TORONTO, ON — Toronto-based Holophone® (Booth 4317), the leading manufacturer of surround microphones, will continue to make its country proud by featuring its complete line of best-selling Canadian-manufactured surround products at PAL 2008 – Canada’s largest production technologies show, August 24-25, 2008.
Holophone first revolutionized the surround sound industry with the introduction of the H2-PRO 7.1 surround microphone. Utilizing a patented design, the H2-PRO contains eight mic elements arranged to coincide with the typical speaker setup found in a studio or home theater. The unique structure and configuration of the mic elements allows H2-PRO users to effortlessly capture, from a single point, an accurate and immersive 3-D audio recording. Since the introduction of the H2-PRO, the company has expanded its microphone line to reach all areas of the audio field while still offering the simplicity and superior audio quality of its flagship model. These microphones include:
PortaMic 5.1: The newest microphone in the Holophone line, this portable, easy-to-use and affordable camera-mountable surround microphone equipped with Dolby Pro Logic II encoding technology makes incorporating surround sound seamless, regardless of the production budget. Simply connect the mic to a camera or surround recording device and it’s ready to capture 5.1 channels of discrete audio. The PortaMic 5.1’s compact Dolby Pro Logic II encoder allows the mic’s six channels to be recorded to two, so that it can be captured by any broadcast camera or stereo recording device while at the same time providing a low-profile when mounted to the camera.
H4 SuperMINI: The world’s first camera-mountable surround microphone, the H4 SuperMINI has quickly become an industry standard. To deliver surround sound within today’s stereo and discrete multichannel infrastructure, the H4 SuperMINI comes equipped with an integrated multichannel pre-amplifier, monitor, and Dolby Pro Logic II encoder. Holophone’s SuperMINI includes an audio zoom button, which increases the forward bias of the pick-up pattern, allowing items in front of the camera to be heard even in noisy environments. For monitoring in the field, the microphone has a virtual surround headphone output with gain control on the 3.5mm stereo jack, and an intuitive tri-colored LED Holophone monitor that indicates sound level and direction.
H3-D: An affordable 5.1 surround microphone, the H3-D helps bring surround to emerging surround markets such as project studios, education, and houses of worship. Larger than the H4 SuperMINI and PortaMic 5.1, the H3-D is designed to offer a more detailed surround sound recording. Like the H2-PRO, the H3-D features six mic elements arranged to pick up the typical surround sound channels, resulting in recordings that leave the listener feeling like they’re in the best seat in the house.
In addition to its microphone line, Holophone has branched out, offering two new products, the D-CODE and N-CODE, which help to complete the Holophone surround audio workflow. The D-CODE Dolby Pro Logic II decoder desktop station helps to easily bring the recordings made by the PortaMic 5.1, H4 SuperMINI; and H2-PRO and H3-D combined with the N-CODE, from the field to post. The D-CODE converts the microphones’ Dolby Pro Logic II encoded recordings back to six channels of discrete audio.
The N-CODE Dolby Pro Logic II encoder looks to harness the encoding technology found in the H4 SuperMINI and PortaMic 5.1 to be used with Holophone’s larger microphones, the H2-PRO and H3-D. It allows the six channels of audio from the H2-PRO or H3-D to be converted to two channels using Dolby’s Pro Logic II technology. These encoded two channels of audio can be captured to virtually any stereo recording device, or can be broadcast over the existing stereo infrastructure.
“It is our goal to help the production industry worldwide find easier solutions to record surround sound, but it’s always nice to be able to interface directly with our local production professionals here in Canada, to see how we can help improve their surround sound solutions,” says Jonathan Godfrey, CEO of Holophone. “With our microphones, along with the D-CODE and N-CODE, our users have everything they need to record surround and bring it from the field or studio right to their editing workstations. Since all our products are Canadian-made, users also have the added assurance that they are receiving a quality product that will hold up to whatever their production throws at them.”
