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Screen Magazine - Index

Screen Magazine - Screen Magazine: Vol. 29, Issue 22 - Index

Best Kept Secrets
Never Last
By Robert Leach
It’s not like sound designers Jeff Van Steen, owner of Secret
Frequency (SF), and Harry Burgan are much of a “secret”
anymore. Recent work from the pair has been among the best in
the business and considering that the digital transformation set
to take place early 2009, Van Steen and Burgan are poised to
skyrocket in growth. Secret Frequency has been a pioneer in 5.1
surround sound, their studios at 55 W Wacker in Chicago were
designed and purpose built to be a 5.1 surround sound facility.
“In order to insure the most accurate sonic image experience
for our clients, the large main control room in Studio C was
carefully designed to make sure that the client area would be
situated directly in the center of the surround sound monitoring
field. However, this posed a problem. Because of the large
depth of the control room, with the client area situated toward
the back of the control room, the mixing-authoring position was
too far forward” said Van Steen “We remedied this by choosing
a speaker array and monitor controller that allowed us to switch
between two separate sets of rear speakers. The monitor
controller allows us, among other things, to activate the far rear
speaker set when clients are present to optimize the surround
sound field to favor their position. It can also be switched to
activate a near rear speaker set to optimize the surround field
to be aligned with the mixing-authoring area in the front of the
control room.”
Secret Frequency has ten years of experience
working with surround sound which began with
surround sound authoring and mixing in the late
nineties by utilizing Dolby Pro Logic encoding. Dolby
Pro Logic is an analog audio encoding scheme that
allowed the company to produce audio material
that contained audio channels for a stereo front
speaker pair, mono center speaker and a mono rear
channel feeding two rear speakers. It allowed all
of these channels to be matrix encoded into a two
channel audio master, which could be decoded
by consumers who had a Dolby Pro Logic decoder.
Those without the decoder would just hear the
front, two channel stereo content. With the advent
of digital 5.1 surround sound, SF is allowed a much
greater ability to control and refine both the material
produced and the sonic image into which they
place the material.
“The important thing to understand about Secret
Frequency is that we are different from most other
music and sound design houses. Our clients are
benefited by being able to interact with one
company that has a lengthy history in the production of sound
design and music, as well as, the provision of all of the services
that comprise audio post-production. We typically handle the
preparation of sync audio, voiceover recording and editing,
and final mixing. When possible, we like having the sync and
VO when we are authoring because we are able to optimize the
sound • music • design track to work well with them. Additionally,
our close association with Chicago Recording Company gives
us access to an unequaled range of technical and material
recording arts and sciences resources” states Van Steen.
During a typical project, Burgan and Van Steen create the
sound design and music elements in tandem. Burgan creates
his parts in Logic and then Van Steen takes them into Pro Tools
and combines them with the parts he has created in Pro Tools.
At this point, there is usually too much stuff happening at the
same time and the track therefore needs to be arranged. Van
Steen looks forward to this element of the process, “This is a
very enjoyable part of the creative process because, with all
of the different sound design and musical elements in the box,
there are numerous arrangements that I can make. If we are
creating a 5.1 sound • music • design track, we like to author
the sound design and music elements in the surround sound
field as the track evolves. Our control room is set up so that we