NEW YORK CITY — Earlier this year, audio post company Sound Lounge (www.soundlounge.com) introduced Sound Lounge Everywhere, a remote audio post/sound mixing service that allows clients in the Boston market to access the mixing talent at its New York location.
The studio initially partnered with New York City’s Nice Shoes, which in recent years has expanded its business to offer remote color grading services. Together, they offer their respective services via the Boston-based creative editorial company Editbar.
At the time of the launch, Sound Lounge partner, COO and sound designer Marshall Grupp said: “We believe that geography is now an opportunity rather than a boundary, and we’re excited to work with new brands and agencies in this unique fashion. We’re leading a new era in remote mixing, and our custom technology enables us to offer an unmatched level of streaming quality for our clients.”
Post had an opportunity recently to witness what a remote mixing session might look and sound like. Sound Lounge has multiple rooms in New York that are capable of connecting to Editbar in Boston. In this instance, sound designer and mixer Glen Landrum (pictured) showed how seamless the process is. Both Sound Lounge and Editbar have the same monitoring set up — B&W surounds speakers and Samsung displays — ensuring that the experience in Editbar mirrors that in the New York studio. A Webcam allows the producer at Boston to see the Sound Lounge engineer, and vice versa. In addition, clients attending the session can comment via a remote talkback module.
Sound Lounge chief engineer John DeMaio says he and executive producer Mike Gullo made a number of trips to Boston to implement and test the set up. He put together a proprietary solution that allows 6-channels of uncompressed audio to be sent to Editbar with near zero latency, ensuring those attending a session are hearing the highest quality sound possible — just like they would if they were in one of Sound Lounge’s New York rooms.
Since its launch, the Sound Lounge Everywhere service has been used on a number of commercial projects. A Hyatt project was the first to use the service, with Royal Caribbean, Dunkin Donuts, Bank of America, McDonalds, Sam Adams, Subway, Liberty Mutual, and Puma later taking advantage of it too.
The company is now looking to expand the Sound Lounge Everywhere service beyond the Boston market and autonomously of Nice Shoes. While Grupp and his team weren’t ready to announce future locations just yet, they did hint at the idea of three additional spots possibly coming online in 2018.