Belgium (October 30, 2023)—The flagship studio at Alaska Studios, a new multi-room, multi-function music hub in Belgium, is a Dolby Atmos mixing and mastering suite outfitted with PMC monitors.
Producer and engineer Peter Phillips, who set up Alaska Studios with live sound engineer Frank Voet, says, “We built the studio from the ground up as a commercial facility that could take artists and bands all the way through from songwriting, recording, mixing and mastering to preparing live for tours. We share the building with a live sound touring company and a merchandising company, and there is also space for clients to store tour equipment.”
Located in Lokeren, near Ghent, Belgium, Alaska Studios has five acoustically separate rooms including the 11.1.6 Dolby Atmos facility, which is equipped with a PMC monitoring system supplied by Joystick Audio. The Dolby Atmos studio, Mix Room 1, has a main LCR monitoring system consisting of PMC MB2S-XBD speakers supported by 14 PMC Ci65 surround speakers, all powered by MC2 amps.
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The facility also has a stereo studio, Mix Room 2, which is equipped with PMC IB1S monitors. The three other studios are designed for band rehearsals, tour pre-production, live recording and recording vocals and podcasts.
Philips, a 25-year veteran of the audio industry, says his interest in surround and immersive formats was sparked for the past 10 years in post production. “When we started looking into Dolby Atmos in 2020, we were mainly investigating its possibilities in the post-production market because at that stage Atmos for music was not something many people were thinking about. I already had my own studio, so I upgraded it from 5.1 to 5.1.4 in order to get to know the workflow and do some testing.”
Apple Music’s support of Dolby Atmos on its Spatial Audio platform, announced in the summer of 2021, was the catalyst for building an Atmos room at Alaska Studios, Philips reports. “We were already working with artists such as Stromae, Oscar and the Wolf, Selah Sue and Charlotte Adigéry, so the question Apple’s announcement raised was where would Belgian artists like these carry out their Dolby Atmos mixes? It was clear that immersive audio was the next step and here to stay, and as we were already building a studio facility from scratch, we decided to build a room that was 100% up to Dolby Atmos specifications.”
