San Francisco’s One Union Recording Studios has been serving the sound needs of ad agencies, game companies, TV and film producers, and corporate media departments in the Bay Area and beyond for nearly 25 years.
In the summer of 2017, the facility was hit by a terrible fire that affected all six of its recording studios. The company, led by president John McGleenan, immediately began an ambitious rebuilding effort, which it completed earlier this year. One Union Recording is now back up to full operation and its five recording studios, outfitted with the latest sound technologies including Dolby Atmos capability, are better than ever.
Andy Greenberg, One Union Recording’s facility engineer and senior mix engineer, who works alongside engineers Joaby Deal, Eben Carr, Matt Wood and Isaac Olsen. We recently spoke with Greenberg about the company’s rebuild and plans for the future.
Rebuilding the facility after the fire must have been an enormous task.
You’re not kidding. I’ve worked at One Union for 22 years, and I’ve been through every growth phase and upgrade. I was very proud of the technology we had in place in 2017. We had six rooms, all cutting-edge. The software was fully up to date. We had few if any technical problems and zero downtime. So, when the fire hit, we were devastated. But John took a very business-oriented approach to it, and within a few days he was formulating a plan. He took it as an opportunity to implement new technology, like Dolby Atmos, and to grow. He turned sadness into enthusiasm.
How did the facility change?
Ironically, the timing was good. A lot of new technology had just come out that I was very excited about. We were able to consolidate what were large systems into smaller units while increasing quality 10-fold. We moved leaps and bounds beyond where we had been.
Prior to the fire, we were running Avid Pro Tools 12.1. Now we’re on Pro Tools Ultimate. We had just purchased four Avid/Euphonix System 5 digital audio consoles with extra DSP in March of 2017 but had not had time to install them before the fire due to bookings. These new consoles are super powerful. Our number of inputs and outputs quadrupled. The routing power and the bus power are vastly improved. It’s phenomenal.
We also installed Avid MTRX, an expandable interface designed in Denmark and very popular now, especially for Atmos. The box feels right at home with the Avid S5 because it’s MADI and takes the physical outputs of our ProTools systems up to 64 or 128 channels.
That’s a substantial increase.
A lot of delivered projects use from two to six channels. Complex projects might go to 20. Being able to go far beyond that increases the power and flexibility of the studio tremendously. And then, of course, our new Atmos room requires that kind of channel count to work in immersive surround sound.
What do you do for data storage?
Even before the fire, we had moved to a shared storage network solution. We had a very strong infrastructure and workflow in terms of data storage, archiving and the ability to recall sessions. Our new infrastructure includes 40TB of active storage of client data. Forty terabytes is not much for video, but for audio, it’s a lot. We also have 90TB of instantly recallable data.
We have client data archived back 25 years, and we can have anything online in any room in just a few minutes. It’s literally drag and drop. We pride ourselves on maintaining triple redundancy in backups. Even during the fire, we didn’t lose any client data because it was all backed up on tape and off site. We take backup and data security very seriously. Backups happen automatically every day… actually every three hours.
What are some of the other technical features of the rebuilt studios?
There’s actually a lot. For example, our rooms — including the two Dolby-certified Atmos rooms — have new Genelec SAM studio monitors. They are “smart” speakers that are self-tuning. We can run some test tones and in five minutes the rooms are perfectly tuned. We have custom tunings set up for 5.1 and Atmos. We can adjust the tuning via computer and the speakers have built-in DPS, so we don’t have to rely on external systems.
Another cool technology that we are using is Dante, which is part of the Avid MTRX interface. Dante is basically audio-over-IP or audio-over-Cat6. It essentially replaced our AES router. We were one of the first facilities in San Francisco to have a full audio AES router, and it was very strong for us at the time. It was a 64×64 stereo-paired AES router. It has been replaced by the MTRX interface box that has, believe it or not, a three-inch by two-inch card that handles 64×64 routing per room. So, each room’s routing capability went up exponentially by 64.
We use Dante to route secondary audio, like our ISDN and web-based IP communication devices. We can route signals from room to room and over the web securely. It’s seamless, and it comes up literally into your computer. It’s amazing technology. The other day, I did a music session and used a 96K sample rate, which is very high. The quality of the headphone mix was astounding. Everyone was happy and it took just one, quick setting and we were off and running. The sound is fantastic and there is no noise and no latency problems. It’s super-clean, super-fast and easy to use.
What about video monitoring?
We have 4K monitors and 4K projection in all the rooms via Sony XBR 55A1E Bravia OLED monitors, Sony VPL-VW885ES True 4K Laser Projectors and a DLP 4K550 projector.Our clients appreciate the high-quality images and the huge projection screens.
