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Last wednesday I was invited on the “Obsessed with sound event of Philips” in the Galaxy studios in Mol. The purpose of this event is to submerge us in sound with one of their three heroes for the campagne, the producer of the soundtrack of batman begins, Geof Foster.

Bert Van Daele gave us a little history lesson about how Philips has and still is obsessed with sound since the beginning. Their main ideas since the beginning are that sound should be of best possible quality and sound should be available to everyone. Along those lines they created the first affordable radio in the 1920′s called “het kappelke”

In the 1940′s philips introduced the vinyl and created the philigraph. They kept on innovating in the 1950′s and they developed the kinetic tape. By the 1960′s Philips Hasselt developed the compact cassette and since then it became and still is the main music carrier. In 1968 they developed the cassette in the car. In the 70′s they developed the laser disc and they used the mpeg file format for video and audio. But in the 70′s the emphasis for Philips was more on video then on sound. In 1982 the audio cd was invented, it gave better quality and far more storage capacity. In the 90′s they started with DVD and SACD, where the DVD took of pretty well, the SACD was and still is a niche market. 2004 marked the date of the ambisound release and is another way to create surround sound without all the different speakers. And today we are here to see and hear the 360 sound speakers and systems.

Geof Foster was next up, he is the chief engineer for the batman begins soundtrack. He explained his workflow for making film music.

It all starts with spotting, which is basically putting some existing music against the different scenes. This process ends with a template to direct the composer. The second step is writing the music through the unique sound of the composer. The third part is scoring, this means choosing from the different sound generators like an orchestra. And the last part is a the actual mixing.

Geof gets involved mostly at the scoring stage, to record and create the sound, a big part of the scoring is choosing the layout and venue for the orchestra and the recording. He uses the batman begins soundtrack as an example. The recording is mostly done in separate parts. The very last thing is putting the music against the film and the sound of the movie itself. There is some more fine-tuning and listening if everything is in place.

Geoff also explained why the soundtrack is a little different from the music used in the film. Most music in the film is not always very interesting music wise, so they tweak it a bit for the OST

After that Bert explained what the 360Sound is all about. It’s aimed at people that like good sound, but the speaker system has to be stylish. The 360Sound system has a front facing speaker and two speakers on the sides. The speakers on the side are aimed at bouncing of the walls to create a surround sound. The 360Sound is completely developed in Leuven, be.

The last product is the free floating tweeter, where they created a speaker which creates a full 360 degrees sound experience when the speaker is placed in the middle of the room. I like the idea, although the sound is not perfect, it is nice to have a device that sounds ok and it doesn’t matter where you are in the room.

Philips also released a couple of iPhone/iPod dock speakers, they sound pretty awesome, but I don’t think they will take off until the one with the battery is released.

Because the whole event took place in the Galaxy studios in Mol, one of the best recording studios in the world, we were entitled to a tour trough the complex, complete with the a movie from the late 80′s filmed during the building of the complex. It was quite impressive to see what they all did to make sure the best sound is recorded.

You can check out the pictures at Flickr

I liked the event, I liked some of the products, but I’m not convinced they will take off with the high prices. I would have loved some more light to photograph the products. But thx Talking Heads and Philips for the invite and the Philips GoGear, which I will try to review a bitter later.