Fitzrovia based sound design studio String and Tins have just finished an expansion to their Gresse Street studio and have been awarded a Dolby Atmos Home Entertainment certification. The String and Tins team are the creative minds and ears behind award winning advertisements, for any cinema fan this includes the well-known Vue cinema show opening reel. The expansion and accreditation make String and Tins a strong candidate for the influx of longform work driven by OTT platforms such as Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney +, and Amazon.
“We consider ourselves to be audio professionals who are pretty handy at crafting all aspects of a soundtrack”, commented Co-Founder and Creative Director, Will Cohen. “It’s important to scale up in the right way in terms of long form. Part of this studio build was to facilitate that – to have the best possible premix space we could, before taking our work to the stage for final mix.”
To scale up the right way meant they would have to have an immersive, Dolby Atmos certified premix room, a new voice over room, and two additional studios – a Dante® based network. String and Tins worked closely with HHB Communications to ensure the new rooms would meet the specified technical requirements.
One key component ensuring flexibility in the new studios is inclusion of Audinate’s Dante audio over IP technology. When asked about it, Greg Wheeler, Sales Manager for HHB Communications says “The immediate benefit to String and Tins utilising Audio over IP infrastructure is the greatly simplified cabling runs between machine room, studios, and other areas such as the voice-over booth. Future use cases are far and wide when sharing I/O and routing. For the String and Tins team this means anything from recording foley around the facility, to recording the mini grand piano in the studio’s new reception space”.
While designed with several different types of work in mind it was important to the String and Tins team that the new premix room be Dolby Atmos certified and have the highest quality sound reproduction possible. In its finished state, it is impossible to miss the unique speaker integration designed for the room. The team themselves seem besotted with the number and range of speakers in the new room.
String and Tins worked with Munro Acoustics who designed a custom monitoring solution to incorporate special cabinets that extend the flat response as far down as possible. Included in this integration were two 15-inch drivers in the ceiling at the back and two 18-inch drivers at the front along with all the overhead and surround cabinets which were custom shaped for the room.
The speaker integration, paired with the Scrub installation of a Dolby Atmos Home Entertainment Rendering and Mastering Unit (HE-RMU), helped String and Tins move quickly through the certification process. Beyond the technical aspects, the team are excited for the creative possibilities the new immersive room affords them. “It will be exciting to create something fully in Atmos“, says Joe Wilkinson, sound designer and composer at String and Tins. “I believe we’ve only scratched the surface of what is possible.”
“Dystopian lasers”, was the straightforward reply from founding partner Mike Bamford when asked how they hoped to apply their knowhow and new tools; designing sounds to match the vision of science fiction writers. A sentiment that was echoed across the team, and an achievable goal when considering the wealth of creativity and talent housed within the Gresse Street studio. Now equipped to meet the latest standards and demands of both long and short form media, String and Tins is ready to take on any project… they just hope it will include lasers
