SAE Magazine 12-2

This is how things can turn out, but it certainly does not help sound producers to run free, conquer things or make new discoveries as individuals. But creating this content here is certainly only possible for larger film mix stages which can currently af- ford the necessary renovations. Furthermore, for the end user, the fun ends when they exit the cine- ma, right? No, and this is where headphones come in. In any case, 70% of all people who listen to music use headphones. On the go, in the evenings, or in the afternoon on the sofa, there’s no time or place they don’t suit and the ‘equipment’ fits in your pocket and can, depending on the size of the investment, provide considerable enjoyment at a comparatively low cost. LAN parties are also unimaginable without head- phones. Almost everyone in the first and second world has a pair and, unless we grow a third ear, nothing about their use will change. So why not use the opportunity whilst the listener is also still sitting in the acoustic sweet spot? I could write pages on this topic, having started to create ‘virtual’ sound mixing for headphones as early as 2000, but I’ll keep it short here. The first questions which come up are ‘how will this work?’ and ‘what should it sound like?’ In response, it should sound like hearing your MP3s in stereo or DVDs in 5.1 through a speaker system. So not like the usual headphone reproduction in your head but as though the mix is being played through a loud- speaker system near the listener. That this must work, and is not a mess of echoes, delay and phas- es, becomes clear when you consider the facts. No matter how many loudspeakers are set up around a listener, no matter how many noises like cars, airplanes, birds and people are in one’s natural en- vironment, our brain ALWAYS uses two signals to localise the surrounding sounds and identify the current dimensions of our location, two ‘sig- nal mixtures’, which both of our ears capture. So somehow it must work, and that’s that! The roots of the idea come from Artificial Head Technology and have already been used by many manufactur- ers, but when developing my process, I still found several areas which no one had explored yet. One was that I was able to build the panner into SAD, which I had wished for twelve years ago and for which I once bought two M6000 systems. Apart from headphones, this is the basis of 3D cinema mixes like for Red Tails, which Lucas Film pro- duced inAuro-3D®. Sadly, the film’s release at the start of this year missed Germany. Furthermore, and this is what Björn and Hannes immediately grasped in our meeting, and what restored the calm; there are some real limitations with headphones which we no longer have, which paradoxically al- low realistic-sounding mixes, which don’t exist in ‘real’ life! That’s something which needs some time to process…. Working virtually with SAD, on and for headphones, there’s nothing and no one, except perhaps the CPU catching fire, which can prevent you from mixing various loudspeakers at various distances and in different locations at the same time! This sounds crazy at first, but the game and radio play producers are the first whose hairs will stand on end at this thought. As always, I have to say that the musicians are sadly the last ones to get it but anyway, that’s something I’m working on now and it seems like I’m now preaching to the converted! DVDs had what it takes to succeed CDs anyway. I hope I’ve whetted your appetite for what might be in the pipeline and will of course provide more information in my classes, online on my website and of course on Facebook too. SAE Hamburg is also planning a workshop on the SAD plug-in soon, which will be released on to the market in August. ➤ In any case, 70% of all people who listen to music use headphones. 85 Production & Know How // Tom Ammermann Index

SAE Magazine 12-2

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