Multimedia audio firm Human, which along with its sister company Post Human offers music composition, sound design, music supervision, sonic branding and audio post services from its bases in New York City, Santa Monica, and Paris, is embarking on what will be a complete refurbishment of its audio monitoring infrastructure utilizing a combination of Genelec 8341A and 8351B Smart Active monitors, part of the brand’s “The Ones” line.
A group of award-winning composers, artists, and producers populate Human, the production side of the company that creates music and other audio elements for advertising, video, digital and film projects. Post Human takes the firm’s decade-plus of experience to the world of audio post-production, offering a suite of post audio services, including 5.1 mixing, music supervision and sound design.
The Ones have already been utilized on projects that include the Sandy Hook Promise Teenage Dream film (which won six Lions at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity), Infiniti’s “Beautiful Mess” television spot, Bud Light Seltzer’s “Declared Loudest Flavor” commercial (which aired during the Super Bowl) and the “IT Heroes” campaign (currently on air from Intel).
The shift to The Ones began at the personal studio facility of Sloan Alexander, a partner and senior mix engineer at Post Human, and composer, sound designer and creative director at Human. “I’ve used almost every kind of speaker there is in my career, starting with the Genelec 1029A in the 2000s, and I’ve found that choosing a monitor speaker is a journey and you learn as you go,” says Alexander. “But especially in the last four or five years, I’ve watched as the listening experience has been transformed as people shifted to a wide range of devices through which they consume media, from iPhones to tablets to smart speakers.”
In 2018, Alexander first demoed The Ones and found them to be the right fit for a fraught moment in audio production. “As we moved further into mixing for multiple kinds of devices, I think the mixing environment itself became less and less critical — it was the transitions between devices that became more important,” he says. “It was taking the room out of the monitoring equation, which made the monitor speaker itself so much more critical. That’s where The Ones became so important: they were the link between so many different kinds of devices and mixing environments.
“A lot of high-end speakers can actually hype every little detail, which can be a distracting jumble and ultimately not an accurate mix,” he adds. “The Ones give you the bigger picture, the complete picture, but also one in which you can hear necessary details like compression and dialog artifacts. And the results really translate into something that clients can wrap their heads (and ears) around. When you can trust the speaker, the client can trust the entire process.”
