With a recent multitrack recording of The Polish National Wind Orchestra (Narodowa Orkiestra Dęta w Lubinie) at a musical celebration of Ukraine in Warsaw as its first assignment, 120dB Sound Engineering’s Atmos music recording and broadcast production truck is on the road. The truck is equipped with a Solid State Logic System T S500 console surface configured with 64 faders and powered by a T80 Tempest Engine offering 800 channels of DSP and supported by a 7.1.4 Genelec Dolby Atmos monitoring system.
The company is headquartered in Katowice in southern Poland, and has long worked on eSports broadcast events, including for Turtle Entertainment and ESL TV, which rely heavily on Dante networking. When 120dB launched its first OB van, ST1, in 2018, it was designed around an SSL System T S300 to take advantage of the platform’s native support of the Dante protocol.
‘Then, when we wanted to grow and build a bigger truck, we decided that a big SSL System T would be the best choice for us,’ says120dB Sound Engineering. owner and founder, Michał Mika.
Both the System T S500 in the new Atmos truck and the System T S300 in ST1 were supplied by Krzysztof Kowalewski at Audiotech Commercial, Solid State Logic’s distributor in Poland. The new truck carries SSL SB32.24 Stage Boxes supporting up to 256 mic inputs, plus an SSL SB8.8 Stage Box that transports eight mic/line inputs and eight line outs. A Focusrite RedNet interface delivers 256 channels of Madi to and from the Dante network. Recordings are made to a redundant 256-track Reaper DAW system running on twin Macintosh computers. Cubase and Pro Tools are alternatively available.
Atmos additionally houses a selection of outboard processing tailored for music production and broadcast needs, including an SSL Fusion analogue multiprocessor and devices from Bettermaker, Bricasti, Lexicon and TC Electronic. Maintaining consistency with the ST1 van and a small production and demonstration room at the company’s HQ, the Atmos truck is equipped with a Genelec Smart Active Monitoring system.
The focus on music and the truck’s significant channel capacity enables Atmos to take advantage of a niche in the Polish broadcast and mobile production market. ‘It’s normal for us to work with almost 200 channels,’ Mika explains. ‘National TV in Poland still doesn’t have enough trucks that can handle that number of tracks, so they order trucks from us.’
120dB Sound Engineering has been busy this summer, supplying both Atmos and ST1 to record a variety of events, including multiple outdoor shows on the Męskie Granie 2022 concert tour, featuring major Polish artists. The company also recorded Jimek – composer Radzimir Dębski, one of Poland’s best known music producers – performing his symphonic orchestration, The History of Rap, a project that required 190 tracks. Atmos also participated at the Film Music Festival in Krakow, hosting listening sessions and presentations.
‘When you’re mixing, everything is musically glued together,’ Mika says. ‘If you’ve got good sources, even if you don’t do anything with EQ or dynamics, it will be OK. Just push the faders up and it will be great sounding. After that, you can make something better, but you don’t have to do anything – on an SSL, you can do nothing, and it will be OK.
‘It’s very easy to do what you want to do,’ he adds. ‘It’s not an analogue console, but everything is where it needs to be. You don’t need to find some parameters or knobs. Even if you are new to the System T, everything is on the channel strip, just like an analogue console.’
Atmos is not the only truck that supports immersive mixing in Poland, but it is likely the only one to offer an uncompromised monitoring environment. ‘In TV trucks you always have to fight with the room and with poor monitoring,’ Mika says. ‘In TV trucks you put the Dolby Atmos height speakers where you can, not where you want them. It’s impossible to produce good sounding audio material in those rooms.’
In Atmos, the dimensions and the acoustics have been optimised to create an experience that is much more like a brick-and-mortar mixing facility. ‘Our room is 2.5m by 4.5m, and we have a 2.2m ceiling height, so it’s like a regular audio room in a production studio,’ Mika says. ‘We want to give audio operators a better place to work.’
More: www.solidstatelogic.com
