BALANCE, AND THE NEW  WORLD ORDER

In the last five decades or more, audio mixing has traditionally been about shoe-horning sounds into one or two speakers. Getting all these noises to coexist inside a soundstage between a stereo pair of one-inch paper cones has been an art unto itself over the years, and as track counts have grown, so the task of shoehorning them into this so-called ‘space’ has grown more challenging. But with the expansion of immersive formats like Dolby Atmos, Spatial et al – cramming and shoehorning may no longer be quite so important.

There has always been a fundamental tenet in mixing: that sounds are combined together – from either a multitrack recording, or a live stage full of musicians – into a single, creative euphonic entity that’s appealing to a listening audience.

As mix engineers, it’s our job to pull all the ingredients of a mix together in combination with a sonic palate of ‘herbs and spices’ appropriate to the material presented to us. To that end, we can position ourselves as either cooks who work with recipes to produce predictable, familiar meals, or chefs who push boundaries by making our own dishes, simultaneously expanding the palate of the clientele along the way.

But, as many of us well know, the art of mixing isn’t just a creative one. It’s also technical in many respects – although I won’t digress into the details around those here, lest we disappear into the weeds for good. Suffice it to say, mixing involves being able to pull all the sonic information together into a form that’s capable of translating through countless sound systems the world over. And as these types of systems change – and they are changing – so the mixing process does along with it.

With the new immersive formats looking like they’re here to stay (he says with a small amount of trepidation in his voice) the mixing task seems to have shifted, or at least the new formats present options that call some of these well-established mix fundamentals into question.

One of these questions is whether sounds must still be compromised, or ‘made to fit’ together in the same way as they did when one or two speakers were all a mix engineer had to play with. With immersive formats it seems that this concept is something we can now make a subjective decision about. It’s no longer fundamental to the physical limitations of the format that we compromise sounds to make them fit, or even glue them together at all.

As an example… sounds placed inside the sphere of a Dolby Atmos environment clearly no longer need to battle with one another quite so rigorously on the frequency spectrum as they do in a typical stereo image. When 11 speakers (plus a sub) are – at a minimum – sharing the workload of a Dolby Atmos mix that was previously carried by only two speakers in stereo, clearly there’s now space beyond most engineers’ wildest imaginings for more frequency overlap, a greater dynamic range for both individual instruments and the mix overall, and infinitely more placement and proximity options.

Indeed, immersive formats potentially call into question some aspects of the very notion of what we understand mixing to mean.

As an example, and to digress for a moment, I was recently in a room at Empire Studios in Melbourne listening intently to some mixes by Bob Clearmountain, that the man himself was presenting in Dolby Atmos 7.1.4.

Apart from being an interesting experience for all present – and of course hearing Bob talk about his thoughts on Atmos was very interesting indeed – what was fascinating to hear was that the Atmos mixes of some of Bob’s most familiar work – songs like ‘Avalon’ by Roxy Music and ‘Run to You’ by Bryan Adams, for example – were fascinating not for how they were ‘glued together’, but for what they revealed.

Despite Bob consistently trying to frame the Atmos mixes around the idea that they needed to stay true to “what the original song was all about,” nevertheless what tended to happen was that things previously hidden in the stereo mix were exposed, and in some cases you might say, celebrated.

In many respects, what Bob’s Atmos mixes revealed – to my brain at least – was all the things I hadn’t quite noticed before. Certain sounds were far more detailed, exposed and full toned than they had previously been, almost as if I was listening to the multitrack again.

Which brings me to the far bigger question that immersive mixing tends to provoke: what is mixing in this context?

With all this space, the multiple phantom centres, and the capacity for sounds to exist inside a sphere of sonic information, rather than merely on its outer shell, most objects can now occupy their own space virtually without compromise. Of course, a mix engineer can still choose to conceal something, curtail a sound’s frequency response, dynamic range and so on, but it’s no longer quite the imperative it once was.

So what does this mean? Is immersive mixing a format where all the rules of the stereo approach still apply, where only some of them still apply, or indeed none of them apply? Can we bring all our experiences of working in stereo into an immersive context, or do we need to rethink our approach entirely? It seems to me that at least some of what stereo mixing has been all about these past decades doesn’t necessarily apply in an immersive context at all.

Dynamic range is another question posed by immersive mixing. Given the amount of space available to a mix engineer in this context, in some respects the dynamic range of instruments is now conceptually well and truly up for grabs. Indeed, allowing instruments to retain a greater dynamic range than they have generally enjoyed in stereo might be the best way to keep these elements elusive and subtle in an immersive context, and ultimately prove to be an instrument’s greatest strength. Hearing a musician play with subtlety can be an enthralling thing, and with an ensemble cast given this freedom, immersive mixes will be able to breathe like never before. Moreover, they will present new gifts of sonic intrigue over time like never before…

But when it comes to mixing immersively, there are a couple of issues I find difficult to reconcile.

The first is the nature of the ‘sweet spot’, and a sub-category of that question: because objects can be placed discretely into innumerable locations, when a listener moves around, are they not fundamentally altering the focus of a mix? In a larger physical space where multiple listeners are ‘immersed’, they all receive a different version of your mix, not only with respect to volume, but also time. So, one listener might be in the centre, up front, and perhaps receive too much main vocal (assuming it’s front and centre), meanwhile someone up the back and to the left, might receive too much of a supportive rhythm guitar channel, and far less main vocal.

You get the idea. In other words, the mix starts to unravel depending on your position.

Particularly in larger environments, this constitutes a serious limitation.

The other issue is where will immersive mixing formats be consumed by listeners…

In our corner of the globe, the big question that remains is how studios, individual mix engineers and producers will be able to justify the outlay of a decent immersive rig in their mixing environments. Without healthy budgets from record companies or individual artists funding the work, it arguably feels like a fool’s errand to invest heavily in a format that very few artists are inquiring about.

On the other hand, it’s arguably up to us as an industry to recognise our role in all of this. If we’re not out there educating customers on the benefits of immersive formats, then customers are very unlikely to request mixes in said formats. It’s cart before the horse, of course, and to some the financial risk seems high, but the flipside is waking up one day to realise that you’re a stereo mix engineer and the whole world has passed you by. It’s our equivalent of the transition over to electric cars… once you drive one, every other form of transport feels steam-powered.

I for one don’t want to get stuck driving a steam engine… and besides, once you listen to immersive formats for long enough, stereo sounds pretty darn flat.

Immersive audio gives mix engineers a palate and a sound stage that’s vastly larger and more superior in every way to stereo. So why are we still debating this?

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Andy Stewart owns and operates The Mill in the hills of Bass Coast Shire, Victoria, and he’s also the new Editorial Director of Mutech Media. Check it out here: mutech.media

Mani Photo: Apogee’s Greg Chung, Link Audio’s Michael Jago, and Bob Clearmountain