benefit concert. “Stevie was using great mics, but on his recording I had to edit out quite a bit of wind because he was outside because of the pandemic!!!

There was also a harpist in the song who performed in a super-live room so I had to claw out the real signal from all the room reverb,” he says.

For the Carousel of Hope Ball, Moritz and his team are doing a remake of “That’s What Friends Are For.” They recorded Gladys Knight at home, and then Dionne Warwick at home. “The trick was, if we were going to capture these recordings in less-than-ideal rooms, how do we make the mix better?” he explains. “One solution is to find one source with great fidelity to lend to a project.

I knew we had to get mics and legit setups on the band because that fidelity would help to make the track sound better overall.

“You have to lean into what you get, lean into the things that, if you tried to remove them, would cause you problems at every step of the way,” he adds. “You have to listen with the mindset of ‘What is this for? What do the other mics that I’m ingesting sound like in this package? How can I get the recordings to sound close to one another, sonically and acoustically?

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Home performance by John Mayer

And, how do I keep them to the highest fidelity without imparting artifacts?’ It’s all about trying to remove as much room as you can to get a realistic-sounding, dry take.”

For UNICEF’s event, Moritz did a worldmeets-pop-music re-orchestration of Whitney Houston’s “Higher Love,” performed by Jordin Sparks. Moritz created a guide/framework track in Nuendo and sent that via Dropbox to his drummer, guitarist, bassist, and rhythm section.

He imported their parts back into his master session and created a rough mix with guide tracks for a 60-member gospel choir. Each singer in the choir recorded a cell phone video of him/ herself singing and sent that back to Moritz. He separated the audio from the video, imported the .wav files into iZotope RX8 for cleanup, exported those into Nuendo, synched them up, and created a new mix for Sparks to perform to.

“Then I mailed a USB mic to Jordin and she sang her part in her closet while I produced her vocals over Zoom,” he says.

Steve Martin

Barry Manilow and a few of the 120 vocalists singing "One Voice."

Alanis Morrissette and a few of the cast from Jagged Little Pill

Moritz used a similar workflow on a track he produced for The International Thespian Festival, which featured 150 singers, and for a track he did with Barry Manilow singing “One Voice,” which had 120 singers. He says, “Every one of those phone submissions had problems sonically. But after some light cleaning on the tracks, using Spectral Denoise and Spectral Recovery in iZotope RX, and some light cleaning on the bus-level, it sounds quite passable when you join them altogether. I think there’s a great advantage to the power of numbers.”

MIXING FROM A VARIETY OF SOURCES Synching up 100 different vocal tracks recorded in different locations on different mics and making it sound like a chorus of people singing together seems daunting. At least, it should.

For Moritz, the solution is to “work directly in Nuendo’s native audiowarp tools for pitch and timing correction, and also use Synchro Arts’ ReVoice Pro to help lock together problematic takes from different sources. I like to tune

“I’ve been enjoying helping other people to figure out how to adapt to the new challenges of production.

There are a lot of lessons in this for people who do pre-pro at home or do selfrelease albums from home.” modestly, and tighten performances so all the cutoffs are right, the entrances are right, and all the sibilance are exactly in line,” he explains.

Mixing music (even when it’s turning iPhone recordings into polished tracks) isn’t the main challenge for Moritz. His real challenge was, as a music professional, diving into the sound-for picture world. Moritz has been actively seeking out post sound solutions, like ReVoice Pro, which haven’t shown up on his radar before.

He says, “For Saturday Night Seder, they brought me on to produce and mix all of the music numbers and I ended up also mixing the dialog. I’m like a re-recording mixer now, too. I’ve found Nugen Audio’s plug-ins—like ISL and LM-Correct—to be incredibly helpful for achieving consistency from segment to segment across a one-hour show, and for staying within broadcast or network spec. You can manually watch meters, but once you get the mix close, these plug-ins essentially do the QC for you on the way up, so I know loudness compliance won’t hurt me.”

In the role of music supervisor, Moritz is

responsible for putting together all the prep materials, from creating a boilerplate with instructions on how to submit tracks to setting up file request links via Dropbox. He also creates and exports guide tracks for each performer.

Oftentimes, he’s creating new arrangements of songs or different orchestrations.

It requires clear pre-planning and rigorous organizational practices, like using consistent file naming conventions to easily find and organize files within smart folders in macOS. With hundreds of files moving from the talent to Moritz to the video and audio teams and back again, keeping track of everything is essential. “That’s the secret,” he says.

“So much of it is being organized and having good email follow-through, and funneling things into a really good organizational system that you can track and audit.”

After Saturday Night Seder, several major broadcast companies and producers for Late Night shows and even high-profile podcasts reached out to Moritz to ask about his process of remote production.

“I’ve ended up consulting for them, to help them find better ways and new workflows,” he says. “I’ve been enjoying helping other people to figure out how to adapt to the new challenges of production. There are a lot of lessons in this for people who do pre-pro at home or do self-release albums from home. Look at the Billie Eilish record. That all happened in a bedroom.

“Knowledge will always trump gear, and kindness and patience will always trump ego,” he says in summary. “I’ve always loved the work, and my passion has never diminished.

However, using talent and resources to help effect change in the world and to raise up marginalized communities, as well as sharing my knowledge to encourage younger talents in our business, brings a sense of pride far greater than any stream counts, social media metrics, and download numbers could ever bring.” n

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New Dolby Atmos Suite Certified for Home

By Tom Kenny

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n the one hand, Mert Ozcan was about as unlucky as a new studio owner could be. It was early March 2020, and he was finishing up fabrics and tweaks on a new Dolby Atmos room at The Record House, a facility he had opened four years earlier with a single 5.1 room inside the Sonic Fuel complex in El Segundo, Calif., run by composers Christopher Lennertz and Timothy Michael Wynn.

A space had opened up the previous Fall when a composer decided to leave the facility, and, having looked to the near future, Ozcan decided the time was right to fast-track the construction of a certified 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos mix room. He didn’t want to be late to the party; he wanted to be one of the first guests to arrive. Everything was going better than expected.

Then four days later the virus hit, and the shutdown orders brought all business to a screeching halt.

On the other hand, if there is such a thing as a “silver lining” over these past 10 months, the slowdown has allowed Ozcan time to educate himself on the format, to study up on the techniques

used by the pros, and to add Dolby Atmos Music mixing to his list of skills and services.

“The first month I basically brought myself up to speed on the technology itself because I hadn’t necessarily worked in Atmos before,” Ozcan says.

“Dolby has some great webinars with established mixers, so I feel like I was able to learn from the masters during the down time. And then I sought out the music masters, especially from Capitol.

I was lucky enough to see how they work, and it made sense. I wanted to mix in post-production and mix music, so I kind of combined the two mentalities and came up with my own way of approaching things. I’m confident now that I’m proficient. I’m basically waiting for production to start back up and to get into the full swing of things.”

GAINING HEIGHT, ADDING LOW END The Record House is known primarily as a music production facility, built around something of a “collective” of composers with commercial clients and a few independent features, looking up toward big-budget features and projects. Ozcan is a Berklee

The new Dolby Atmos suite at The Record House, with natural light, a Pro Tools/Avid S1/keyboard-based command center, and acoustical treatment by ZR Acoustics.

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PHOTO: Alper Nakri/Deniz Hotamisligil

The Record House Goes Immersive

Engineer Josh Margolis , left, with The Record House founder, producer Mert Ozcan, in the control room at Sonic Fuel, part of the building –wide collective.

College of Music grad who, before founding The Record House with partner Beto Vargas in 2014 had worked stints at Blue Microphones, House of Rock and Interscope Records.

He and Vargas invited a few composers, most fellow Berklee alums, to work out of the facility in 2018, allowing one and all to expand their networking opportunities. At the end of 2019 Vargas went off on his own to pursue his own music production and performance goals, though the two remain friends and collaborators.

That same year, just a few months earlier while at the Mix Presents Sound for Film & Television event on the Sony lot, Ozcan ended up talking to “a guy from Netflix,” where it really hit home that Dolby Atmos masters were a required deliverable, same with Amazon, Hulu, HBO and others. The pipeline was overflowing with content, and there weren’t a lot of mid-level facilities focusing on Dolby Atmos Home certification. Even before the pandemic, Ozcan saw the living room as his target market.

On the same day, he approached Ziv Gross at Streamline Streamline Integration, who in a previous life at GC Pro had helped Ozcan set

PHOTO: Alper Nakri/Deniz Hotamisligil

up his 5.1 room and was now directing business development at the integration company.

Streamline had provided the integration for many of the Atmos rooms at Sony, as well as many others around town. Things started to move quickly after that, and Gross and Streamline engineer Josue Catalan, a music mixer from Chile, were soon walking around The Record House looking at ceilings and walls.

“It was a pretty good room size-wise,” Gross recalls. “The only two issues we had with the room were the ceiling height and a window. Once we talked to Dolby about the possibility of getting this room certified, the main problem became the ceiling height.”

It’s a myth that you need a big room to mix in Dolby Atmos, as the format tends to translate up and down pretty well; but you do need to meet minimum height requirements to be certified, and The Record House was on the edge of acceptability.

Because the room had been a studio, the walls and floors were solid and the speakers could be mounted on brackets. To work with the ceiling, the team decided to “dig up” and soffit-mount the four

The Record House Collective, led by Mert Ozcan, in action in the live room.

JBL 705s above the mixer.

“It was literally inches from the actual roof, so there was not too much space to be able to build the soffits, engineering-wise,” Catalan says.

“It would have been much easier to aim with mounting brackets, but it ended up pretty slick with the soffits and we pulled it off. In a room this size, we were aiming for the home, the near-field environment. The height is there.”

Another common problem in any smallroom, near-field environment is dealing with low frequencies. The math is difficult to resolve when dealing with long waves and volume. Initially, to complement the JBL 708s across the front and the JBL 705s for surrounds and ceiling, controlled by a JBL Intonato monitor controller, Ozcan had a single JBL 4645C sub. By the time the lockdown began to open up and Ceri Thomas made a first field visit for Dolby, it was clear that a second sub was needed.

“We realized by June that I needed a second sub, tuned differently, for the LFE and bass management,” Ozcan says. “So we added a second one for bass management.”

The initial 3D model showing speaker placement; note the soffits in the ceiling.

“We started with one sub, and the reason for that is when you are looking acoustically at a small room with multiple subs, you’re exciting the room,” adds Catalan. “But one of the things we noticed was that on some of the content the bass management and LFE channels were basically working against each other, and that’s when you started having the drop in level. With the second sub, we are able to have separate channels and we’re not going to excite the room. So that’s what we did. And we were able to get that put in before Dolby came back in to get the room certified.”

The final tweaks involved adding Dante connectivity by setting up the Focusrite RedNet interface in and out of the Dolby RMU, with an additional RedNet 16R to handle analog input, as well as tielines to the live room on the first floor.

A keyboard, rather than a console, sits at the sweet spot so that, as Ozcan says, “You can write and mix in the room; I wanted it to be multidisciplinary.”

DHDI founder Hanson Hsu stepped in for acoustical consultation and presented Ozcan with a demo of his ZR Cloak, which surrounds three sides of the speaker to eradicate first-order reflections. The walls and ceiling are treated with DHDI’s ZR MicroTwin acoustic products.

MIXING FOR THE HOME Flexibility is the name of the game today. While the impetus for Ozcan building the room was rooted in post-production, by June of 2020 he began thinking about immersive music, too. He found that outside of Capitol, Blackbird, PMC’s studios and a few others, there weren’t actually that many facilities focusing on music. Then when Avid came out with Avid Play, making it easier for independents to deliver Atmos tracks to streaming services, his thinking coalesced: It’s all about the living room, all about home entertainment.

“We are a music company, and music is what I’ve been doing for the past seven or eight years,” Ozcan says. “So when Ceri of Dolby started talking about how this room could work equally well for music mixing, it was like the light bulb went off. I want a composer to be able to compose, an engineer or producer to produce, a sound designer to design. And then we can mix.

“I actually find music to be a better way of explaining what the medium is,” he concludes.

“When I’m hosting listening sessions, sitting back on the couch, and people hear, for example, Rocket Man, and that chorus hits—it’s like an explosion.

I’ve literally had multiple people turn around and show me the goosebumps.” n

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Rick Camp and Master Mix Live FOH Engineer Brings Live Sound Technologies to New Dolby Atmos Facility

By Steve Harvey

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donated a mixing console, 2-inch tape machine and effects rack to a youth center when studio business everywhere started to taper off. But the youth center had since lost its lease. “A friend of mine was teaching there. I said, ‘What did you do with my gear?’ He said, ‘They’re selling it.’ I said, ‘Give me my stuff back!”

The console, a Sony DMX-R100, had already been sold, but he got his Otari machine and effects rack back. As luck would have it, he didn’t need a desk. Years before, Camp had flown out to install a Neve Genesys at Orange’s new studio in Florida, but it proved to be too much console for him. A few years later, he called Camp to swap it out for a PreSonus Live board.

PHOTO: Jorina King

hen Rick Camp conducted a test earlier this year with German networking and bridging solutions developer DirectOut Technologies to stream multitrack audio across 5,800 miles using standard Internet connections in real time, the results were impressive. The average time taken to transport 48 tracks of uncompressed 48kHz, 24-bit audio from a studio in Milan, Italy, to Camp’s Master Mix Live Studio in Las Vegas was roughly 100 milliseconds, or 500 samples.

That’s too much latency for musicians to collaborate remotely, of course, but that wasn’t what Camp was hoping to achieve. “I said, ‘I want to be able to mix somebody’s show from my studio in real time.’ They said, ‘No problem.’”

For 35 years Camp has pursued a dual career, working in the studio between touring as a front-of-house mixer for some major marquee names: Beyoncé, Madonna, Jennifer Lopez. An accomplished trumpet and trombone player who attended Berklee College of Music back in the day, he found his true calling in the studios and clubs of his native Ohio. In 1988 he hooked up with The Whispers, moved to L.A. and got his first taste of world travel, touring with the band for 12 years. In 1993 he set up Reel Tyme Productions & Recording after buying a house and studio from The Commodores’ Walter Orange, with whom he had been working for a while.

The latest chapter in Camp’s life began in 2003. “I was on tour with Beyoncé, and our final show was the Radio Music Awards in Vegas at the Aladdin. That’s where I met my wife; she was an actress and a stand-in reading lines for Beyoncé. That day I met her was her birthday.

Three days later was my birthday. And we have been together ever since.”

Camp relocated to Las Vegas and eventually set about rebuilding his studio. He had previously

Rick Camp at the Neve Genesys console in the new Master Mix Live.

“I said, ‘Let me make a little left turn here and go more into post-production.’ I had always been wanting to do it, but I never had time because I was always out on tour.”

—Rick Camp “We packed the Genesys up and put it upstairs, where it stayed for two years,” Camp says. “When I was starting my school, I asked what he was doing with the console. He said, ‘Come and get it.’”

Camp set up Master Mix Live about 10 years ago, teaching intensive live audio engineering courses with occasional tuition in studio and broadcast engineering. “I’ve had students from all over the world. But with Covid-19, that’s slowed down or stopped,” he says. “I said, ‘Let me make a little left turn here and go more into post-production.’ I had always been wanting to do it, but I never had time because I was always out on tour.”

Indeed, Camp’s post-production experience goes back many years and includes 5.1 mixes for DVD releases of live shows by Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez. Master Mix Live is equipped with

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a 7.1 Genelec 1031A near-field speaker setup with a 7050 subwoofer, but at the beginning of the year he also began the process of adding Dolby Atmos mixing capabilities.

Los Angeles-based Ceri Thomas, who is responsible for content and studio enablement for Dolby, guided Camp through the upgrade.

He met Thomas about five years ago, he recalls.

“At that point it was not as easy to get into Dolby Atmos; you had to buy the hardware renderer.

But I knew it was going to be the future and we stayed in touch.”

His 7.1.4 speaker setup includes some unconventional choices. The front and side zone speakers are K-Array Kayman and Python models. “Their speakers are really accurate, like studio monitors, but for live,” says Camp. A pair of ISP Technologies XMAX 218 dual-18-inch subs

PHOTO: Jorina King

handle the low end.

He first encountered K-Array speakers when he was asked by Marc Vincent, then president of Sennheiser China, to fly over and babysit a K-Array rig during several days of demonstrations. “After mixing on it for the week, I said, ‘You’ve got to get this in the States,” he says.

Vincent subsequently joined K-Array as president of global sales and marketing and sent Camp a 24-box KH8 rig with 18 subs. “I’ve been demoing and using it on festival dates. I can put enough P.A. into 24 feet of truck space to do any stadium. Not arena—stadium,” he stresses.

For the overhead channels Camp installed Tectonic PL-11 distributed-mode, flat-panel speakers, another P.A. product. “I needed something small that sounds good. I dialed them in with Smaart and they work great,” he says. “The ribbon tweeters are nice and smooth.”

Camp started out with Dolby Atmos Production Suite and Pro Tools on the same computer, but a few months ago upgraded to run Mastering Suite on a separate machine.

While there are other, perhaps more popular,

The full room, with 7.1 Genelec monitor system, alongside a rather unconventional K-Array/Tectonic 7.1.4 system

choices for managing Dolby Atmos signal routing and speaker management, Camp elected to install a DirectOut Technologies Prodigy MP multifunction processor. “It does multiple things: 128 channels of Ravenna, 64 channels of MADI, 64 channels of Dante and 32 channels of analog I/O-slash-mic pre’s. The box is amazing,” he says.

“I had done a project for Bally’s 10 years ago when they revamped their system for Jubilee, the longest-running strip show in Vegas,” he recalls.

“I redid the sound system and used a DirectOut MADI A/D converter to switch between two computers.” When the company introduced the Prodigy MP, he jumped on it.

Signal transport in his room is via several protocols, with 64 channels out of Pro Tools passing through an SSL XLogic MADI converter into the Prodigy, which sends a Dante stream to his Mastering Suite computer. The computer feeds Dante back into the Prodigy, which outputs analog sends to the separate 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos and 7.1 surround monitor systems.

With everything installed, Camp set up a test with DirectOut’s Luca Giaroli to see if he

could do remote real-time mixing out of his room. Giaroli, at the headquarters of Vivivaldy, a long-distance real-time synchronized audio transmission solutions developer in Milan, played out a multitrack session that Camp had previously sent him. A custom Vivivaldy VPN switch was installed at each end and a maximum buffer size of 32,768 samples (or 682.67 ms) set to avoid packet loss of the 48k audio. Camp’s PTPenabled Sonifex AVN-GMC Grandmaster Clock provided sub-microsecond synchronization via GPS satellite.

The results were everything that Camp had hoped for, even with a reported 32 switch hops in the path and using his regular Internet service provider, which offers a 200 Mbps download speed with 20 Mbps on the upload. “I brought everything into Pro Tools, recorded it, and while I was recording it, I was mixing it live back to Luca in stereo and 7.1.4, in under two seconds,” he says.

“I’m always looking for the newest, latest, greatest thing,” he concludes. “But I don’t just jump on anything; I had to be convinced.” This time, the proof was in the streaming. n

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Tech

new products

The

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W of it La h a A s C dd t- o By M u i Th t e io in ple M ix ns ut Ed e ito r

Audio Products of the Year

AMS Neve RMX16 500 Series Digital Reverb Module With its company roots going back to 1970s, Advanced Music Systems introduced the RMX16 Digital Reverberator in 1981. It was the world’s first microprocessorcontrolled, full-bandwidth digital reverb, and it went on to become a signature reverb effect heard on many (now) classic records from those times. The AMS Neve RMX16 500 Series Digital Reverb module was launched at the 2020 Winter NAMM Show and is a remarkable-sounding rendition of that original reverb that fits into just three slots of any 500 rack. Besides the original, and by now familiar nine reverb programs, the new RMX comes with nine more carefully chosen programs for 18 total. The new RMX16 uses 24-bit, 48kHz sample rate audio, 32-bit DSP processing and the A/D and D/A converters were design to sound the same as the original units.

For the most part, AMS NEVE has kept the user interface/operation and controls the same—even within the compact front panel. The wide, red LED display of the original 2U RMX is replaced by a 2.4-inch OLED display mounted above the familiar 16-button alphanumeric keypad.

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t’s been a long, strange year. Huge shifts of audio teams and individuals from facilities to homes, which leads to much different buying patterns when it comes to upgrading audio systems—or developing and releasing new products.

But! The industry has responded with a flood of late-year debuts—including Avid, Steinberg and Focusrite all in one week in November!—to go with a slow-but-steady stream of new releases since last year’s NAMM Show. (That seems like a looooong time ago sitting here in mid-November.)

To celebrate year’s end, Mix asked its technology editors and contributors to offer their suggestions for the year’s top products. Here’s what we came up with.

Apple Logic Pro X 10.5 (Mac) Even before the release of version 10.5, Apple Logic Pro X offered an amazingly deep feature set—not to mention a ridiculously low price. The update ushered in a slew of new capabilities, mostly aimed at the EDM world. The headline addition is Live Loops, a well-designed and deep cliplaunching and arranging environment. Version 10.5 also features a number of excellent new plug-ins. Some of the most notable are Remix FX, a versatile dance-music oriented effects processor; Sampler, which replaces the venerable ESX-24; and Drum Machine Designer, an electronic counterpart to the existing Drum Kit Designer. Also new is a powerful Step Sequencer, 2,500 more Apple Loops and much more.

Audio Design Desk 1.4 (Mac) If you work with sound for picture, Audio Design Desk is a gamechanger. Created by a filmmaker, a composer and a musician/ programmer, it combines the functionality of a workstation, a sound effects and production music library, a sampler and an editor in one kick-ass application.

Sound designers and sound effects people in particular will find ADD’s unique and well-thought-out workflow to be a huge time-saver. And its library of sound effects and production music (library size varies depending on which subscription plan you choose) to be hugely useful. You can also import your own sound libraries into ADD. Whether you’re working on soundtracks for feature films or YouTube videos, you’ll want to check out ADD. It even offers a free version that includes the ADD application and a small library.

Eventide H9000 AVID PT|HDX Expansion Card

DiGiCo Quantum 338 Digital Mixing Console Based on seventh-generation FPGA technology, the Quantum 338 from DiGiCo is designed to provide advanced processing capabilities and a high level of flexibility in a compact format. The Quantum 338 supports 128 input channels, 64 aux or subgroup buses, LR/LCR/LCRS/5.1 master buses, 24 control groups, two solo buses and a 24x24 matrix—all with full channel processing.

The Quantum 338 work surface includes 38 100mm touch-sensitive faders organized in three blocks of 12 faders, plus a central section with two masters. A 17-inch highres touchscreen with two rows of rotary encoders is located above each fader bank for quick access to various channel parameters.

First introduced in 2017, the H9000 is Eventide’s flagship product, a multichannel audio processor with eight times the processing power of the H8000. The H9000 features four, quad-core ARM DSP modules on plug-in boards that will run 16 effect algorithms simultaneously. Released in 2020, the H9000’s AVID PT|HDX Expansion Card connects up to 32 channels directly to and from an Avid HDX processor card in your computer via a single DigiLink cable. Amazingly, the Eventide H9000 will support up to 96 channels of I/O over the three expansion card slots on the unit’s rear panel. The H9000 is posed to become the de facto standard in configurable outboard DSP for post-production and high-end mix studio complexes. A single H9000 can be split between two studios (with the same sample rate) and can share its immense power with excellent reverbs, delays, choruses, flangers, pitch-changers, dynamic processors, equalizers and more.

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Tech // new products

iZotope RX8 (Mac/PC) The latest version of RX has dropped, and, as usual, iZotope’s industry-leading, AI-powered audio-repair suite doesn’t disappoint.

Audio-post users running RX8 Advanced (the top-tier version) will love the new Spectral Recovery and Wow and Flutter modules. Users of the Advanced and Standard versions will appreciate new features such as Loudness Control (which makes adjusting masters for streaming and many other destinations easy), Guitar De-Noise; and improved versions of Music Rebalance, De-Hum and the Batch Processor. If you work with lots of files open simultaneously, you’ll love that iZotope doubled the number of open tabs you can have from 16 to 32.

Lectrosonics DCR822 Dual Channel Portable Digital Receiver The Lectrosonics DCR822 is a high-performance, portable two-channel receiver compatible with Lectrosonics mono and stereo digital transmitters. It is also backwardcompatible with Lectrosonics’ Digital Hybrid Wireless transmitters and can tune across six Lectrosonics blocks.

SmartTune and two-way IR sync simplifies the identification of clean channels and transmitter setup. A new RF front end design provides low-noise amplification, high sensitivity and extremely low intermodulation susceptibility. Vector Diversity smoothly and continuously combines RF signals from two receiver front ends per channel for maximum signal integrity. The DCR822 can record receiver audio directly onto a microSD card in WAV (BWF) file format at 24 bit/48 kHz.

Millennia Media HV-316 Remote Mic Preamp Millennia Media’s HV-316 has up to 16 channels of the company’s TECnology Hall of Fame HV-3 transformerless microphone preamps that are remote-controllable using Millennia’s third-generation AELogic software. The HV-316 provides simultaneous analog and Dante 32-bit/192kHz Ethernet outputs and other digital audio output options are planned, including USB and MADI. and an HV-3R and HV-316 will operate together on a single Ethernet network for up to 256 redundant audio channels with remote control of Gain, Polarity, Pad, Mute, channel Linking, highpass filter, and selectable ribbon or phantom-powered inputs on every channel. The 1U HV-316 uses 16 channels of the new generation AKM 192-kHz analog-to-digital conversion that’s multi-paralleled for extreme dynamic range performance (130dB); super-low jitter clock (measured in femto seconds), and up to +34dBu of input headroom.

miniDSP UMIK-2 omni-directional measurement microphone The UMIK-2 is miniDSP's second-generation omnidirectional acoustic measurement microphone. It features a convenient plug-and-play USB connection and a unique calibration file for each microphone to ensure accuracy in the measurement process. The UMIK-2 employs a 0.5-inch microphone capsule for reduced noise and distortion, and analog audio is converted using a 32-bit ADC built into the microphone housing. Sample rate may be set from 44.1 to 192 kHz, ensuring compatibility with a wide range of measurement and recording software, including Room EQ Wizard and Dirac Live (version 3 and later). Driverless operation with macOS, Linux, Android and iOS, and a supplied ASIO driver for Windows, facilitate integration into many other measurement and recording applications.

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PreSonus AVB-D16 Networking Bridge

Radial Engineering HotShot 48V

The PreSonus AVB-D16 is the first plug-and-play endpoint that bridges communication between AVB and Dante™ networks. The AVB-D16 can send and receive up to 16 channels of audio between an AVB network and Dante network with one device, enabling connection of a PreSonus StudioLive Series III AVB (or any AVB-compliant) device to Dante-equipped products. Built-in Asynchronous Sample Rate Conversion ensures that the AVB-D16 provides precision clock isolation between networks for clear audio without dropouts or artifacts. When viewing a Dante network setup via Audinate’s Dante Control software or managing a StudioLive Series III AVB ecosystem via UC Surface or the StudioLive Series III console touchscreen, the AVB-D16 shows up as a simple 16x16 network device. This enables a user to easily patch up to 16 audio sources on any AVB device to any available input on a Dante network, and vice-versa.

The Radial Engineering HotShot 48V is a condenser microphone output switcher designed to silently switch a single microphone between two discrete outputs. The HotShot 48V is packaged in a stomp-box format with a chassis constructed from 14-gauge steel, and features one locking, balanced XLR microphone input and two balanced XLR outputs. The microphone input to the HotShot 48V can supply 48 VDC phantom power, making it unnecessary to derive phantom power from the switching destinations and avoiding the audible pops and clicks that would otherwise result from doing so.

An isolation transformer on the XLR input, in conjunction with a timedelay microcontroller, ensure noiseless switching between the A and B outputs, and a heavy-duty footswitch swaps the input signal between outputs A and B. The HotShot 48V may also be used with dynamic microphones.

Retro Instruments 500PRE Tube Mic Preamp Retro Instruments’ 500PRE is a single-channel tube microphone preamp/line amp module that fits into a single slot of any 500 rack, incoporating doublebalanced Class-A circuit topology like the company’s flagship Sta-Level limiter. The 500PRE works as microphone preamp or as a line level amplifier; its two switchable gain ranges with an input operating range of -72dB to +12dBu. Two subminiature relays are used to switch in/out an additional third tube gain stage while a solid-state buffer amplifier output stage drives the customized Cinemag CMOQ2S output transformer to full line level. A CMMI-10BPC mic input transformer is used and the entire module only draws 160mA of slot current—a high current 500 rack is required. The Retro Instruments 500PRE stands out for its rich, tube sound and the unlimited ways it can be used to amplify sound from clean to colorful to overdriven textures.

Shure DuraPlex Subminiature Headset Mic Shure DuraPlex is a new series of subminiature (5 mm) omnidirectional lavalier and headset microphones that feature IP57 waterproof and dustproof ratings. DuraPlex consists of the DL4 Omnidirectional Waterproof Lavalier Microphone and the DH5 Omnidirectional Waterproof Headset Microphone. Both mics were designed to provide consistent and neutral sound quality with low self-noise for vocal clarity in a variety of environments, and complement Shure’s mid- and high-tier wireless systems. DuraPlex microphones utilize the same ultra-thin (1.6 mm) cable found in Shure’s TwinPlex line of microphones; it is immune to kinks and memory effect due to an innovative spiral construction with redundant shielding. DuraPlex DH5 Headsets are available in Tan, Cocoa, or Black with a brushed steel frame for stable placement, while DuraPlex DL4 lavalier mics are available in Black, Tan, Cocoa, or White. The mics are fully paintable with typical theater paints, pens, and polishes. Accessories supplied with the microphones include carry cases, foam and snapfit windscreens, a presence cap and a single tie clip; the DL4 also includes a sticky mount. The DH5 and DL4 are available terminated with either LEMO or MTQG (TA) connectors.

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Tech // new products

Solid State Logic SSL 2 and SSL 2+ USB Audio Interfaces Year 2020 saw Solid State Logic introduce its very first desktop USB-powered audio interfaces.

There are two versions: the 2-in/2-out SSL 2 and the 2-in/4-out SSL 2+. Both models operate up to 24-bit/192kHz using AD/DA AKM converter chips and are class-compliant on Mac computers with no driver required. PC users would download the included ASIO/WDM driver. They use an SSL microphone, line, and instrument preamp capable of up to 62dB of gain with a microphone input impedance of 1.2k-ohm. Also Identical on both models are three separate push-button switches for Channels 1 and 2 to select: +48-volt phantom, line level, or a 1-megaohm high impedance input for direct connection of a guitar or bass. There is a lighted “4K” button that adds a combination of high-frequency boost and subtle harmonic distortion. This is the sonic profile of the SSL 4000 Series consoles when their inputs are driven hard.

Tonelux JC37 Condenser Microphone

Steinberg SpectraLayers Pro 7 (Mac/PC) All software updates are not created equal. For SpectraLayers Pro—a spectral-based audio-editing-and repair application—the jump from version 6 to 7 was a significant one, transforming the program from a niche product to a mainstream one. The biggest reason is the addition of extremely powerful AI-assisted processing. One example is the Unmix Stems feature, which splits a stereo file into separate Layers for vocal, piano, bass and drums.

The Unmix Components “deconstructs” your audio into Tonal, Transient and Noise elements. Both processes are impressively fast and accurate. Then you can easily edit, export, solo, mute and rebalance levels for the various splitout components. Steinberg also added several new AI-assisted audio repair processes including Click repair, Hum reduction, Clip repair, De-Esser and Voice Denoiser.

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The Tonelux JC37 is the product of a ‘labor of love’ by engineer/producer, Joe Chiccarelli and Tonelux. Chiccarelli’s goal was to create a present-day studio condenser microphone having the “utility and singular sonic characteristics” of the revered Sony C-37A tube microphones manufactured in the mid 1950s.

The JC37 retains all the basic elements of the original microphones, with a 6AU6 pentode tube wired as a triode, a separate power supply unit connected by a cable permanently attached to the microphone body. Tonelux modernized the power supply by making it possible to power two JC37s at a time. The JC37 uses a 37mm diameter single diaphragm capsule, and the whole kit comes in a carrying case that holds two microphones along with the power supply.

UAD Luna 1.1 (Mac) Some might ask, “Do we need another DAW?” If it’s UAD Luna, the answer is a resounding “yes!” UAD has done a masterful job creating an analog-like environment inside Luna that seamlessly integrates UAD plug-ins and hardware and even offers analog-modeled Neve Summing (optional). The GUI is well-thought-out and will feel comfortable to those sliding over from other DAWs, particularly Pro Tools. Luna even offers on-the-fly conversion of audio files, allowing you to import them seamlessly. Luna comes with an excellent-sounding, all-purpose MIDI virtual instrument called Shape. If you pay extra, you can get the super-impressive MiniMoog and Ravel (piano) instruments. You need a UAD interface to run Luna, but the application itself is free.

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Warm Audio Bus-Comp Warm Audio has made its reputation by offering hardware products that provide pro audio sound quality at lower-than-expected prices.

In early 2020, the company released the all-analog Bus-Comp, a stereo VCA compressor with a design reminiscent of the classic SSL Bus Compressor, yet priced at only $699. It’s equipped with a single set of controls, including Threshold, Ratio, Attack, Release, a High-Pass Filter and Makeup Gain. Although it doesn’t offer dual mono operation, you can use it with individual mono sources on input or in a mix. Sonically, it can hold its own with more expensive bus compressors. Bus-Comp also offers sonic variety. Pushing the Engage Transformers switch lets you toggle its CineMag transformers in and out of the circuit, and significantly changing the tone. If you’ve been looking for an affordable way to integrate an analog compressor into your studio, you’ll want to give a serious look to Bus-Comp.

Yamaha Rivage PM3 and PM5 Consoles Yamaha Rivage PM5 and PM3 Digital Mixing Systems include two new control surfaces and two new DSP processing engines, all of which are compatible with the existing range of products in the Yamaha Rivage PM series. The CS-R5 control surface for the PM5 system features three large touchscreens and 38 faders arranged in three sections of 12, plus two masters, while the CS-R3 control surface for the PM3 provides the same fader complement and employs a single, centrally

Waves OVox Vocal Resynthesis Plug-in (Mac/PC) OVox is a potent and comprehensive vocal synthesis processor that’s also great on drums, basses, guitars, synths and more. OVox features dual processing sections, an 8-voice synth engine and powerful pitch shifting—along with a suite of multi-effects including Reverb, Compression, Distortion, EQ, Chorus, Limiter, Delay and Autopan. You can apply scales, chords or harmonies to your source audio as well as an array of modulators. Waves also built in optional sidechain audio or MIDI control over various effects parameters. OVox offers stunning vocoder effects, pop-style synthesized voices and gives you the ability to take your source audio into uncharted territory.

located touch-screen. The CS-R5 and CS-R3 are complemented by two new rackmount DSP engines: the DSP-RX, which provides 120 inputs, 48 mix buses and 24 matrices, and the DSP-RX-EX; which provides 288 inputs, 72 mix buses and 36 matrices. Combined with the two new control surfaces, the DSP-RX and DSP-RX-EX enable a user to create a scalable system suited to their application, and allow DSP mirroring for fail-safe redundancy. The PM3 and PM5 systems are compatible with Yamaha TWINLANe networking, as well as with Dante audio networking.

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PLUS! This Just In!

As were preparing to finalize the pages for this issue, in the middle of November, Steinberg and Avid came out with big announcements on consecutive days. So…

Tech // new products

Avid Pro Tools | Carbon The newest software/hardware product from Avid is Pro Tools | Carbon, a 1U interface that combines your computer’s Native processing with eight onboard DSP chips—equivalent to about onehalf the power of an HDX PCIe processor card. Carbon is designed to run on Macs with Catalina 10.15.6 OS or later and connects to your computer over high-speed Ethernet.

The new Hybrid Engine design allows your computer’s CPU to handle virtual instruments and run Native-only plug-ins with the ability to monitor and record through AAX DSP plug-ins with near-zero latency (below 1-ms) on individually designated channels in DSP Mode.

At any time during a session, Carbon allows for changing channel(s) back and forth between DSP Mode for super-low-latency monitoring/ processing and recording over to conventional Native mixing channels.

This is a standalone interface with up to 25 x 34 simultaneous I/O channels,

Steinberg Cubase 11 On the 11th day of the 11th month, Steinberg released Cubase 11, and when Steinberg puts out a major Cubase update, it’s always important in the music production world.

As you would expect, all the new features are in the flagship version, Cubase 11 Pro. A smaller subset made it into Cubase 11 Artist, and a smaller one yet into the entry-level Cubase 11 Elements.

Perhaps the most impressive of these is what Steinberg refers to as Advanced Audio Export (Pro). It’s a complete overhaul of the Export Audio for Mixdown window that dramatically simplifies and streamlines the process of printing stems. You can now create stems from Group Channels (buses), FX Channels, Instrument Tracks and Individual tracks.

You can even set it so that any track you select in the Project window is automatically selected for export. You can create custom queues or bounce

ASI Audio x Sensaphonics 3DME In Ear Monitors The ASI Audio 3DME is a universal-fit IEM system that combines patented Active Ambient audio technology from Sensaphonics with a smartphone app to customize and enhance on-stage or streaming performances. The system includes 3DME Active Ambient universalfit, dual-driver earphones with embedded binaural microphones that capture ambient sound with 3D directionality. Three sizes of ear tips are included for isolating the listener’s ears from high SPLs while allowing ambient sound to be fed into the earpieces via the embedded mics. The microphones feature a full-range frequency response (20 Hz to 20 kHz) and wide dynamic range for natural ambient reproduction with accurate directionality. The mics are controlled using the (free)

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including eight XLR microphone preamps and/or variable impedance instrument inputs, four headphone outputs for four separate stereo mixes, and 16-channels of combinations of ADAT optical and analog inputs/outputs over rear panel DB25 connectors. Also on the rear panel are Word Clock in/out BNCs, separate TRS stereo monitor out jacks, and a programmable footswitch for the front panel’s talkback mic. All I/O setups, monitoring configuration, and headphone mixes will be handled in the new I/O pages starting with version Pro Tools 2020.11.

Avid Pro Tools | Carbon sells for $3,999 MSRP and includes a one-year subscription. A large suite of both Native and AAX plug-ins from Arturia, McDSP, Plugin Alliance, UVI, Native Instruments, and Embody are included.

everything out simultaneously. Sampler Track 2 (Pro, Artist, Elements) updates the Sampler Track with many new capabilities, including Slicing Mode, which automatically chops up your loops by their transients so you can edit and rearrange them. Vintage Mode converts your 24-bit samples to sound like you created them in an old 12-bit machine.

The Snap Live Input setting constrains your live MIDI playing to a key and scale that you select. You can also apply the Scale Assistant’s powers to existing MIDI parts, and it will quantize the pitches to the key and scale of your choosing.

Several brand-new plug-ins were added. One is Squasher (Pro, Artist, Elements), a multiband compressor that offers downward and upward compression. Although designed with EDM in mind, it’s quite powerful and could be handy in any musical style.

ASI Audio App running on the Android platform (v5.0 and up). The app allows a user to create custom settings for each ear with 7-band EQ, limiter and room ambience levels. The rechargeable 3DME Bodypack Mixer/Amplifier integrates with any wireless personal monitor system, combining the monitor mix feed with the ambient mics to add 3D stage sound to the monitor mix. When used without a monitor mix feed, 3DME functions as a high-fidelity earplug system with a customized sound signature and active level control.

Custom-fit, soft-silicone ear tips are also available from Sensaphonics.

Tech // reviews Benchmark Media Systems HPA4 Headphone/Line Amplifier With Built-in THX-888

By Barry Rudolph

B

enchmark Media Systems’ HPA4 Headphone Amp incorporates the company’s LA4 Line Amplifier into a single, 2U, half-width cabinet. With identical performance and feature sets, the HPA4 enables complete and separate control of both the LA4 Line Amp to drive your main stereo monitor speaker system and the built-in THX-888 amplifier to drive any set of headphones, including difficult-to-drive planar magnetic headphones. THX AAA is the same technology used for the company’s AHB2 power amplifier.

The HPA4 has four stereo inputs: two pairs of balanced XLRs for up to +24dBu (19.5 Vrms) signals and two pairs of gold-plated, unbalanced RCA jacks that accept up to +12.2 dBu (3.2 Vrms). There are L/R XLR outputs and a set of RCA unbalanced outputs. There is also a summed (L+R) mono output for connection to a separate subwoofer.

The HPA4 is available in a 2U rackmount version and in either silver or black finishes. The clean front panel has a single large volume control that uses an optical encoder to set volume in 256 half-dB steps. Sixty-four precision relays with gold contacts use a stack of precision metal film resistors for a range from +15dB to -122 dB, or mute.

The front panel has an intuitive 3.5-inch color TFT touchscreen

to facilitate source input selection and rename and lock/unlock certain settings. There are separate L/R balance and Mute buttons for the line and headphone amp outputs, -20dB Dim, power up/ down programming, setting up a pair of 12-volt, bi-directional rear panel ports for sequential power up/down of connected gear.

The volume level for both the line-level and headphone outputs are displayed on separate calibrated vertical bar graphs. Pushing in on the Volume control links/unlinks the headphone and line levels to track together, or not. You may also just touch the bars to do the same thing, although the bars are close together and I sometimes inadvertently select the wrong one, or both at the same time.

The front panel has both a conventional TRS jack for headphones plus an XLR4 connector with dedicated pins for the left and right channels. My review unit came with an optional IR remote control that allows control of it, plus any Benchmark Media DAC, from the listening position.

ULTIMATE ANALOG SIGNAL PATH Designed to be the ultimate analog controller, the HPA4 uses precision differential amplifiers on all inputs to reject commonmode noise and distortion from any source devices without

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with the same music played using the typical methods used in the studios I visited.

I liked that the unbalanced inputs are automatically boosted by 15.8 dB so when switching between balanced XLR sources and the unbalanced RCA inputs, the volume levels were similar.

Listening on either headphones or monitors, in general there was a remarkable and very “hearable” improvement in quality compared to the usual way I monitor analog sources; it is not subtle.

There is an immediate change in overall clarity, transparency, The rear panel of the HPA4 includes two pairs of balanced XLRs and two pairs of gold-plated, unbalanced RCA jacks, L/R reduced muddiness, dynamic range XLR outputs, a set of RCA unbalanced outputs, and a summed mono output for connection to a separate subwoofer. and noticeably better reproduction of percussive bass instruments—upright bass, of the Audio Precision AP2722 test system. differential output amp stages (most DACs).

High-impedance headphones require higher kicks and synth basses. The HPA4 has lowThe unit is flat from 0.1 Hz to 500 kHz, with accurate phase response in the entire audio band. voltages, and the HPA4 will deliver 11.9 Vrms frequency extension down to 0.1 Hz with the The signal-to-noise ratio is greater than 135 dB, into 300 ohms—enough for low-sensitivity phones result that the bass sounds more damped.

Recordings with good dynamic range are and the THX-888 headphone output amplifier’s such as the Audeze $4,000 LCD-4 pair that requires total harmonic distortion is less than 125 dB, or more than 500 mW with an impedance of 200 reproduced without effort, and even driving my 0.00006% under full load, and does not increase ohms or the customized $10,000 Abyss AB-1266 low-gain Kali monitors, the HPA4 made them with output power—from 6 milliwatts to 6 Phi TC headphones—both use planar magnetic more powerful-sounding and dynamic. I tried every set of headphones in my collection, including watts into a 16-ohm load. Most performance speaker drivers.

I tested the HPA4 as both a headphone a borrowed pair of Focal Clear Professional with specifications are near the measurement limits amplifier and as 55-ohm impedance. A change in quality is less an analog monitor noticeable with cheaper phones but the Focal Clear controller to drive Pros sounded noticeably better. my modest Kali IN8 three-way powered SO WORTH IT! monitors, and a pair of Listening on either my monitors or headphones to PMC twotwo.8s. For music I know very well revealed detail, hidden sonic consistency, I used my effects and some past questionable mixing decisions!

The HPA-4 is the biggest sonic microscope I own set of short, Swissmade VOVOX XLR have ever used. For better or worse, any amount cables for connection of dynamic alteration (compressing/limiting) or from source outputs EQ/filtering is immediately heard. I would love and to the input to the to own the HPA-4 for the final playback test for every mix I do from now on! ■ monitors.

LISTENING TESTS I listened to mostly my original un-mastered music mixes or songs that were in process, or were done in my studio. I compared the difference in sound quality, detail and overall tonality shift

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PRODUCT SUMMARY COMPANY: Benchmark Media Systems PRODUCT: HPA4 Headphone/Line Amplifier WEB: benchmarkmedia.com/products/hpa4 PRICE: $2,999 MSRP PROS: The ultimate headphone and line amp in one CONS: Front panel touchscreen could use an update

Tech // reviews

The K371-BT offer wired and Bluetooth connectivity.

AKG K371-BT wHeadphones Over-ear Models With Wired and Bluetooth Connectivity

By Mike Levine

Y

ou could say that the K371-BT headphones have a split personality. On one hand, they’re wired studio headphones very much like the AKG K371s. On the other, they’re Bluetooth (5.0) headphones designed for the “mobile lifestyle.”

Alas, due to Covid-19, the mobile lifestyle is pretty limited at the moment. But even if your farthest trips these days are from your studio to the living room, you’ll likely be intrigued by the combination of high-quality sound, dual connectivity and affordable price of the K371-BTs. IN THE BAG These headphones feature an over-the-ear, closed-back design, and AKG developed them for maximum sound isolation and superior bass response. The ear cups are made of memory foam–like material that contours to your ears.

Whether you’re using them for long sessions or long flights, they’re quite comfortable.

In addition to adjusting up and down to fit your head, both ear cups swivel by 90 degrees, making the K371-BTs also suitable for DJ use. Not only that, they’re collapsible and can be put—along with their cables—in the snazzy, included cloth carry case.

AKG equipped the headphones with hefty 50mm drivers, making possible an extended frequency range of 5 Hz to 40 kHz. But it’s not just on paper that the K371-BTs are impressive. In use, they provide the professional-level sound quality one expects from AKG studio headphones.

Three different connector cables come with the package: 9.8-foot and 3.9-foot straight ones and a 9.8-foot coiled one. Each has a mini-XLR jack for connecting to the headphones and a 1/8-inch jack on the other end. An 1/8-inch to ¼-inch TRS adapter is also included.

SPLIT PERSONALITY Unplug the cable from the headphones, and the K-371-BTs transform into a high-quality Bluetooth headset. You do have to charge them

first with the included USB-A-to-micro-USB cable. They take about two hours to fully charge, which, according to AKG, can yield up to 40 hours of Bluetooth playback time. You can tell the battery and pairing status from the color and behavior of a tiny LED on the side of the left ear cup.

When in Bluetooth mode, the outside surface of that ear cup also functions as a gesture controller.

You can swipe up and down to change the volume and left or right to change tracks. A double-tap triggers play or pause.

AKG even built a tiny microphone into the left ear cup for mobile phone or VOIP calls. While it’s a handy convenience, it’s impossible get reasonable sound quality from a microphone that’s literally behind the sound source (your mouth). That said, it’s fine for phone and VOIP calls, which is all it’s designed for. Perhaps a detachable, headset-style mic that’s positioned in front of your mouth would have been a better option.

Learning how to access the K371-BT’s features was a bit of a pain, due to the sparse documentation, which only consists of a pamphlet-like “Quick Start Guide.” It’s one of those multi-language manuals that folds up like a map, with cryptic descriptions and pictograms. If AKG is going to bill the K371-BTs as professional headphones, they should produce a

PRODUCT SUMMARY COMPANY: AKG PRODUCT: K371-BT WEBSITE: aka.com PRICE: $179 PROS: Balanced sound with tight bass; 55mm drivers make extended frequency range possible; Bluetooth mode; ear cups swivel 90-degrees; extremely comfortable; excellent isolation; built-in mic and gesture controller available in Bluetooth mode.

CONS: Cryptic documentation; built-in mic sound quality.

more informative manual. I would happily settle for a downloadable PDF with more in-depth descriptions.

LISTENING UP I used the K371-BT in wired mode for both tracking and mixing and was pleased with the sound quality.

The highs were crisp, the mids were clean and the bass was tight and not hyped. The over-the-ear, closed-back design gives them impressive sound isolation, which means less outside sound coming in and less bleed leaking out.

In theory, there should be a drop-off in sound quality when switching from a wired connection to Bluetooth audio. But listening to both, I didn’t notice much difference, although it’s impossible to compare them immediately back to back because it takes a moment to switch into Bluetooth mode.

You have to unplug the cable and then turn the power on and wait for it to connect. But no matter, the headphones sound excellent in both modes.

In its product videos for the K371-BT, AKG shows people in recording studios with the headphones connected wirelessly. Sure, you could use them in Bluetooth mode for mixing, but why would you when you can plug them in? And you certainly can’t track through Bluetooth because of its inherent latency.

HAVING IT BOTH WAYS Without question, the K371-BTs are quality studio headphones. Having Bluetooth capability makes them quite versatile. When Covid is more under control, and everyone gets back to traveling more, these headphones will provide even more value.

AKG also makes the less-expensive K361-BT, which is based on the K361 headphones and has a similar dual-mode capability. ■

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Tech // reviews Earthworks SR314 Handheld Vocal Microphone Smooth Off-Axis, Extended LF Response for Stage and Studio

By Steve La Cerra

T

he Earthworks brand has long been associated with the production of high-quality condenser microphones designed for use not only in the studio and on stage, but for measurement purposes, as well. The company’s microphones are known for uncolored reproduction, extended frequency range and fast impulse response.

Earthworks’ SR Series of microphones is intended for sound reinforcement applications, though the subject of this review—the SR314 handheld vocal condenser mic—is equally suited for use on stage or in the studio.

The SR314 is a cardioid condenser microphone with a pre-polarized

capsule coupled to a transformerless preamp employing Class A electronics. The microphone was designed to produce a uniform frequency response out to 90 degrees off-axis, and a consistent lowfrequency response even when used at varying distances.

The frequency response chart of the SR314 shows a fairly flat curve (about ±2 dB) from 20 Hz to 30,000 Hz at a distance of 5 inches, with minor dips at 4 and 8 kHz, and minor bumps at 10 and 16 kHz. At a 12-inch distance, the low-frequency response gently rolls off below 100 Hz to approximately -5 dB at 20 Hz. Signalto-noise ratio of the SR314 is said to be 79 dB (A-weighted), and the mic can handle a maximum SPL of 145dB—so it should easily accommodate the loudest of screamers.

Phantom power requirements for the SR314 are 24 to 48 VDC with a current consumption of 10 mA, which is the maximum current draw permitted under IEC 1938. This shouldn’t be an issue with any professional mixing console, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make sure that the preamps in your desk can accommodate the current requirement. The SR314 ships with a nylon pouch and a microphone stand clip, and is warranted for a period of 10 years from the date of purchase—an impressive commitment from the folks at Earthworks.

A UNIQUE LOOK AND FEEL One glance at the Earthworks SR314 makes clear that this is not another “me too” vocal mic for onstage use. The SR314 features a distinct, tapered housing with a brushed-silver finish that somehow makes it look retro and contemporary at the same time (the microphone is also available in a black finish with stainless screens, or black finish with black screens). Weighing in at a hefty 1.5 pounds, the solid feel of the SR314 inspires confidence—it’s built like a tank—so you’ll need to make sure that your mic stand is securely locked into place to prevent slipping.

At the top of the SR314’s basket is an external stainless steel screen, underneath which is a two-layer pop filter, an internal stainless-steel windscreen, and finally another screen beneath the (non-removable) capsule housing. The external stainless screen and two-layer pop filter can easily

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be removed for cleaning without disassembly of the basket, and the manual for the SR314 states that with normal use it should not be necessary to clean the internal stainless windscreen. As is the case with most handheld vocal microphones, there are no switches or controls on the body of the SR314.

The SR314’s frequency response is flat, but don’t let that lead you to think that the microphone lacks personality. It has a slight coloration in the lower-mids that’s flattering to vocalists who need a bit of help in that region, and the microphone is capable of producing plenty of mojo in the low end, particularly when used up-close (within a few inches). I found this characteristic an attribute on one male vocal, but it made a different male singer’s voice sound too thick. A highpass filter set around 150 Hz with a steep slope (18 dB/octave) helped reduce this thickness; that filter frequency was much higher than I’d normally use on this particular singer.

0 degrees, so most singers won’t have an issue remaining in the sweet spot. At around 60 degrees off-axis, the output level starts to drop, but the timbre is still consistent. When you move the mic 90 degrees off-axis, the timbre changes, and you can hear the high-frequency response start to drop off. This shouldn’t be a problem because most vocalists won’t be singing into the mic at a 90-degree angle.

The SR314 did a good job of rejecting unwanted sound in most of the applications where I used it. For example, when used for a vocalist who was also playing an acoustic guitar, leakage of the guitar into the vocal microphone was minimal, as was any evidence of bleed or feedback from the wedge monitor. This strength was apparent even when the singer worked the mic from a distance, which is often not the case with other microphones.

At one particular show, the SR314’s extended low-frequency response presented some

from 400 Hz to 4 kHz. The pattern tightens up a bit around 6 kHz, and then becomes more omnidirectional at frequencies above roughly 8 kHz. There is no polar response data supplied for frequencies below 400 Hz, but I suspect that the pattern is wider at lower frequencies, making it more susceptible to feedback in the low end (that’s probably also the reason why the off-axis response is so uncolored).

The combination of the reflective stage, along with the fact that the main P.A. subwoofers were ground-stacked front-and-center of the SL100, resulted in significant low-frequency feedback between the house P.A. and the SR314. A highpass filter on the SR314 set to a frequency of 160 Hz helped but did not cure the problem, and we had to swap it out for a different microphone.

Handling noise was minimal when using the SR314, and what little handling noise made it to the capsule was easily removed using a highpass filter set to around 70 Hz (which I’d typically

"When used for a vocalist who was also playing an acoustic guitar, leakage of the guitar into the vocal microphone was minimal, as was any evidence of bleed or feedback from the wedge monitor. This strength was apparent even when the singer worked the mic from a distance, which is often not the case with other microphones."

I found that the SR314 provided the most natural-sounding response when a vocalist worked the microphone from around 8 to 10 inches away from the microphone grille. When a singer moves within about 4 inches, proximity effect starts to gently emphasize the low end; any closer than that and proximity effect is clearly noticeable. I also noticed that within 3 or 4 inches, popping Bs and Ps can become an issue. This is a by-product of the mic’s extended low-frequency response and can be held in check by using a highpass filter or a foam windscreen (in some cases, I opted for the windscreen). If your singer has good technique, popping won’t be an issue, but for some vocalists it could be a problem.

OFF-AXIS RESPONSE Earthworks’ engineers have definitely met their objective regarding smooth off-axis response.

At angles out to 45 degrees off-axis, the SR314 sounds virtually identical to the way it does at

difficulty. I was using the SR314 for a male vocal and the band members were all using IEMs. The stage was a Stageline SL100 with windowalls on three sides, which made for a very reflective environment. As a result, the SR314 picked up quite a bit of spill from the instruments on stage, as well as from the rear wall and ceiling.

The SR314’s cardioid pattern is down 5 to 10 dB at 90 degrees off-axis at frequencies ranging

PRODUCT SUMMARY COMPANY: Earthworks PRODUCT: SR314 Handheld Vocal Microphone WEBSITE: www.earthworksaudio.com PRICE: $699.95 PROS: Smooth response on- and off-axis; unique appearance; robust construction CONS: Sensitive to plosives; heavy weight requires a sturdy stand; cardioid pattern may not be tight enough for some applications.

use anyway to minimize low-frequency spill).

One thing I noticed about the SR314 is that it’s capable of producing tons of detail. If you choose to emphasize that with a bit of EQ, the SR314 will not disappoint. On one particular singer, a gentle boost of a few dB at 3.2 kHz and a slight cut at around 200 Hz brought the voice frontand-center of the mix, making it sound intimate without being harsh or sibilant.

Earthworks has achieved its goal of creating a studio-quality condenser microphone that can be used on stage. The SR314 has a wide sweet spot, captures plenty of detail, and effectively controls proximity effect.

It presents vocals with a natural, balanced response and maintains articulation without ever sounding strident. The SR314 is expensive when compared to other handheld vocal microphones (particularly dynamic mics), but it produces a level of quality aligned with its price point, and will be equally useful in studio applications. ■

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Tech // back page blog Taking Advantage of AI; One Semester Almost Done!

Mike Levine: Mix Technology Editor, Studio

Steve La Cerra: Mix Technology Editor, Live

AI and Presets: A perennial controversy in the music production world is whether or not there’s something inherently wrong with using presets. Some people take the “presets are for wimps” side of the argument, while others have no problem whatsoever with them.

To me, it’s a little more nuanced. Particularly when it comes to signal processors, the problem with presets is that they’re generic and can’t take into account the specifics of the track you’re processing, nor the context of the mix that track is part of.

Of late, a new wrinkle (actually, a new technology) has appeared that changes the calculus about whether or not to do your own parameter setting. I’m talking about processor plug-ins developed with AI capabilities— machine-learning, to be specific—giving them the ability to analyze audio and come up with custom settings.

You’ll find AI embedded in everything from compressors to EQs, and even reverbs. Sonible smart:reverb and iZotope Neoverb are two recent examples of the latter. In the case of Neoverb and other iZotope products like the mastering software Ozone or the mixing plug-in Neutron, the software also asks you some basic questions that provide it with context about your project.

I have found the processors that include AI to be pretty handy. But even if you have several AI-based processors at your disposal, it’s still important to at least be capable of coming up with settings manually.

In case you were wondering, machine-learning is part of a type of artificial intelligence called Narrow AI, which focuses on a relatively limited task. It’s not part of the category called General AI, which is the kind that’s designed to “think.” So no need to worry that your smart compressor plug-in will eventually take over the world.

Holding My Breath: This morning, I was thinking about how most of my students at Mercy College are doing a pretty darn good job in spite of the pandemic. They’re split into small groups, each of which attends class in-person every other week. This keeps the number of people in a studio at or under CDC guidelines.

Keeping track of who is supposed to attend in-person on a given week, whether or not they’re late with an assignment, and simultaneously balancing that with teaching in-class while preparing online content for the “off” weeks has been a full-time task. While I flail away, these youngsters have been managing to keep their noses out of trouble—i.e., staying away from parties and large gatherings where they might risk exposure to the virus.

As the semester progresses, we’re doing less and less work on paper, and more and more hands-on in the studio or workshops. Normally, my Audio Systems Design and Installation class works on soldering and/or kit building later in the semester, but I re-sequenced the topics to front-load that portion of the curriculum, thinking we might not make it through the entire semester on-campus. I’m glad I did because at this point, they’ve already completed building microphone kits, so if we do go off-script they won’t lose that experience.

Given the recent increase of Covid cases in the New York area, our administration is looking at a multitude of options for finishing the semester.

We are now past the halfway point to the finish line. Many students are well into their term recording projects, and it would be a shame if they’re unable to see those through to completion.

The idea of teaching my kids how to reamp a guitar track or mike a drum set online is not exactly appetizing, and it’d be a drag for them because they’ve been so excited about being in the studio. Hopefully we can make it just a few more weeks. I’ll continue to hold my breath until the end of the semester.

Product of the Month: Steven Slate Audio VSX Steven Slate Audio designed VSX to re-create the acoustics of two studio control rooms (NRG and Archon), Howie Weinberg’s mastering room, a couple of car interiors, a club, an audiophile listening room, a boombox, several different studio headphones and even Apple Earbuds and AirPods.The headphones themselves are the closedback type and feature beryllium drivers. In tandem with the included VSX plugin, these headphones are designed to make you feel like you’re actually in the various modeled spaces. The NRG and Archon models let you switch between near-field, mid-field and far-field models, providing additional listening choices.

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M I X | D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 0 | mi x o n l i n e.co m

Product of the Month: JBL IRX115S Subwoofer The IRX115S, the newest member of the IRX Series of affordably priced portable P.A. products, is a powered subwoofer utilizing a 15-inch woofer with a 3-inch voice coil housed in a ported enclosure. It is capable of producing bass response down to 35 Hz at SPLs of up to 128 dB, with onboard amplification rated for 1,300 watts peak power (600 watts burst/400 watts continuous). Frequency response is spec’d at 45 Hz to 103 Hz, 3 dB down. Input is via two rear-panel combo jacks, and output is via XLR male jacks, enabling systems to be created using either one or multiple IRX115S subs. Cabinet features include recessed, sidemounted handles and an M20 x 2.5P pole cup for pole mounting of IRX Series full-range cabinets.

Dimensions are 18.9 x 18.9 x 23.6 inches, and the IRX115S weighs in at 65 pounds.

9000