Known for its innovative approaches to audio design and instruction, Sonic College recently completed construction of a new facility, using Audinate’s Dante transport protocol for routing audio throughout the building in the town of Kolding, Denmark.
Students graduating from the school will help shape audio production of films, gaming, music and podcasting in years to come. Lecturer Lars Tirsbæk was instrumental in setting up the new facility and deciding what spaces would be most beneficial to students and essential to delivering a good grounding in sound design.
‘[Building the new facility] was an opportunity to start from scratch,’ he says. ‘Our infrastructure needed to not only fit the demands of the spaces, but also provide learning opportunities for our students and give them practical experience working with real-world technologies like Dante.’
Staff used Dante interconnected multiple stereo studios and their companion mastering suites, a Foley stage, immersive recording studio, Dolby Atmos mastering suite and theatrical mix stage – and a 187-channel, AVB-based Meyer Sound Spacemap Go spatial sound system located in the five-storey atrium.
‘We didn’t have the Dante network in our old facility,’ says Tirsbæk. ‘Now you can do a mix then easily route it through to the cinema to listen. You can take a stagebox anywhere in the building and still communicate back to the control room.’
Dante Domain Manager allows Sonic College staff to manage the large Dante network effectively through granular user access control levels able to lock down certain network areas and functionality while allowing students room to experiment within boundaries chosen by teaching staff and network managers. In this type of educational environment, segmenting domains was critical.
‘Students definitely need to know how Audio-over-IP works. That’s the way all audio infrastructure will be implemented in the coming years,’ Tirsbæk says. ‘When our students learn to use Dante they recognize the inherent flexibility of being able to just move A/V hardware around without affecting the network.
‘This was a complex project,’ he continues. ‘With so many adjacent studios and performance spaces we had to consider how to isolate parts of the network to prevent unexpected issues from occurring during live performances. Dante Domain Manager’s user authentication and role definition in combination with its ability to create separate Dante Domains was essential to our success in managing such an intricate system. In fact, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have been successful had it not been for Dante Domain Manager.’
