Originally built in 1941 as part of “Film City Vienna,” Synchron Stage Vienna in Austria, at one time a premier facility for recording film scores with large orchestras, has been renovated and restored to its original glory following its purchase by The Vienna Symphonic Library (VSL), with numerous areas throughout the 21,000-square-foot space that includes several studios and control rooms now linked via the Dante audio networking platform.
During renovation, VSL, a developer of orchestral sample libraries and music production software, identified a need to playback and record up to 144 channels in different sample rates from 48 kHz to 192 kHz on multiple digital audio workstations (DAWs) simultaneously. The recordings needed to be made using the lowest possible latency with minimum setup time to be able to record several sessions in a single day. System designer WSDG (Walters Storyk Design Group) and integrator TSAMM were brought in to provide the technical solution for VSL’s audio requirements.
“A MADI-based system serving around 500 channels at 192 kHz would introduce too many routing issues and potential points of error,” explains Mario Reithofer, director, TSAMM. “We had discussions with a number of manufacturers offering audio-over-IP (AoIP) products before we found one that was able to accommodate VSL’s requirement. It also happened to be a Dante-enable product which was perfect for our needs.”
Two control rooms are connected to the 5,800-square-foot Main Hall and smaller Stage B, as well as several screening and editing rooms. Both control rooms have multiple DAWs interconnected via Dante, resulting in up to six different sampling rates traversing the audio network at any given time. Extensive testing was conducted to ensure the lowest system latency could be achieved, clocking in at 0.7 milliseconds. The low latency was especially important for representatives of film production companies and composers who attend live recording sessions remotely at Synchron Stage Vienna to accommodate their often tight recording schedules.
“Synchron Stage Vienna is a beautiful architectural space befitting its status as a leading scoring stage,” says Bernd Mazagg, technical director and chief recording engineer, VSL. “With Dante’s low latency and huge number of supported endpoints, it was the obvious choice for connecting all the rooms and equipment together.”
