Los Angeles, CA (May 10, 2024)—Mix engineer and educator Joseph Chudyk ironed out some kinks and streamlined the workflow at his private studio in Rochester, NY when he replaced his converter system.
Chudyk, who has mixed immersive versions of hits by the likes of Kane Brown, Mitchell Tenpenny, Elle King, and Miranda Lambert, and also teaches a recording class at Nazareth University in Rochester, had reconfigured his home-based mix room for immersive work not long after Apple Music announced the launch of its Spatial Audio platform, he says. However, he had been battling some shortcomings in his converter system. After Focusrite Group Professional director Dave Rieley offered to send him a unit to evaluate, Chudyk made the switch, integrating three RedNet A16R units into his Dante-based studio setup to handle conversion between his DAW and outboard analog gear and to interface to his stereo and Dolby Atmos monitor systems.
“The moment I hooked the A16R up and heard the conversion out of the speakers, I was sold—the sound quality was much better than what I had been using previously,” he says.
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“My whole studio is Dante-networked, so the ease of use of the A16R MkII over Dante helped as well, compared to my previous device,” continues Chudyk, who mixes both stereo and immersive projects. “At that point, I was starting to incorporate a little more analog hardware, so the ability to put the converter where the gear was, run a very short cable to the gear then just run one Ethernet cable to another Focusrite unit or directly into my computer was a big sell for me.” He has since also added a Focusrite PCIeNX card, supporting 128×128 channels, to his computer, he adds.
Chudyk’s outboard processing racks, which house a host of analog devices, including DW Fearn tube equalizers and a Fairchild 670 compressor, have become integral to his immersive mixing workflow. “EQ and compression are like panning for me,” he explains. “They give 3D movement. It’s the same with stereo mixing. If you want to pull something forward, back or higher or lower, you can do that with EQ, saturation and compression. So I’ve taken that same for approach to Atmos.”
Chudyk also uses his Focusrite RedNet converters together with monitor control software to manage his separate stereo and immersive speaker systems. “I can switch between speakers and headphones. Then, in combination with that, I can switch between the stereo master reference, the 2.0 re-render, the Spatial Audio and the binaural.”
