The Most Advanced Mixing Board

Listen Up Boards like these make movies sound like real life Courtesy Euphonix (Zoom out!)

Consider a scene from a hypothetical Hollywood thriller: Our heroine, filled with dread and whispering into her cellphone, walks slowly down a dark hallway toward a closed door. The sounds that make this scene come alive—-her voice, her footsteps, the creaking floorboards, the background music—-began as a bunch of prerecorded digital files on a hard drive. It took a sound engineer’s touch-—and a machine like the Euphonix System 5—-to blend them into the final, seamless soundtrack.

The System 5 works as a giant keyboard for controlling a computer called the DSP SuperCore, which sits in a separate rack and stores recordings of music, dialogue and sound effects. Each recording, called a channel, can be assigned to one of the 1.5-inch-wide channel strips on the System 5's surface. Each strip works like an ultra-sophisticated version of your home stereo’s controls; one dial adjusts bass, another treble, and so on. Faders, the sliding controls at the bottom of each strip, control volume.

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Entertainment & Gaming, How It Works, Mike Kobrin, april 2009, audio, audio engineering, how it works, how it works 2009, mixing boards, sound designers

Sound and Screen
While mixing our hypothetical thriller, the sound engineer turns a knob on the strip assigned to the actor’s voice to make it sound fuller and cut through the background music. On another strip he adds bass to her footsteps, which were recorded in a sound studio and sent to the DSP SuperCore as digital files. Then he adjusts the panning controls slowly so the sound fades from right speaker to left, mirroring the on-screen action. Using a different channel strip, the engineer raises the volume of the background music. On another he adds new, muffled voices—-they’re coming from behind the door. You slide closer to the edge of your seat.