Westminster Kingsway College is twice as Zen

Two of Audient's compact high resolution Zen mixing consoles were chosen for the extensive new music recording facilities at the King's Cross Centre, part of London's Westminster Kingsway College, which are now operational.

“The opportunity to re-equip and upgrade the studio equipment on this level is a very rare thing, particularly in the education sector, so it had to be done right,” explains Grant Leslie, Music Technician at Westminster Kingsway College, and specifier of all studio equipment including the Audient desks.

“The Zen was the logical choice for us as it had exactly the features that we were looking for as well as the renowned Audient sound quality; there was nothing else on the market that came close to ticking all the boxes. I’ve worked with Audient products before and love the smooth, clean sounding preamps and signal bussing, the Zen certainly doesn’t disappoint in this regard.”

The music department's studios consist of two control rooms adjacent to a large main live space, along with four other rooms predominantly used for band workshops and rehearsals. All the rooms have audio and video tie-lines to the control rooms.

“We record and mix a huge variety of different student projects, so flexibility in the console was key. This is where the Zen is a real winner for us as the combination of the routing options are vast, but are also laid out in a neat, logical way that students find easy to understand. So many of the students are used to using only software in their music creation, so understanding analogue signal flow is very important.

“The Zen’s balanced I/O connections and buss structure mean that teaching gain structure, routing and patching is straight forward, whilst maintaining the optimum quality at all times.

“The on-board compressor is just fantastic and again, the ability to patch it anywhere, along with the parallel options are genius. I’ve yet to come up against a routing situation in a session that the Zen can’t handle!”

The studios are based around ProTools HD2 and Logic Studio systems using Lynx Aurora convertors with Genelec monitoring, supplied by Andrew Hingley at HHB Communications. Grant says, “We also wanted to integrate are existing outboard equipment from TLAudio, Drawmer and Lexicon in order to teach students techniques of mixing out-of-the-box. The Zen’s ability to integrate both the analogue mixing and DAW control domains gives students the best of both worlds.”

The facility supports the work of students studying Music and Music Technology, as well as facilitating audio content for other departments in the college.

“The inclusion of automation on a console in this price bracket is amazing. It means our students have every opportunity to prepare for working on larger consoles in the industry.”

Douglas Doherty, founder and Managing Director of DACS, studio design and installation experts commissioned to design and build the extensive recording facilities, adds: “I'm very pleased with the results, but most importantly, so are the staff and students of the College."

Andy Wilson, Westminster Kingsway College Principal, confirms: “The move of our music students to the King’s Cross Centre gave us the chance to enhance their learning experience with state-of-the-art equipment and a bigger selection of instruments so that Westminster Kingsway College can continue to produce even more talented musicians like Eliza Doolittle.”