Powered by an SSL T80 Tempest Engine, truck is capable of 800 channels of DSP and outfitted with a 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos Monitoring system.
120dB Sound Engineering in Poland recently rolled out a new music recording and broadcast production truck equipped with a Solid State Logic System T S500 console surface configured with 64 faders powered by a T80 Tempest Engine offering 800 channels of DSP and outfitted with a 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos monitoring system. The inaugural project for the new truck, which is named ATMOS, was a multitrack recording of The Polish National Wind Orchestra (Narodowa Orkiestra Dęta w Lubinie) in Warsaw, Poland in late April.
The main reason for choosing a System T for the ATMOS truck was simple, according to Michał Mika, owner and founder of 120dB Sound Engineering. “We are native to Dante,” he says. The company, which is headquartered in southern Poland, near Katowice, has long worked on eSports broadcast events, including for Turtle Entertainment and ESL TV, which rely heavily on Dante networking. When 120dB launched its first OB van, ST1, in 2018, it was designed around a System T S300 to take advantage of the SSL platform’s native support of the Dante protocol. “Then, when we wanted to grow and build a bigger truck, we decided that a big SSL System T would be the best choice for us,” Mika says.
Both the System T S500 in the new ATMOS truck and the System T S300 in ST1 were supplied by Krzysztof Kowalewski at Audiotech Commercial, Solid State Logic’s distributor in Poland.
Tailored for music production and broadcast
ATMOS additionally houses a selection of outboard processing tailored for music production and broadcast needs, including an SSL Fusion analog multiprocessor and devices from Bettermaker, Bricasti, Lexicon and TC Electronic. Maintaining consistency with the ST1 van and a small production and demonstration room at the company’s headquarters, the new ATMOS truck is outfitted with a Genelec Smart Active Monitoring speaker system.
The focus on music and the truck’s significant channel capacity enables ATMOS to take advantage of a niche in the Polish broadcast and mobile production market. “It’s normal for us to work with almost 200 channels,” Mika explains. “National TV in Poland still doesn’t have enough trucks that can handle that number of tracks, so they order trucks from us.”
Taking ATMOS to the next level with System T
The musicality of any mix made through the System T is what many operators who work in the 120dB trucks comment about, Mika reports. “When you’re mixing, everything is musically glued together. If you’ve got good sources, even if you don’t do anything with EQ or dynamics, it will be OK. Just push the faders up and it will be great sounding. After that, you can make something better, but you don’t have to do anything — on an SSL, you can do nothing, and it will be OK!”
As visiting mixers soon discover, and as 120dB’s engineers already know, the layout of the System T is very logical and easy to operate, even if they have not previously worked on a digital console. “It’s very easy to do what you want to do,” Mika says. “It’s not an analog console, but everything is where it needs to be. You don’t need to find some parameters or knobs. Even if you are new to the System T, everything is on the channel strip, just like an analogue console.”
