A new immersive studio in Colorado, Denver Atmos is now the personal mix room of Grammy-winning engineer Bobby Campbell. The new 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos studio features three of Focal’s top-of-the-line Trio11 Be monitors, eight Solo6 ST6, and two of the Focal Sub12 subwoofers.
The new mix room is already busy, and Campbell has mixed several projects in stereo and Dolby Atmos including Logic, John Legend, Lil Durk, Rod Wave, Wam SpinThaBin, and DD Osama, and has a backlog of legacy albums set for remixing in the Atmos format as well.
Campbell was prompted to build Denver Atmos when he began receiving a lot of calls from record labels asking for Atmos mixes along with his stereo mixes.
During the coronavirus pandemic, he was in the Denver area and found just the right building: ‘I had to react quickly to the Atmos mix requests,’ he recalls, ‘I didn’t want to send out my stems to another mixer, I wanted to be part of that process and have fun with Atmos mixing myself. I really wanted to just have a room devoted to Atmos and be able to come in and turn it up loud and feel the music – as well as make sure the mix is correct.’
Having extensive experience mixing with Focal professional monitors – starting with Twin6, then Trio6 with hip-hop artist Logic – Campbell says: ‘I have Trio11 for the LCR and Solo6s for the surrounds and height speakers, and two of the new Sub12 subwoofers in the studio too. The system translates very well. The Trio11s are amazing. I use the Focus Mode with a footswitch on the Trio11 so it’s almost like I have a pair of Shape 40 in here as well.’
Campbell partners with engineer Gerry ‘The Gov’ Brown in ‘Mixed by Humanz’, and received a Grammy for Best R&B Album in 2021 for mixing John Legend’s ‘Bigger Love’ where they both used their own Focal Shape 40 monitors in separate mix locations for their mix collaborations during the pandemic. Campbell and Brown both still love the Shape 40s and use them on various projects.
‘There are plenty of top models of monitors that I’ve mixed records on that came out great and translated, but I’ve just felt like Focal, for me, has had really nice transparency, the power distribution has been good, and the frequency response is really nice,’ he says. ‘I like the top-end crispiness and that low-mid punch, that is what has always driven me to stick with Focal.’
In addition, he’s able to mix a wide variety of musical styles on the monitors: ‘The versatility of being able to go from mixing a hip-hop album for Logic and pushing the monitors a bit more, and then switching to a jazz-fusion album by Stanley Clarke – those are big differences, but I feel like I’m still getting the same level of clarity and frequency response in all genres.’
