Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/757053
36 F A L L 2 0 1 6 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y sync-perfect material." He also reinterated Phil Palmer's statements that oftentimes catching the sync of words right before and after a breath is more important than perfect per- formance sync throughout. He also recommends requesting a live recording from production during playback, as this will give him an example of the room he is matching. He may add space that is artificial to infer a different reality for the narrative in the mix, but the guide of the actual space can be useful at the very least for matching the needed sound from production and creating a more realistic transition. Building an Immersive Room: Small, Medium, and Large Presented by Westlake Pro Moderated by Jonathan Deans, CTO, Westlake Pro. Panelists included Jerry Steckling CTO, JSX Audio; Mark Binder, re- recording mixer, IMN Creative; Tom Brewer, re-recording mixer, Sound Cove; Brett Crockett, VP Sound Technology R&D, Dolby Laboratories; Bill Johnston, VP of Engineering, Formosa Group; Nathan Oishi, Director of Engineering, Sony Pictures Studios; Peter Chaikin, Director of Recording Solutions, Harman International. Check out some of the highlights from the discussion below: What do you see as the first steps to consider when designing a room (from an acoustics and monitoring standpoint)? Mark: My advice to everybody—immersive audio is where we're going. This is the new art form and it's turning into the Wild Wild West. I own four Dolby Atmos rooms. There are physical things to do (relating to the height of the ceiling, size, and power requirements), but I think we can't sit and think there's one solution for all. By pure physics/science, nothing is going to sound the same. It's like the old music days—I hope that we all start thinking about where we came from and say, "translation is about how much time you have behind your board or your computer system." There is no easy or fast answer. Jerry: Translation between large and small rooms is an age- old problem. I don't believe the translation back-and-forth with immersive sound has changed very much at all. We do want to consider scaling the power bandwidth of the loudspeakers. You have to consider where is the target? Is it a large theater with 48 surround speakers? Is it eventually going to be a home play? Bill: When you're scaling from an edit room all the way to a dub stage—in your smaller room, you have to go with a con- sumer format. In your larger stage, it's obviously going to be theatrical Atmos. It's when you start to get into a lot of the meat work in the middle of the market where you're doing features, television, home theater mastering … then your design process becomes difficult in that you have to place your speakers in certain ways to handle both the consumer market and the theatrical format. You have to take a step back and realize, "Where am I going to put my speakers?" You might have to make some different decisions on what speakers you're choosing, what kind of power handling you're having, and the placement of those speakers in the room. Peter: If we're talking about immersive audio, we're talking about putting a lot more speakers in a small room. Where are you going to put them all? How are you going to power them? How are you going to mount them? What are they going to block? In the broadcast environment, there's displays every- where. We realize that the speakers needed to be small and they're going to be used at a greater working distance. By the time you take any of the existing small speakers and put them where they need to be, they don't have enough output. Many of the speakers have limiting in them to protect the drivers and, by the time you take a speaker intended for a near-field application and put it 10 feet up—that speaker is well into compression. In other words, limiters are in there. We started with a design for transducers that could fit in very tiny boxes and generate a huge amount of output—not loud but dynamic range. If you use that speaker at a reasonable distance, you're going to get the 105 in the Dolby spec. What solutions have you considered for monitor control? Tom: QSC DSP monitor controller. To go from a simple editorial and pre-dub/mix room in my house and adding those four top channels didn't take much to do. I think the DSP was the key and getting someone in to tune the room really well. It's like anything else—if you spend time treating your room right and balancing the room right, adding the top speakers is almost a no-brainer. I've found a lot of success in a really simple setup—not even using an RMU (Rendering and Mastering Unit) but just a local renderer so it's software only. I can essentially do my whole mix there. Nate: We have Harrison engines that work great. In our small room (home theater immersive), we went with a truss system, which allows us to move things. We left the JBL fronts behind the screen. The manufacturers are helping us immensely at coming up with great tools. In the small room