Michael Levine: Composing with Apogee’s Symphony System
Posted on: June 10, 2008
Posted in: Artists, Products, Rosetta Series, Symphony, Video
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Composer Michael Levine (Cold Case) and Production Manager, Peter Adams, talk about their Apogee Symphony System and why Apogee was the perfect upgrade for their composition studio housed in Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control facility in Santa Monica, CA.
Related Apogee Gear
Rosetta Series
Big Ben
Symphony
Video Transcript
“I’m Michael Levine and I’m the composer for Cold Case and a number of other films and I occasionally help out other talented composers such as Hans Zimmer with their films and a little bit of additional music and arranging. My production manager is Peter Adams and I help Michael out with all sorts of things that are technical and musical.”
“Our symphony system is the Rosetta 800 and the Symphony card mostly. Which handles 8 In and 8 Out analog. We have all of our surround sound coming out, The symphony handles our DA entirely and our AD as well. It was night and day compared to the MOTU’s we were using before. We also did a pretty extensive take test between the Rosetta and the Pro-Tools, the 192’s. We like them both but ended up going with the Rosetta. It has a sort of evenness to it, sort of a not hyped sound but it has clarity and evenness over the whole frequency spectrum. It’s very pleasing”
“ We’ve notice we have more sonic overhead and a better stereo field again and it’s a lot of depth, it’s been really a great sound. We sort of took our mixes from our old system and started playing it back here and we were like Oh no, and it really opened our eyes as far as the amount of sonic space we have to work with now as opposed to what we had worked with before.”
“ It’s subtle but the cumulative effect is fairly profound. And it’s difficult for me when I’m making A/B comparisons initially to even hear the difference between things that are good quality and things which are superlative quality, because they both sound pretty good. It’s really over a period of time when you listen to something that really does have superior sound as the Apogee products have… that you start hearing subtleties that you haven’t heard before and you learn to listen for them. It essentially teaches you to listen in a different way.”
“Our old work sounded like.. you could kind of hear where it started and stopped frequency wise and decibel wise, where there was a smaller space to work with overall. Frequency spectrum wise and also just decibel wise, and now I feel like we have a little more room to work with. Even though we work at the same sample rates and bit depths we have.”
“One of the things that I mentioned before that I like about the Apogee system is that I just don’t think about it. It’s one more thing that is not in my way. We rarely have software issues, and never sonic issues and I just feel like there are so many things that overwhelm me in the course of working, so many musical problems and in addition there are all these technical barriers you have to overcome with most pieces of gear and software and it’s just a wonderful luxury to have something I don’t think about.”