Guildhall School chooses Audix mics for Live Dolby Atmos Capture

Driven by a need to capture film soundtracks performed by their newly instituted Alumni Session Orchestra, Guildhall School of Music & Drama recently added 20 AUDIX A231 large diaphragm condenser microphones and a DP5A five-piece professional drum microphone kit to their production arsenal.

Guildhall School of Music & Drama is a vibrant, international community of musicians, actors and production artists in the heart of the City of London. Established in 1880 and ranked number one in Arts, Drama & Music by the 2024 Complete University Guide, the school offers training in all aspects of classical music and jazz along with drama and production arts.

Impressed by their great sound, simplicity, utility, and build quality, Guildhall soon found the AUDIX microphones to be their go-to choice for everything from student projects and recitals to groundbreaking live Dolby Atmos capture. Former Prince FOH engineer and now Guildhall’s head of recording and AV, Professor Julian Hepple, and audio operations manager, Mimi Hemchaoui describe how they came to choose AUDIX microphones and the ways they’ve become central to nearly everything they do.

“I got first exposure to recording at the age of eight by making tea for the Spice Girls and other UK pop acts at Steelworks studio in Sheffield,” recalled Hepple, “but I got my first real exposure to AUDIX as the front of house engineer for Prince on his Hit n Run tour in 2014, where we used the AUDIX i5,D2, D4 and D6 on the drum kit. Since then, I’ve come to rely on various AUDIX microphones with Anoushka Shankar, Robert Glasper and many others.

“Our decision to acquire 20 A231 and a DP5A drum microphone kit centered around the launch of the school’s Alumni Session Orchestra, who provide full film tracking at proper studio specifications for our film composition students.”

“When we do these sessions, we might have 100 people or more in the room,” commented Hemchaoui. “Ordinarily, condenser mics pick up lots of unwanted sound, but if they've got great off-access rejection like the A231, that means that even with 20 mics in the same space, there’s not going to be many phasing issues.”

But the decision to go with AUDIX also had to do with the microphones’ ease-of-use: “The simplicity of the A231 can’t be overstated,” said Hepple. “Recording five or six performances a day, we wanted a mic that we could put in place and know that we’re good to go.”

Durability was also a deciding factor: “There's a nice ‘built in the USA’ ruggedness to AUDIX microphones. I can give one to a student who’ll do their own thing with it, and I don’t need to worry about it coming back damaged,” Hepple added. “So, considering all the large diaphragm mics on the market through a filter of simplicity, utility, superior quality, and affordability, the A231 was the logical choice.”

After Guildhall received the AUDIX microphones, they quickly found them indispensable for all types of audio capture, from jazz festivals, to opera, to student recitals, and more, but the most exciting application has been the groundbreaking work that they have been doing in their 7.1.4 Atmos mixing studio which was tuned and approved by Dolby and delivers pre-approved masters to Universal Music.

“We work differently by capturing orchestras in Atmos, live at the source, rather than fake it afterward,” Hepple explained. “That’s one of the reasons why we bought the AUDIX mics, to enable us to capture acoustic music in a more spatial environment.”

“We use AUDIX A231 microphones to enable 11-point Atmos recordings of an orchestra using a configuration called a PCMA 3D Array,” Hemchaoui elaborated. “Each captured channel is intended to be played back through a corresponding speaker in a 7.1.4 configuration. We arrange the mics to mirror that setup. Then we position the tree in the room based on where we want the listener to feel that they are. On many recordings, we place the tree in the middle of the orchestra so that the listener feels as though they are in the middle of all the action, but for a more natural effect we can also place it in the audience.”

When asked what’s next for Guildhall and their AUDIX microphones, Hepple rattled off a weighty list of projects that are coming in just the next two university terms alone: “Scoring sessions for eight films, capturing 250 final student recitals, a jazz festival, a drum & bass meets orchestra event at the Barbican Centre, staging a full opera at a nightclub… essentially, there are seven or eight things a day and our AUDIX mics are essential for almost all of them.”

He then went on to describe a project pending approvals from the Civil Aviation Authority, where they plan on sending weather balloons into space to record audio as they go up, “We’re going to learn what interesting acoustic phenomena we can then replicate in Atmos, and this work might translate into more accurate audio based on elevation in films.”

“In short, we like to be driven by projects, not by what we can do, which is why it's so important that you can open the mic locker, grab the AUDIX mics, plug them in and they just work,“ Hepple concluded. “And it’s not just ‘record an orchestra in this room and a big band in this room,’ there’s a lot of fun experimental and investigative stuff going on, too.”