The Most Advanced Mixing Board

Hollywood sound engineers refine and combine hundreds of individual recordings on advanced mixing boards. Here’s a close look at their tool of choice

By Mike Kobrin Posted 03.27.2009 at 2:24 pm 6 Comments

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.

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.

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6 Comments

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dontbother

03/18/09 at 10:58 pm

These board are especially fun to play with when the sliders are automated and can move by themselves. That way, rather than manually adjusting all the dials at once, the sound engineer can replay the sequence as many times as necessary, adjusting one dial at a time, and the sliders will remember what was done to them and repeat it in sync with the video.

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Patrick Kiley

04/02/09 at 10:04 pm

This is extremly cool! I really want one to put in my basment.

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Hippocratus

04/11/09 at 4:41 am

Super cool, I could definitely use one for my music. Then again, I don't know what I would do with so many channels. I have a hard enough time filling up the 48 channels I've got on my mixer. These would be total overkill. Very much super cool though, heh.

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jibran_pcc

10/31/09 at 3:54 am

always your articles are rocking and informative man. Thanks a lot for your lovely share. Keep on posting man we love to read it .thanks
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valterchaves

10/12/10 at 1:14 pm

These board are especially fun to play with when the sliders are automated and can move by themselves. 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.That way, rather than manually adjusting all the dials at once, the sound engineer can replay the sequence as many times as necessary, adjusting one dial at a time, and the sliders will remember what was done to them and repeat it in sync with the video.
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BrianDubb

10/17/12 at 2:12 pm

This is the Master of Mixing, I wish i had this...U hear that Santa?!?!

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