Metropolis Studios launched its pioneering spatial audio mix/master facility in July 2021.
Our state of the art studio is the highest resolution in the UK and was the fastest to be Dolby certified in the world. We built the room to enable both established and emerging artists to unlock the exciting potential of 3D audio. The control room pursues a flexible ‘hub studio’ approach with a bespoke designed console which can be moved anywhere in the room allowing for multiple uses including all mixing desk based workflows. The room is also connected by hundreds of metres of fibre to our Studio A and B Live Rooms allowing us to record and broadcast live in any immersive format.
With the loudspeakers arrayed at 30° of separation, the audio monitoring in the new studio is designed to cater for all surround formats, including Dolby Atmos and 360RA. The rooms resolution sits at 11.2.8 with 11 loudspeakers in the horizontal 360’ plane, 8 height loudspeakers from front to rear and a sub array.
Dolby Atmos is an immersive audio format which uses object-based rather than channel-based delivery enabling the same master to scale to the number of speakers in any system, whether that’s a simple two-channel stereo, a 5.1 channel surround, a fully immersive 7.1.4 (or more!) surround system or a binaural representation on headphones. With Dolby Atmos, the artist is able to place each object in a precise 3-dimensional location, which will be rendered in real time during playback to the appropriate speaker in whatever system is available.