AV/IT TEAM: Lars Tirsbæk, lecturer
GOALS: The town of Kolding, Denmark, is home to the unique and cutting-edge Sonic College. Known for its innovative approaches to audio design and instruction, students graduating from the school will shape audio production for films, gaming, music, podcasting, and more in the years to come. When the college built a new facility, the staff implemented Audinate’s industry-standard Dante transport protocol for routing audio throughout the building.
Lars Tirsbæk, a lecturer at Sonic College, was instrumental in setting up the new facility and deciding what spaces would be most beneficial to students and essential to delivering a good grounding in sound design. “[Building the new facility] was an opportunity to start from scratch,” he said.
CHALLENGES: No small undertaking, staff had to interconnect multiple stereo studios and their companion mastering suites, a foley stage, immersive recording studio, Dolby Atmos mastering suite, and theatrical mix stage—even a colossal 187-channel, AVB-based Meyer Sound Spacemap Go spatial sound system located in the five-story atrium, all via Dante (with a little help from AVB-to-Dante conversion cards).
Tirsbæk said, “Our infrastructure needed to not only fit the demands of the space(s), but also provide learning opportunities for our students and give them practical experience working with real-world technologies like Dante.”
Dante Domain Manager
FINAL INSTALL/USER BENEFITS: “We didn’t have the Dante network in our old facility,” said Tirsbæk as he counted off a long list of benefits. “Now you can do a mix then easily route it through to the cinema to listen. You can take a stage box anywhere in the building and still communicate back to the control room.”
Dante Domain Manager allows college staff to manage the large Dante network effectively. With its granular user access control levels, administrators can lock down certain network areas and functionality while still allowing students room to experiment within boundaries chosen by teaching staff and network managers. In this type of educational environment, segmenting domains was critical.
“Students definitely need to know how audio-over-IP works. That’s the way all audio infrastructure will be implemented in the coming years,” Tirsbæk commented. “When our students learn to use Dante, they recognize the inherent flexibility of being able to just move AV hardware around without affecting the network.”
A range of spaces and studios offer students the perfect sonic playground, complete with cutting-edge products that deliver hands-on experience with the very best AV, broadcast, and studio tools and technologies for commercial use.
“This was a complex project,” said Tirsbæk. “With so many adjacent studios and performance spaces, we had to consider how to isolate parts of the network to prevent unexpected issues from occurring during live performances. Dante Domain Manager’s user authentication and role definition in combination with its ability to create separate Dante Domains was essential to our success in managing such an intricate system. In fact, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have been successful had it not been for Dante Domain Manager.”
[ Check out more from The Class of 2023: The AV/IT Teams of Higher Ed ]
