Meeting Reports

Meeting Topic: Inside the Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media & Technology at IU-Bloomington

Moderator Name: Brett Leonard

Speaker Name: Kevin Evans, Danny French, Nathan Miller, and Brock Hamman, IU Radio-TV Services

Meeting Location: Indiana University, Bloomington, IN

Summary

Indiana University Radio-TV Services welcomed the Indiana section of the AES to tour the Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media and Technology’s control rooms within the storied Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall, the home of the IU Bloomington basketball dynasty. After years of fly-pack setup for basketball season and special events, the University’s Radio-TV Services were allocated space to construct dedicated control rooms within the building. The facility’s design goals were to streamline production for broadcast and recording, as well as video wall production, as well as uniting a variety of different campus facilities at a central hub.

The primary venue serviced by these control rooms is the Assembly Hall itself, where basketball games are covered by roughly eight cameras and some 20-30 mics. The production’s outputs, however, are somewhat more complex. Feeds from the control rooms feed streaming on the Big Ten Network, campus TV, radio, venue concourse video monitors, as well as the arena’s video boards. These productions require the crafting of several unique audio mixes and video cuts. The staff, overseen by at least one staff engineer-in-charge, but often employs a full compliment of student workers in roles from on-screen graphics to video replay and camera shading.

The facility’s unique technical features center around a robust central fiber network. Fiber interconnection runs throughout Assembly Hall, offering an array of Dante interconnection options, as well as tie-in to feeds from the house PA system. The Dante network is currently manually configured, but upcoming upgrades will include implementation of Dante Domain Manager, allowing for greater control over access levels for student engineers. Video is run on SMTPE 2022, with provisions in place for updates to SMPTE 2110. Similarly, intercoms are run over a dedicated portion of the same network. This network is also patchable to a variety of dedicated fiber and triax interconnection to the broadcast truck pad often used by networks broadcasting notable games and tournaments, allowing for easy interconnection and sharing of feeds. The fiber network also connects to other notable venues across campus with 100 Gigabit trunk lines, allowing these control room facilities to function for any variety of events across campus. A central machine room between the two control rooms offers hard patching between remote venues and these control rooms, as well as the IU Radio-TV studios across campus.

Written By: Brett Leonard

Meeting Topic: Sweetwater Studios Open House

Moderator Name: Sean Rollins

Speaker Name: Shawn Dealey & Jason Peets, Sweetwater Studios

Meeting Location: Sweetwater Studios, Fort Wayne, IN, USA

Summary

Sweetwater Studios opened its doors to the Indiana Section of the AES and audio enthusiast in the area for a technical tour and discussion of immersive production. The tour began with a look inside the studio’s expansive mic locker, which features well over 100 makes and models, most in pairs or more. From there the group moved into Studio A, the primary tracking room in the facility. The control room features a Neve 5088, a substantial collection of outboard gear, and multiple pairs of stereo monitors housed in a comfortable, creative environment. The adjacent tracking space and two iso booths were set from a recently concluded progressive rock recording session, allowing for a look at the day-to-day recording practices employed at the studio.

After the visit to Studio A, the tour moved to Studio C, an Atmos-equipped immersive editing and mixing suite. While Studio C does a smooth attached booth, its primary use is as an immersive mix room using its 9.1.6 monitoring setup from ATC and Focal. The final stop on the tour was the similarly appointed Studio B. This control room has been the epicenter for Sweetwater Studios’ foray into immersive mixing. Chief engineer Shawn Dealey walked the group through the refinement of his method for Atmos mixing from stereo stems. The group was able to listen to an impressive array of new and released mixes and the opened house ended with a thorough discussion of workflow, tools, and techniques for immersive mixing.

Written By: Brett Leonard

Meeting Topic: Technical Tour: Earshot Audiopost

Speaker Name: Brice Bowman and Rick Such, owners, with Ben Ericsen and Haley Morkert, engineers

Other business or activities at the meeting: Membership advantages and upcoming meetings were announced briefly

Meeting Location: Earshot Audiopost, Indianapolis, IN, USA

Summary

The tour of Earshot Audiopost began with an overview of the company’s history from co-owners Brice Bowman and Rick Such, discussing how they met and joined forces to open the original Earshot in a previous location. After years of successful operation, a building sale forced the company to search for a new location; the ideal spot was found in the form of a former Boys & Girls club building with a half-court gymnasium, a quiet location, and sturdy block construction. The build out of the studio was completed with the owners serving as general contractors and supervisors to meet both time and budget demands while ensuring high-caliber workmanship. With the owners careful oversight and nights working on the build while maintaining operations in the previous location, the present facility opened with only one day of downtime.

Earshot Audipost features three control rooms. Each control room is configured with a similar Pro Tools HDX system and monitors, and with closely matching acoustics despite slightly different sizes. This allows for flexibility in use between engineers and control rooms when the need arises and helps to ensure consistent results across the facility. The only substantive departure from this theme is the addition of surround capability in one control room. The tracking spaces, however, offer variations in size and acoustic. A smaller booth, comfortable for one or two artists, a medium size and slightly more live booth, and a larger space that could host foley, a larger cast, or musical artists allow for a range of project. All three spaces are interconnected with all control rooms via central patch, where audio, closed-circuit video, and timer information can be routed.

Earshot’s clientele ranges from commercials to network broadcasts, and independent films to ADR for motion pictures and video games. While unattended sessions were becoming the normal pre-pandemic, the vast majority of clients now attend and work remotely. Similarly, bespoke Pro Tools templates were created to facilitate the recent removal of consoles and streamline the regular use of Source Connect to leverage remote talent. This has proved a winning formula for Earshot Audiopost as they celebrate more than 20 years of success.

Written By: Brett Leonard

Meeting Topic: LEA Professional: Bringing a New Company and New Products to Life

Moderator Name: Jay Dill

Speaker Name: Scott Robbins, LEA Professional

Meeting Location: New Ear Technologies, Indianapolis, IN USA

Summary

Scott is a former Crown staffers who, after Harman shut down the Crown business and product line, became part of the start-up team for LEA Professional. He noted that, as a private company, unburdened and unencumbered by corporate requirements, they created an atmosphere where a totally new approach could be taken. The result has been a hugely successful new line and new approach to audio power amplifiers, placing them in the #2 position in the installed systems market. Working with speaker manufacturers, they have speaker tuning files for over 2,000 speakers.
Engineering development is with a German team; manufacturing is in Costa Rica.

Written By: Barrie Zimmerman