Brooklyn s the Garden Adds RTW TM7 Touchmonitor To the Mix

When it comes to analog and digital audio, Mix Engineer Drew Vogelman, founder of The Garden, a renowned mix and dubbing studio in Brooklyn, New York, believes in using elements of both worlds to get the best sound. Along these lines, he has incorporated a TM7 TouchMonitor from RTW, a leading vendor of visual audio meters and monitoring devices for professional broadcast, production, post production and quality control, into his studio. The 7-inch, touch-sensitive, 16:9-screen TM7 enables him to monitor both the analog and digital aspects of his clients' mixes, ensuring that a particular sound, whatever its source, truly contributes to the perfect track.

Named after the outdoor garden lounge area of the Brooklyn brownstone where it is located, The Garden comprises a large control room and a dubbing room with a Solid State Logic (SSL) AWS Hybrid Console/Controller at the center of its operations. Vogelman has outfitted the studio with a large selection of analog outboard gear and instruments-everything from vintage drum kits, guitars synthesizers and amps, to plug-ins that replicate classic hardware and sound from storied music production studios and manufacturers-to give his clients a plethora of options for finessing their mixes. The TM7 takes things a step further by providing Vogelman a way to assess whether the sound of a particular analog element will complement a client's particular mix.

The RTW TM7 is critical to our mix process, says Vogelman. I'm an old-school engineer, so I'm a stickler for setting up what unit will be used on every mix. Because analog and digital are very different from one another, it's important to go into a mix with an idea of what elements will work best for it. In a sense, we're going back and forth between the digital and analog realms, and the TM7 helps us determine and maintain the right sound, regardless of where it comes from.

The TM7's intuitive graphical user interface, a feature of all models of the RTW TouchMonitor range, also helps Vogelman set up his tools for monitoring a mix. Users can control the interface with their finger, scaling, positioning and combining instruments in virtually any manner for the best use of available screen space. Multiple instruments of the same type, assigned to different input channels and configurations, can be displayed, along with other elements, such as meters, a feature Vogelman finds especially handy.

Once he sets up the GUI for a particular job, Vogelman employs the RTW to bring everything out analog, through the desk, through the outboard. I sum everything back in through a Burl Audio ADC and I'm actually taking the digital feed from the ADC to the RTW, so I'm literally monitoring my digital mix box and my analog mix box. It's pretty cool how it does that for me and allows me to just keep an eye on the mix, so I can really manage the analog mix head room and at the same time monitor and manage the digital head room, and the particular loudness factor.

As for loudness, Vogelman says it is as much of a concern in music mixing as it is in broadcast, so the TM7's ability to monitor for all major audio loudness standards, including ATSC, EBU, ITU, ARIB and SPL, as well as custom standards, is a major benefit. Mix engineers have to be aware of and work with loudness issues, though with different set of requirements, he says. Artists are always aware of that loudness factor and there are lots of opinions around what loudness is. We really hear a mid-range and, so, high fidelity is kind of about getting the lows and the highs in there, but modern mixes are very pointed on the mid-range. So being a mixer is about finding a way to almost satisfy both worlds in a way, whether you're hearing it on a laptop or ear buds, and knowing that it's going to cut through the clutter.

The loudness tools also help Vogelman when working with fades. One of the things I play with a lot are fades, because it's a way to manipulate frequency relationships, so if I have for instance, multiple tracks of things, which is much more common these days. You start blending these, and you have to create a relationship with them, so RTW is cool for that.

As with RTW's entire line of TouchMonitors, the TM7 TouchMonitor provides unparalleled flexibility and modularity combined with intuitive control. The software visualizes multiple sources simultaneously. It supports displaying the same signal on multiple instruments in parallel, each with dedicated defaults with both horizontal and vertical operation. The system visualizes up to 16 analog and/or digital sources at the same time.

About RTW

For more than 45 years, Cologne-based RTW has accompanied the steady technological progress in the professional audio industry with innovative instruments and technologies for visual audio monitoring in broadcast, production, post production and quality control. Its state-of-the-art audio and loudness metering systems have an excellent reputation throughout the world. With groundbreaking products such as the Surround Sound Analyzer, the company has been a key vendor of professional broadcast and audio metering equipment for decades.

RTW's range of products currently include the SurroundControl series for monitoring, controlling and routing stereo, multichannel and surround audio and the TouchMonitor range, which truly marks a paradigm shift in visual audio monitoring and loudness metering. Combining maximum flexibility and modularity with an intuitive touch-enabled surface and multichannel signal analysis, the TM7 and TM9 units are the essence of many years of experience. The attractively priced TouchMonitor TM3 entry-level system opens new markets, targeting applications such as journalist cubicles, edit suites and small control rooms.

As part of its expansion into the U.S.

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