In mid-August 2015, Belmont University’s Curb College of Entertainment and Music
Business moved into the new $87 million R. Milton and Denice Johnson Center, a
134,000-square-foot structure featuring a new home for the music business, motion
pictures and media studies programs. Functional spaces include classrooms, labs,
performance spaces, production spaces and research rooms. Additionally, the
Johnson Center features a 250-seat theatre and mixing stage equipped with Dolby
Atmos immersive audio system. HARMAN Professional Solutions’ JBL loudspeakers,
Crown amplification and BSS networked audio are proud to play a role within this
important entertainment education facility.
Serving as a home base for a wide range of entertainment, music and film
students, Curb College offers a comprehensive curriculum for majors including
audio engineering, songwriting, motion pictures, music business and entertainment
industry studies. University officials worked with Nashville-based AV Integrator, M3
Technology Group, who provided the systems, technologies and installation on the
project.
From a technology point of view, the college offers a comprehensive set of
facilities, including a TV Production Studio for producing and capturing student
newscasts, commentators, product shots and small interview productions; a Motion
Capture Space to create live-action computer-generated imagery, allowing for 3D
animation, digital compositing and motion graphics for any production; a 2,500-
square-foot Sound Stage for making single- and multiple-camera motion pictures;
24 Student Edit Bays in which students can view, process, synchronize, edit and mix
video and audio program material, and a Foley/ADR Suite to capture sound effects
and atmospherics for replacing and enhancing sounds in audio, video and film
productions.
A crown jewel within the new facility is the 250-seat Johnson Screening and Mixing
Theater, which serves as a screening room for motion pictures and a mix theatre
for audio mixing for film. In fact, this makes Curb College the world’s first and only
university-based film program capable of teaching the process of developing and
producing theatre-ready films in the Dolby Atmos immersive format.
The Dolby Atmos Rendering and Mastering Unit (Dolby RMU) allows faculty to teach
the process of creating and compiling movies in immersive Dolby Atmos sound, as
well as traditional 7.1 and 5.1 formats. The system design for the loudspeakers
alone presented some unique challenges, with the overall goal of providing
maximum sound quality and flexibility.
The Johnson theatre has 34 JBL 9320 high-power cinema surrounds, 5 JBL 5732 3-
way high-power ScreenArray loudspeakers and 4 JBL 4642A dual 18-inch bass reflex
subwoofers. The entire system is powered by a set of 14 Crown DCi Network
amplifiers with a total of 64 channels, connected through BSS BLU-806 audio
transport.
A great deal of planning for audio transport infrastructure went into assuring the
entire facility had fast, flexible access to data. Treating each room of the four-story
facility — theatres, sound stages, production suites, edit bays — as a network node,
engineers were able to create a robust system to support the university’s current
and future needs.
BSS BLU Link by HARMAN is a high-bandwidth, low-latency audio bus that can be
used as a standalone technology or used as a complement to Dante, AVB and
CobraNet.
