With an expansion of its Gresse Street facility and a Dolby Atmos Home Entertainment certificate, Fitzrovia-based sound design studio String and Tins is set to continue its production of award-winning advertisements. The expansion and accreditation makes the comapny a strong candidate for longform work being driven by OTT platforms such as Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+ and Amazon.

‘We consider ourselves to be audio professionals who are pretty handy at crafting all aspects of a soundtrack’, says co-founder and Creative Director, Will Cohen. ‘It’s important to scale up in the right way in terms of long form. Part of this studio build was to facilitate that – to have the best possible premix space we could, before taking our work to the stage for final mix.’

This meant adding an immersive Dolby Atmos certified premix room, a new voiceover room and two additional studios – with a Dante based network. String and Tins worked closely with HHB Communications to ensure the new rooms would meet the specified technical requirements.

One key component ensuring flexibility in the new studios is inclusion of Audinate’s Dante Audio-over-IP technology. ‘The immediate benefit to String and Tins using Audio-over-IP infrastructure is the greatly simplified cabling runs between machine room, studios and other areas such as the voice-over booth,’ says HHB Communications Sales Manager, Greg Wheeler. ‘Future use cases are far and wide when sharing I/O and routing. For the String and Tins team this means anything from recording foley around the facility, to recording the mini grand piano in the studio’s new reception space’.

While designed with several different types of work in mind it was important to the String and Tins team that the new premix room be Dolby Atmos certified and have the highest quality sound reproduction possible. In its finished state, it is impossible to miss the unique speaker integration designed for the room. The team themselves seem besotted with the number and range of speakers in the new room.

String and Tins worked with Munro Acoustics to design custom monitoring that incorporated special cabinets to extend the flat response as low as possible. Included in this integration were two 15-inch drivers in the ceiling at the back and two 18-inch drivers at the front along with all the overhead and surround cabinets that are custom shaped for the room.

The speaker integration, paired with the Scrub installation of a Dolby Atmos Home Entertainment Rendering and Mastering Unit (HE-RMU), helped String and Tins move quickly through the certification process. Beyond the technical aspects, the team are excited for the creative possibilities the new immersive room affords them. ‘It will be exciting to create something fully in Atmos’, says Joe Wilkinson, sound designer and composer at String and Tins. ‘I believe we’ve only scratched the surface of what is possible.’

‘Dystopian lasers’, was the reply from founding partner Mike Bamford when asked how the team hoped to apply their knowhow and new tools – designing sounds to match the vision of science fiction writers. An achievable goal, considering the creativity and talent within the Gresse Street studio. Now equipped to meet the latest standards and demands of both long- and shor-form media, String and Tins is ready to take on any project… they just hope it will include lasers.

More: https://hhb.co.uk