Studio Equipment, which was commissioned for the project by Anna Valley (UK), treated the room acoustically to give it the characteristics of a proper screening room before setting up an Electro-Voice Plasma surround speaker system. At the centre of this, Nelson used a Midas Venice 160 as his monitor controller plus a processing rack of three Klark Teknik Helix DN9340 equalisers run by V3.7 Elgar software and a DN9344 slave.
"In order to cater for overall system level plus speech control should microphones be required, we chose the Midas Venice 160," explains Nelson. "It has a very clean signal path and is suitable for the demanding requirements of cinema sound, as well as featuring a flexible EQ on the stereo line channels. Modern cinema soundtracks are composed of many different elements and can go from a whisper to a bang in milliseconds!"
As the audio source was AES/EBU from DVS servers, the three Helix master units were fitted with AES/EBU interface modules. Two DN9340s controlled the LCR and LFE channels, with the third acting as a D/A converter for the stereo surround channels and master for Ls and Rs. The analogue outputs were then fed into an encoder to create LCR surround channels and the four outputs of the encoder were fed into the DN9344 to EQ the Ls, CsLs, CsRs and Rs. Real Time Analysis was carried out by a Klark Teknik DN6000 audio analyser.
(Jim Evans)
