An Audient ORIA has been installed as the ‘go-to’ monitor controller and sound card in Challow Park Studios. Comprising two control rooms and three dedicated recording spaces - including one area large enough to record a 45-piece orchestra - Challow Park Studios is built within the grounds of a Victorian house not far from Wantage, Oxfordshire.
One of the first facilities to take advantage of ORIA’s ability to integrate with Dante technology, the facility has used ORIA for all its most recent projects across a range of genres.
“I find the sound quality astonishing on the analogue outputs,” stated Will Biggs, the on-site producer and engineer, who has been overseeing their transition to immersive audio.
“We recently moved ORIA into my main recording room so I can monitor in Dolby Atmos. We run a hybrid system, but all of our converters connect to Pro Tools via Dante,” he explained. Although they had been running Dolby Atmos in the studio for nearly two years, finding a suitable controller to run the speakers seemed to be impossible. “We put together a couple of different systems, but none were adequate,” said Biggs. Enter ORIA. Biggs reportedly found it simple to set up and appreciated how easy it was to integrate with Dante.
“I plugged it in and it worked,” he said. “The way that you have the Dante card integrated into the box is intuitive and straightforward. It works nicely, and has allowed me to run Pro Tools into it very easily.”
Providing up to 16 input channels over AoIP, the optional Dante Card allows quick and seamless integration with new or existing AoIP networks.
This year sees Challow Park relaunching itself as a dedicated space based on recording and mixing immersive audio, something Biggs, a self-confessed sound recording addict, has been working towards for a while. Bored of recording and listening to music on stereo speakers, he was keen for everybody to experience the subtleties he could hear.
“When you record and mix on speakers in a studio, it’s very unlikely anyone else is going to be able to hear what you’re doing, due to the quality of speakers available to the average listener,” he explained. “When I first heard Atmos on headphones, it was like the sound was coming from outside my head…very different to listening on headphones traditionally. Listening on headphones is a much more level playing field; most people are listening to music on headphones on the way to work and Atmos is just a fantastic upgrade of that system.”
“Once you’ve listened to Apple Spatial, it’s very difficult to go back to listening to the same things in stereo,” he ended.