Custom House at Guitar Center, the premier destination for customized professional audio solutions, recently worked with Winter Park, Florida-based Full Sail University to support the school’s expansion in immersive audio education, collaborating to equip ten identical on-campus Dolby Atmos® studios designed to give Recording Arts students hands-on experience with the technologies and workflows they will encounter upon graduation in today’s professional production environments.
The project represents the latest chapter in an ongoing relationship between Full Sail University and Custom House at Guitar Center, with Davey Rieley, Custom House Executive Account Manager, working closely with Full Sail’s audio team throughout the transition. Building on Full Sail’s existing relationship with Genelec and its experience using the company’s monitoring systems, Genelec became the natural loudspeaker choice as the university upgraded a group of existing 5.1 post-production rooms into 7.1.4 fully immersive Dolby Atmos environments.
The studios are part of Full Sail’s “Mix Palace,” a facility originally designed around individual production rooms that allowed students to work independently rather than sharing a single large-format studio environment. The facility previously included twelve stereo rooms and twelve 5.1 post-production rooms. As immersive audio became increasingly important to professional music and post-production workflows, Full Sail saw an opportunity to evolve the existing spaces and provide students with practical experience working in Dolby Atmos.
“The move to Atmos was really a necessity,” says Darren Schneider, Course Director for Advanced Session Recording at Full Sail University. “Students need to leave here understanding the basics of Atmos. There are ways to introduce immersive audio through binaural monitoring, but we already had these rooms and Genelec monitoring in place, so it made sense to build on that foundation and give students the opportunity to actually hear and work with Atmos on speakers.” Full Sail’s emphasis on real-world technology was a major factor in the system design.
Rather than choosing equipment specifically for an educational environment, the university strives to expose students to the same tools and workflows they are likely to encounter after graduation. “The gear that’s in a room is there because it is what the industry is using,” Schneider explains. “Our goal is always to ask: What are students going to leave here and see in the real world?
Increasingly, they’re going to see Atmos rooms. We want them to understand the concepts, the signal flow and the I/O, and, most importantly, have the experience of actually hearing immersive audio on speakers.” Each of the ten rooms features a 7.1.4 Genelec monitoring system, with 8340A Smart Active Monitors serving as the L-C-Rchannels, 8330A Smart Active Monitors deployed for the surround and overhead positions, and dual 7360A Smart Active Subwoofers.
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