The Digital Audio Workstations

We are currently using the newest version of the Sonic Audio workstation - the Sonic HDSP system. We are also still using the older (but in no way inferior in terms of sound quality) Sonic USP system. In addition to these we are now also using the SADIE 5 workstation.

We have been using the Sonic system for a long time now, the main reason being that it just sounds great. In addition to that our philosophy is to work at high resolution (88.2/24 etc.) whenever possible, and for a long time Sonic was the only platform to support that capability.

Now there are several other excellent sounding workstations that are capable of working with high resolution audio, and of these we feel that the SADIE system in particular has now reached a very high standard and also has several advantages on the software side that, although not significant for many of our clients, nonetheless would be an advantage for some. Both sytems also support MLP encoding for authoring in the DVD format, which is an area we specialize in.

We do very little signal processing with the workstations, we use them just to capture the sound. We feel that it's better to leave the processing to high quality dedicated external devices. Our main requirement of the workstations is they it don't degrade the sound in any way. That said, we feel that the equalization in both workstations sounds very good, and we sometimes use it for final touchups or small adjustments.

Another reason for having multiple workstations available is that some of our clients bring in projects on data files in which the audio is sampled at 48kHz. These files have to be converted to 44.1kHz for the CD format. Files sampled at 44.1kHz may have to be converted to the 48kHz rate for the DVD Video format. In order to avoid software sample rate converters, which we feel degrade the sound, we accomplish the conversion by going from one workstation, through a Pacific Microsonics Model 2 D/A converter to analog, re-sample the audio at 44.1kHz with another Model 2 (and also here if the file was at 16 bit resolution we can re-capture at 24 bit!), and capture the audio in another workstation.