My New Dolby Atmos Room

A short note on a big addition to the studio.

For the last few months my studio has been part building site, part laboratory. Monitors going up on stands and brackets, cables everywhere, and a great deal of measuring, listening, and measuring again. As of the end of June it is finished and calibrated. Oakleigh Studio now has a full Dolby Atmos 7.1.4 room, and I could not be more pleased to offer fully immersive mixing as a proper, everyday part of what I do.

Here is what that actually means, and why I think it matters for the music we make together.

Inside the sound, not in front of it

Stereo puts music in front of you, a wall of sound between two speakers. 5.1 builds on this and creates a solid centre image, plus depth from the rear speakers Atmos does something different. It builds a three-dimensional field around the listener, with sound arriving from the front, the sides, from behind, and now from above. Instead of looking at the orchestra through a window, you are sitting in the middle of it.

For a film or television score that is a real gift. Reverb tails open out into space you can feel, detail can be placed and moved with intent, the low end lands in the body as much as the ear, and a sense of height lifts a cue off the screen. Done well, none of this is a gimmick layer bolted on at the end. It is the emotion of the scene, the job the music was always doing, simply with more room to do it in.

What the room is, and what it can do

At its heart is a calibrated 7.1.4 system: eleven precisely matched ADAM monitors in the surround and overhead array, four of them above the listener, anchored by a sub to hold the bottom end together. Everything is aligned so that what I hear is true, and what you receive translates properly everywhere else it is played. Running through Pro Tools HDX and Apogee conversion, it is furthers the scope of my film-grade mixing.

From here I can now edit, mix and deliver your score in Dolby Atmos (and other immersive formats), 7.1, 5.1, Binaural and stereo from the same room, in one coherent workflow, for film, television, games and theatre. If a project is heading for a streaming platform, immersive is fast becoming the expected premium format rather than a nice-to-have, and a spatial mix futureproofs a release long after it is delivered.

Grounded in the work

Immersive mixing is not new ground for me. I mixed the score for Gravity, one of the first films to really show what surround music could do, which brought a Cinema Audio Society Award, and I have carried that thinking through everything since. From Attenborough's Ocean to Coyote vs. Acme, and back across more than three decades with many composers, the aim has always been the same. My years at Abbey Road taught me to chase the sound of real air moving in a real space. Atmos simply gives that air somewhere more interesting to go.

Let us make something that surrounds people

If you have a project that would suit an immersive mix, or you are just curious what your score might sound like wrapped around the listener rather than sat in front of them, I would love to talk it through. The room is ready.

Gareth gc@garethcousins.com