In Copenhagen, Denmark, the buildings that used to house the locker rooms for workers at a shipyard have been transformed into recording studios and rehearsal spaces. We visited one of the studios that have upgraded to full-blown Dolby Atmos immersive, using Core 47 and Core Sub.
Black Tornado studio has a decade-long history and, while the studio moved to Pro Tools and digital recording and editing some time ago, a central element of the facility is still analogue classics – including an SSL console, as well as tons of delicious outboard gear such as Fairchild, UREI, Tube-Tech and more, that are used for tracking, as well as to be patched into the tracks during mixing sessions. And, in that regard, nothing has changed.
The current upgrade at Black Tornado is all about the output format, as they have moved on from stereo to Dolby Atmos immersive audio. We met founder and audio engineer, Lars Lundholm, along with Christopher Gjørup, sound designer and audio engineer with special focus on Dolby Atmos, for a chat about the thoughts behind the swirling transition to immersive.
Sound designer and audio engineer Christopher Gjørup (left), and Black Tornado founder Lars Lundholm (right) give us their thoughts on the immersive sound revolution.
While the most commonly seen speaker configuration for Dolby Atmos is 7.1.4, Black Tornado has gone for 9.1.6. The reason is that the control room is very large, and since it was possible to extend the system and use the length of the room to add a speaker section, it was recommended to do so by Dolby engineer Richard Addis, who also conducted the calibration of the system.
All of the 15 speakers are three-way Core 47s, which ensures consistent sound reproduction from all sides and from above, while the LFE channel is handled by two Core Subs.
Christopher has worked in some smaller Dolby Atmos 7.1.4 certified rooms but finds that the size of the room really does make a significant difference: “When working in a smaller 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos room, it still sounds great, but the feel is more like wearing a pair of huge headphones if that makes sense. Whereas this room sounds much bigger in a natural way – as if it’s the room itself that plays rather than very large, extended headphones.”
The decision to go with Core speakers was easy, as Black Tornado had already been using Dynaudio BM15A speakers for nearfield monitoring for more than 15 years with great success.
“One of the benefits of having the same three-way speakers at every position is the sonic consistency from all sides and heights,” Christopher says, adding that Core 47 covers a lot of ground in the frequency spectrum – which became abundantly clear when Dolby’s Richard Addis calibrated the room. “He applied Bass Management to every single speaker in the setup, but the crossover points used for the subs and the LFE channel was usually set very low – often as low as 30-35Hz – as the Core 47 monitors are perfectly capable of handling low frequencies with great precision and within the SPL-tolerances for Dolby Atmos.”
Service Engineer from Dolby Europe, Richard Addis (left), introduces Black Tornado's new Dolby Atmos facility to a small audience during the launch event in Copenhagen. He is accompanied by Mastering Engineer Dyre Gormsen (right).