Finland’s Soundon has doubled its OB capacity with the addition of a second OB van to its fleet, and it based the audio design on something very familiar.
The company, who specialise in sound recording for concerts and television with multi-camera productions and live broadcasts, has replicated the design of its original OB unit with a 5.1 Genelec Smart Active Monitoring System.
“We wanted to make our new truck similar to the older one, so it would provide seamless control and it wouldn’t matter which one you are working with,” explains Timo Virtanen, Soundon’s Sound Designer and CEO. “Now when the other truck is somewhere in a production location, we can still do some post in our second truck. There is no need to have a fancy studio room when you can do everything in a moving OB truck. Also, our audio gear has grown so much that we needed a bigger storage area!”
Although the design is the same, the company has upgraded to newer models with 8351 three-way coaxial monitors in the LCR positions, 8331s at the rear and a 7360 subwoofer. Genelec’s GLM software was used to configure and calibrate the monitoring system.
“Back in 2017, we found the 8351As very suitable for us but realised for this project that we needed something different,” recalls Virtanen. “The studio room is 2.5 m wide which meant that handling the side reflections was very important to us, so we went with the newer 8351B models. That worked out much better for the low middle frequencies.
“We’ve only had a few gigs with this new truck, but it already sounds better, and the frequency curve is a lot flatter than the old one.”