My final main Circus session today was on Studio Sound, and how it can make or break a live or as live television production. Bellow is what i had to say about today, in my circus report:

Studio sound is quite similar to Location sound, with the main difference being the amount of microphones / audio sources you can mix and output. In a studio mixer you can also use techniques such as Compression, Effects (Reverb, Delay and such), and Limiting.

In the studio at Ravensbourne there are 3 wall boxes each with a set of input / output tie-line which link back to the sound gallery. Each socket from this wall box can then be patched to any channel on the Solid State Logic C10, digital sound mixing desk. Each socket could be patched as an aux on the desk, allowing you to feed particular channels into the studio, for example as monitors for a band.

Each channel in the SSL C10 can have its own effects and compression applied to it which can be very useful in a band / interview situation, were you would like some reverb on the performance mic’s and nothing on the interviewees. Also each channel can be supplied with phantom power individually; this means that if you have microphones or other equipment that require phantom to operate, they can be supplied with it, without the rest of the inputs being affected. Some older sound desks only supply phantom to all or nothing, this can cause some problems with sensitive equipment.

The SSL C10 can handle “64 full input channels, each with dedicated 4-band EQ, Comp/Lim, Insert, Direct Output”5 as well as “16 dedicated mono Mix Minus buses with insert points, can be stereo-linked”5, all of which allows the sound supervisor to provide the studio floor / in ear monitoring all different mixes. For example a presenter will want to hear the Director, PA, and VT’s but they don’t want to hear themselves.