Australia’s Trackdown Studios Expands With HARMAN’s JBL and Crown

SYDNEY, Australia — Since its humble 1980s beginnings as a cramped recording studio with mattresses on the walls for sound absorption, Trackdown Studios (www.trackdown.com.au) has evolved to become a fixture on the Australian pro audio scene, working with artists like INXS, One Direction, Justin Bieber, Will.I.Am and many more and growing to two locations offering music and film recording and post-production. Trackdown’s Moore Park facility recently expanded with the addition of “Theatre One,” a new 20-seat room with audio post, mixing and 3D screening capabilities. Rather than equipping the theater with conventional studio monitors Trackdown chose HARMAN’s JBL Professional ScreenArray™ cinema system powered by Crown DSi Series power amplifiers.

Working with HARMAN Professional Australian distributor JANDS (www.jands.com.au), Trackdown installed a complete multichannel surround sound system with three JBL 3722N 2-way ScreenArray loudspeakers as the left, center and right channels, each employing dual 15-inch woofers and a horn-loaded compression driver. Four JBL 8340A 2-way surround loudspeakers and a JBL 3635 18-inch subwoofer complete the speaker complement.

The loudspeakers are driven by three Crown DSi 2000 amplifiers, which include presets for JBL cinema loudspeakers to make configuration quick and easy and provide on-board signal processing to handle crossover points, EQ, speaker delay and output limiting. Rounding out Theatre One’s equipment is a host of impressive video gear including a Christie Digital projector, Harkness Screens projection screen, Doremi ShowVault 4K video server and other equipment.

Right from completion (“we finished painting in the morning and started working in the afternoon,” noted Trackdown general manager Elaine Beckett) the studio launched into high-profile activity on films including The Great Gatsby, Forbidden Ground, Warwick Thornton’s new film The Dark Side and a concert documentary on Australian music legends Paul Kelly and Neil Finn (Split Enz, Crowded House).

Response to the Theatre One has been extremely enthusiastic. “One sound mixer in particular was thrilled to be working in Theater One, using it as a premix space,” noted Beckett. “It’s quite common to have small monitors in premix rooms and he was very impressed to be working with true theater sound for monitoring. What he mixed in Theatre One translated really well when doing the final mix in a large theatre.” With customers that include the elite of Australia’s film community and a growing number of international clients, Trackdown is confident they’ll be mixing a future Award-winning soundtrack sooner rather than later.

HARMAN (www.harman.com) designs, manufactures, and markets a wide range of infotainment and audio solutions for the automotive, consumer, and professional markets. It is a recognized world leader across its customer segments with premium brands including AKG®, Harman Kardon®, Infinity®, JBL®, Lexicon®, and Mark Levinson® and leading-edge connectivity, safety and audio technologies. The Company is admired by audiophiles across multiple generations and supports leading professional entertainers and the venues where they perform. More than 25 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and infotainment systems. HARMAN has a workforce of 15,200 people across the Americas, Europe, and Asia and reported sales of $5.1 billion for the last twelve months ended March 31, 2014.