Merging tech for Beijing Film Academy’s new studio

The prestigious Beijing Film Academy’s School of Sound has constructed a new film music mixing studio, equipping it with a variety of kit from Merging Technologies.

Integral to the new facility is a Pyramix audio workstation with MassCore engine to provide ultra-low latencies and give users enough power to mix very high track counts simultaneously. The studio is also equipped with Merging’s Horus, which provides AD/DA conversion and supports up to DSD256 and DXD (352.8 kHz PCM).

The high number of I/O channels necessary are accommodated via the RAVENNA/AES67 protocol, which uses one Cat 5e/Cat 6 cable to connect to Pyramix. Channel routing can be done remotely using the same connection.

The Dean of the Sound School, Professor Tong Lei (pictured), summarized: “Once we start a session with the Merging equipment we enjoy an improvement in production quality. This equates to something similar to the best of classical music recordings.”

The Beijing Film Academy Sound School has also built China’s first movie post production studio specifically for researching standardised 3D sound. The new research space is configured with 40 output channels connected to 40 speakers for playback that are fully adjustable, allowing for different configurations to be easily studied. The purpose of this lab was to find a solution to standardise 3D immersive movie audio for China, enabling the Chinese industry to avoid being forced to accept foreign standards and seeing any monopoly emerge.

Pyramix software features embedded 3D panning, which is essential for the research studio’s investigation and evaluation. The panning engine saves significant amounts of time and effort and supports any multiple speaker configuration including the existing competing international formats.

The 3D panner lets the user customise the immersive listening environment by adjusting the room size and the speaker positions without the need for third party plug-ins. This makes the task of constructing room environment models easier. Lei concluded: “The Pyramix DAW’s native 3D panning functionality allows us cast off the shackles of the existing immersive sound formats. This has given us unprecedented convenience and gives us the possibility to undertake our 3D sound research far more efficiently.”

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