120dB Sound Engineering has been busy this summer, supplying both ATMOS and ST1 to record a variety of events, including multiple outdoor shows on the Męskie Granie 2022 concert tour, featuring major Polish artists. A release from Męskie Granie 2020, recorded by 120dB, was recently certified Platinum in Poland. The company also recorded Jimek — composer Radzimir Dębski, one of Poland's best known music producers — performing his unique symphonic orchestration, The History of Rap, a project that required 190 tracks. ATMOS also participated at the Film Music Festival in Krakow.
Taking ATMOS to the next level with System T
The musicality of any mix made through the System T is what many operators who work in the 120dB trucks comment about, Mika reports. “When you’re mixing, everything is musically glued together. If you’ve got good sources, even if you don’t do anything with EQ or dynamics, it will be OK. Just push the faders up and it will be great sounding. After that, you can make something better, but you don’t have to do anything — on an SSL, you can do nothing, and it will be OK!”
As visiting mixers soon discover, and as 120dB’s engineers already know, the layout of the System T is very logical and easy to operate, even if they have not previously worked on a digital console. “It’s very easy to do what you want to do,” Mika says. “It’s not an analogue console, but everything is where it needs to be. You don’t need to find some parameters or knobs. Even if you are new to the System T, everything is on the channel strip, just like an analogue console.”
ATMOS is not the only truck that supports immersive mixing in Poland, but it is likely the only one to offer an uncompromised monitoring environment. In a TV production truck, Mika says, the audio control room is typically very small. “In TV trucks you always have to fight with the room and with poor monitoring. In TV trucks you put the Dolby Atmos height speakers where you can, not where you want them. It’s impossible to produce good sounding audio material in those rooms.” But in 120dB’s ATMOS truck, Mika says, the dimensions and the acoustics have been optimized to create an experience that is much more like a brick-and-mortar mixing facility. “Our room is 2.5 m (8 ft.) by 4.5 m (18 ft.), and we have a 2.2 m (7.2 ft.) ceiling height, so it’s like a regular audio room in a production studio,” he says. “We want to give audio operators a better place to work.”
