Dante makes connections at Sonic College
- Details
No small undertaking, staff had to interconnect multiple stereo studios and their companion mastering suites, a foley stage, immersive recording studio, Dolby Atmos mastering suite and theatrical mix stage - even a colossal 187-channel, AVB-based Meyer Sound Spacemap Go spatial sound system located in the five-story atrium, all via Dante (with a little help from AVB-to-Dante conversion cards).
Lars Tirsbæk, a lecturer at Sonic College, was instrumental in setting up the new facility and deciding what spaces would be most beneficial to students and essential to delivering a good grounding in sound design. “[Building the new facility] was an opportunity to start from scratch,” he says. “Our infrastructure needed to not only fit the demands of the space(s), but also provide learning opportunities for our students and give them practical experience working with real-world technologies like Dante.
“We didn’t have the Dante network in our old facility,” says Tirsbæk as he counted off a long list of benefits. “Now you can do a mix then easily route it through to the cinema to listen. You can take a stage box anywhere in the building and still communicate back to the control room.”
Dante Domain Manager allows college staff to manage the large Dante network effectively. With its granular user access control levels, administrators can lock down certain network areas and functionality while still allowing students room to experiment within boundaries chosen by teaching staff and network managers. In this type of educational environment, segmenting domains was critical.
“Students definitely need to know how audio-over-IP works. That’s the way all audio infrastructure will be implemented in the coming years,” Tirsbæk commented. “When our students learn to use Dante they recognise the inherent flexibility of being able to just move AV hardware around without affecting the network.
“This was a complex project,” says Tirsbæk. “With so many adjacent studios and performance spaces we had to consider how to isolate parts of the network to prevent unexpected issues from occurring during live performances. Dante Domain Manager’s user authentication and role definition in combination with its ability to create separate Dante Domains was essential to our success in managing such an intricate system. In fact, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have been successful had it not been for Dante Domain Manager.”
