How Dante Is Redefining Audio Excellence at Apogee Studio

From the Santa Monica Pier and surfer's paradise to the Fortune 500-driven cityscape, Santa Monica is a city of contrasts. Located in the heart of the city is the aptly named Apogee Studio. The studio is the brainchild of Bob Clearmountain who recently turned to Dante to expand the studio’s listening options.

Clearmountain’s achievements leave him in the rare air of being a genuine AV legend. He is well known for his work with major acts, including Bruce Springsteen, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Roxy Music, The Pretenders, and Bryan Adams. He has mixed some of the most iconic live shows in music history, including Live Aid, The Concert for New York for 9/11, and the Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concerts.

The large space adjacent to Apogee’s offices and warehouse has hosted legendary recording artists and up-and-coming artist showcases and serves as “The Lab” for Apogee’s product development and testing. If you’re lucky enough to get on the guest list with up to 180 other music fans for a show at Apogee, it’s an intimate experience you’ll never forget. However, the audience interest was often greater than what the studio could hold, so Clearmountain turned to Dante to expand the studio’s listening options.

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“We actually have four rooms here, and I wondered how we can tie all the rooms together. It'd be great if we could do a live, immersive mix in the main studio with the old Neve 8068 console and have people be able to listen to it in other rooms,” said Clearmountain. “And then I thought, ‘Well, we could do it with a Dante network.’”

The studio’s audio system is based around Apogee’s Symphony Mk II Special Edition, a multi-channel audio interface featuring Apogee’s flagship AD/DA conversion, modular I/O (up to 32 inputs and outputs), intuitive touchscreen display and optional microphone preamps. It supports three connectivity modules, including Thunderbolt, Pro Tools + Dante, and Waves SoundGrid. The protocols operate in different modes in the Symphony Mk II, so they turned to Dante Virtual Soundcard and a Dante network to propagate audio throughout all the rooms.

Dante Virtual Soundcard is a software application that turns a PC or Mac into a Dante-enabled device, allowing Dante audio traffic to be transmitted and received between other Dante-enabled devices. In Apogee Studio’s case, a Symphony Mk II in the studio is equipped with an optional Dante hardware module. The audio is transmitted via a dedicated Dante network to the remote rooms, each equipped with a Mac running Dante Virtual Soundcard. Dante Virtual Soundcard allows people in each of the three other rooms to monitor the live immersive audio stream through their Symphony MK IIs, exactly as heard through the Atmos speakers in the main studio.

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The Dante integration now delivers pristine, low-latency audio to all the rooms so that the audience can experience the full, immersive performance regardless of location.

“Setting up the Dante network was fairly painless. We just got a router to use as its own Dante network without any other stuff on it. And then ran cables where we needed them to go,” said Clearmountain. “It's pretty easy, really.”