An Evening with Mark Gittins and Neumann
On Tuesday 10 November, Mark Gittins joins us at Studiocare in Liverpool for an evening on immersive mixing, alongside the Neumann team. The evening begins at 6.30pm, and Mark will talk through his studio workflow, his creative approach, and the Neumann monitoring setup his room is built around. Tickets are free, and there are 40 seats. Reserve your place.
The evening is also a chance to experience the new KH 310 II and KH 350. Both are available from us, and you can see the rest of the range in our Neumann collection.
What is immersive mixing?
Immersive mixing is the spatial counterpart of a stereo mix. Instead of placing everything across two channels, the engineer positions each element in a three-dimensional space: in front, to the sides, behind, and above. Dolby Atmos is the format most records are released in, and it carries the mix as a set of objects rather than fixed channels, so the same mix can be rendered to a large room, a soundbar or a pair of headphones.
That last part is where it gets difficult. A mix that only works in the room it was made in is not much use, because most listeners will hear it on earbuds. The craft is in making the spatial version feel like the record rather than a demonstration of the format, and in checking that it holds together on every system it will meet.
What is a 9.1.4 monitoring system?
The numbers describe the speaker layout. Nine speakers sit at ear height around the listening position, one subwoofer handles the low end, and four speakers are mounted overhead. It is a room built for judging height and depth as precisely as left and right.
Because so much of the mix depends on the room, the room itself has to be trustworthy. That means the acoustics, the placement of every speaker, and the calibration of the system as a whole, which is where a tool like Neumann's MA 1 Automatic Monitor Alignment comes in.
Who is Mark Gittins?
Mark has worked in audio for more than 25 years. He toured as a front-of-house engineer, ran Birmingham's Megatone recording studio for fifteen years, and has worked as an outside broadcast engineer for the Premier League, the Commonwealth Games and the UEFA Champions League.
He now runs Sensound, a purpose-built Dolby Atmos facility in Worcestershire, built around a 9.1.4 Neumann KH monitoring system. His immersive credits include Judas Priest's Invincible Shield and Dream Theater's Parasomnia, both of which came to him through the producer Andy Sneap, along with work for Good Neighbours and Hard Life. “Crown of Horns”, which he mixed in Atmos for Invincible Shield, was nominated for Best Metal Performance at the 67th Grammy Awards.
That body of work sits largely in rock and metal, which tends to be dense, loud and full of layered guitars. Getting those records to open up in a spatial mix, without losing the weight that makes them work, is a particular kind of discipline.
What is the difference between the KH 310 II and the KH 350?
Both are three-way active monitors, and both use Neumann's DSP platform with MA 1 alignment and analogue plus AES3id digital inputs. The difference is the size of the room each one is built for.
The KH 310 II is a nearfield monitor with a sealed cabinet, which gives it a tight, time-accurate low end and very low group delay. Since the original KH 310 it has a newly developed woofer and a new DSP platform, with 300 W going to the woofer, 160 W to the midrange and 125 W to the tweeter, 5 dB more maximum SPL, and linearity of plus or minus 0.6 dB between 100 Hz and 10 kHz. It keeps the 3 inch soft-dome midrange that made the original so useful for judging vocals. Recommended listening distance is 1.0 to 2.5 metres, and the cabinet dimensions are unchanged, so it drops straight into existing KH 310 installations.
The KH 350 is a midfield monitor, and its bass reflex cabinet reaches down to 30 Hz. It uses Neumann's Mathematically Modelled Dispersion waveguide to keep the dispersion even across the spectrum, which matters at longer listening distances where the room starts to have more say. Recommended listening distance is 1.2 to 3.0 metres, and it is intended for medium rooms and immersive systems, where it can be combined with other KH-Line monitors.
In short, the KH 310 II is the choice for a close, critical nearfield position, and the KH 350 is for a larger room where you need full-range authority and control further back.
Where and when
The evening is at Studiocare, 56 Evans Road, Liverpool L24 9PB, on Tuesday 10 November, starting at 6.30pm. Entry is free, but seats are limited to 40 and tickets are one per person, so please book a ticket if you would like to come. If you are coming as a group, each person needs their own ticket.