The music  recording studio at AR Rahman’s YM Movies film production operation in Chennai has recently been equipped with a Studer Vista X digital mixing console.

Grammy and Academy Award winner, AR Rahman is India’s most influential music composer, known for his scores and soundtracks in countless feature films, including Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours and Jodhaa Akbar. Rahman’s compositions are popular for their eclectic blend of musical styles and wide range of instrumentation. To date, Rahman has sold more than 250m albums.

Rahman will use the Vista X to mix audio for the YM Movies projects, as well as other other work, including his own solo albums and numerous humanitarian projects.

‘I first saw the Vista 5 at the Harman store in New York City and I loved the controls,’ the composer recalls. ‘I soon learned about the Vista X and had to have it. It has a very user-friendly vibe and processing redundancy. The massive number of channels and outputs will speed up laying stems, for big scores in particular.’

In addition, Rahman’s previous experience with other Harman audio equipment provided reassurance that the Vista X would not disappoint: ‘When I started my Panchathan Record Inn studios, the only speakers I had were JBL Control 5 and 4412,’ he says. ‘I am also a big fan of Lexicon reverbs as well.’

The Vista X uses the proprietary Vistonics and FaderGlow user interface, providing control of 800 or more audio DSP channels and more than 5,000 inputs and outputs. At the heart of the system is the Infinity DSP core, which provides the many DSP channels necessary for large-scale, high-resolution audio processing and mixing – this is the first time more than 800 audio channels have been processed in a CPU-based board. This offers significant advantages, as CPU processing provides a scalable system, faster development of new signal processing designs, huge channel counts, full system redundancy without a single point of failure and the possibility of running third-party algorithms.

‘I’m using the Vista X as a full-fledged post-production console,’ Rahman says. ‘Geoff Foster from Air Studios is here mixing over 600 tracks of Pro Tools on it right now.’

See also:
Studer Vista X mixing console/Infinity Processing Engine

More: www.studer.ch