Prism Sound Orpheus - Audio Media

Presented bywww.munro.co.ukEastlake’s South East Asian FlagshipIn South East Asia, UK-based Eastlake Audio has built facilities in Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore where work was recently completedon one of the company’s most prestigious projects in recent years. JIM EVANS reports.Yong Siew Toh Conservatory ofMusic, located on the NationalUniversity of Singaporecampus, has constructed a worldclassmusic facility with technologysmartclassrooms and seminarrooms, practice facilities, teachingstudios, Concert Hall, Recording Studio,and video and Pro Tools equippedmedia facilities. Eastlake’s involvementwas with the Recording Studio andmedia facilities.A joint collaboration between theNational University of Singapore andone of the world’s leading musicschools, the Peabody Institute ofthe John Hopkins University inBaltimore, USA, the Conservatoryis working closely on programmeand facilities development with thePeabody faculty.“This was a ground-up projectwhich we were working on for aroundtwenty months, and everyone involvedis more than happy with how it hasall materialised. The concert hall wasinaugurated in October 2006 and thestudio was finally completed and fittedout in Spring 2007. It’s a significantproject for a number of reasons.There aren’t that many 60-man studiosthat are built from ground-up in theworld every year, let alone in SouthEast Asia,” explains Hawkins.SSL Asia, Quested distributor inSingapore, supplied the system forthe recording studio. The Solid StateLogic 48-channel, 216-input C200digital console has been teamed upwith a Quested 5.1 surround-soundsystem made up of the Q412d asmain monitors (L/R), which alsohandle the .1 feed, the Q212dn for thecentre and Q210d for the surroundchannels. The studio playbackand rehearsal room monitoring ishandled by a pair of Q210d and twoQSB118 subwoofers.The large machine room houses theQuested AP1300 and AP800 amplifierswith the SM326 and SM426, whichdrive both systems.Established in 2001 under the nameSingapore Conservatory of Music, theYST was renamed after the daughter ofits benefactor, Dr. Yong Loo Lin, whosefamily made a most generous giftthat contributes to the developmentof the faculty and also supportsstudent scholarships.Students are drawn to theConservatory from all over the Asia-Pacific region, and undertake studiesin music, performance, andcomposition during their four-yearundergraduate coursework.State-of-the-art facilities are housedin a modern, three-story building thatcomprises 45 practice and rehearsalrooms, 30 teaching studios, eightensemble rooms, and one of thelargest recording studios in Asia.“Originally they were looking forsome other monitors, but I convincedthe consultant to take some listeningtests on the Questeds, and a meetingwith Roger at London’s Sarm Weststudio was arranged, and like theysay, the rest is history,” says Chan KenWah of SSL Asia. “The rooms are largeenough to record the entire orchestraof the conservatory. Recording andmonitoring is also possible in thestudio control room from the concerthall, which is situated in another partof the same building. Most – if not all –of the live recordings of performancesare made in the control room withthe Questeds.”Roger Quested went to Singaporein order to set up the recordingstudio and rehearsal room systems.While there, Quested was invited togive talks to students studying at theSingapore branch of SAE, and also toengineers at the studios of Singapore’snational broadcaster, MediaCorp, along-standing Quested customer.The Conservatory’s studio facilitiesare certainly among the mostprestigious in South East Asia. As tothis region in general, David Hawkinsobserves, “Generally, the studio-buildbusiness in this part of the world isquiet. And you can see it when youlook at the announcements from themajor console manufacturers, there’snothing like the level of activity thatthere was ten years ago, for exactly thesame reasons there’s not that level ofactivity in Western Europe.“Interestingly, Singapore whichironically used to be an enormouslypopular source of counterfeit goodsof every kind has cleaned its act up,as indeed has Hong Kong, whereasmainland china and across theborder in Malaysia, there’s no endof ripped CDs, DVDs, and computergames available. Clearly that’s workingagainst anyone investing in a facilitythat nobody will be able to afford torecord in.”The music, recording, and broadcastindustries have changed significantly– some would say matured – over themore than three decades that Eastlakehas been designing and building thefacilities that provide the technologythat provides the wherewithal formusic, words, and pictures to reach theconsumer. “Projects like the NationalUniversity of Singapore don’t comeup every day,” reflects Hawkins as heprepares to fly to the Gulf to discussanother top of the range home theatreproject. Of necessity, Eastlake’s areasof operation now encompass muchmore than commercial recordingstudios as few are being built.While in the industry media thereare more reports of closures thanthere are of openings, and the homestudio flourishes, Hawkins believesthere is a future for commercial, wellrunrecording studios. He states, “Whilemuch of the recording process todayis computer-based and uses harddisk storage, which is astoundinglyinexpensive technology bycomparison with traditional pro audiorecording kit, there is no substitute fora correctly designed acoustical playingenvironment. No amount of electronicreverb or signal processing cancompletely unscramble an acousticalrecording made in an unsatisfactorysituation… Eastlake will continue tooperate in the studio business as longas that business remains viable.” ∫AUDIO MEDIA MAY 2008 19