Composer Joseph Trapanese recently upgraded his studio with JBL Professional 708P master reference monitors to create a Dolby Atmos-capable 7.1.4 speaker system and improve the sound of his mixes on recent projects including the Netflix productions The Witcher (season 2), Shadow and Bone and Spiderhead.
Trapanese is a composer, arranger and music producer who writes for film and television as well as interactive multimedia and live performance.
First gaining major recognition from his collaboration with Daft Punk for the film Tron: Legacy, Trapanese has since composed music for The Greatest Showman, Oblivion, Straight Outta Compton and the Divergent series.
Always seeking to improve his work, Trapanese decided to install a full 7.1.4 speaker system in order to work in the Dolby Atmos spatial audio format.
Additionally, the composer wanted to approximate the sound of a large-format cinema audio system, giving him a better representation of what audiences and post-production teams hear.
“As a composer, one of the most important things for me is to make sure that what I intend when I’m writing music comes across to the audience,” Trapanese explains.
“Something I'd struggled with for a long time was understanding how my mixes translate into a movie theatre. Besides learning how to write music that works well with dialogue and sound effects, I needed to find speakers that sounded similar to a dub stage, which is essentially a small movie theatre.
“I was up at Skywalker Sound where my music editor had a pair of JBLs in the room, and when we went from his little edit suite to the dub stage, I thought, ‘Wow, everything I just heard in that room sounds just like it does right now on this dub stage,’ and that got me thinking about my own setup.”
In a previous upgrade, Trapanese equipped his facility’s main composing room with three JBL LSR6332 studio monitors for the critical left, centre and right (LCR) channels of a 5.1 surround sound configuration.