Crush Media optimizes the audio experience: as the Web plays an increasingly important role in our everyday lives, this new studio is poised to fill the demand for high-quality audio - Audio Today & Tomorrow - Brief Article

Post, July, 2002 by Christine Bunish

NORTHBORO, MA - Sunny Lake believes that audio, whether custom music, sound design or optimized production audio, plays a key role in media rich interactive content As president of Crush Media Solutions (www.crushmediasolutions.com), Lake brings 20 years experience in the audio, film and video industries to his new company, which works on a wide range of projects but has a particular expertise in Web-delivered products.

"Audio has become much more important on the Web," says Lake. 'These days ft's unusual if people don't have good sound cards in their computers, and they at least have decent speakers. It used to be ok to send out eight-bit audio; now if people don't hear something really great, they tune out."

High-quality audio on the Web can actually be the great equalizer for audiences with both high-bandwidth and dial-up connections. "You always want to make the audio crisp, clean and as high bandwidth as possible, but you're always fighting that pipeline," Lake points out. "If the audience has TI connections they can have the full video and audio experience, but we can also scale things so people with just modem connections can get a great audio experience."

CRUISHED ICE

Lake has coined the term "Crushed Ice" for his company's browser-based training and entertainment solution. The Crushed Ice service features high-quality video that brings a message to life, plus embedded PowerPoint presentations synchronized to the video.

Crushed Ice clients receive a "bundle of services" says Lake.' 'We handle the videotape production, capture the audio, edit the footage, enhance and clean the audio, encode those files and optimize the audio, and send the completed files - usually Windows Media or Real - to a specialized edge server near the client's LAN so they can play them locally. Clients get beautiful video, typically I to 2MB/s for something like corporate training, and audio that exceeds CD quality."

THE STUDIO

Lake launched Crush Media Solutions this past January He is joined in the enterprise by partner/executive producer Ellen McCurley and Anne Wheeler, who is in sales and marketing. Their collective expertise allows Lake to concentrate on the creative aspects of audio and video, including editorial and original music composition.

The Crush studio, located in Lake's home, features both Mac and PC platforms. On the PC side, there's a Windows-based Web-authoring workstation, on which Lake can also do sound editing with Sound Forge.

On the Mac side, projects often start in a Media 100XR NLE where Lake edits the voiceover and video, does loops and EQ. He also has MOTUs Digital Performer running on a Mac, and Soundscape running on a PC, which in tandem act as a DAW.

"I'll lay timecode on Media 100 and slave Digital Performer to it, using the MOTU 828 FireWire interface to drive it via timecode," Lake explains. "I'll use a sampler to drop in sound effects on the fly. I can even unplug FireWire, plug it into my Power Book and record tracks down for remote meetings and easy client approval."

Crush has an extensive MIDI setup, including a Kurzweil 2500XS for almost all orchestral work, a Korg Karma, Roland samplers and a Roland RD700 keyboard for realtime performance control. The studio also sports a Mackie d8b board, TASCAM DA-88 and a custom library.

SOME BACKGROUND

With a degree in music production and engineering from Boston's Berklee College of Music under his belt, in the mid-'80s Lake hooked up with producer Maurice Starr Starr was the driving force behind the successful boy band New Kids On the Block. Lake began doing string arrangements and producing some songs for New Kids. Later he discovered he preferred the ad world to the music scene and moved to New York City. There he teamed with a few partners to open music house CyberSound.

Lake's burgeoning interest in the Internet found him studying HTML, learning to build Web pages and exploring streaming audio. Since CyberSound was a music company and Lake wanted to move into video, he launched Cyber-Graphics and built a video/audio studio in the Pocono Mountains where he could do unsupervised audio and video sessions. Cyber-Graphics quickly landed a station ID package for the Scranton/Wilkes Barre CBS affiliate. Soon after Lake produced and edited voice sessions for all the value-added content on the first Rambo DVD, which led to similar work for the Warner Bros.' releases of Millennium, Rombo 2 and Rombo 3.

Lake eventually returned to the Boston area but maintained his Pennsylvania and New York clients.

COMMERCIAL WORK

While much of Crush's business is Web-based or interactive multimedia, the company does a considerable amount of voiceover (VO) work for spots, most of it via phone patches to the voice talent's location. New spots for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts feature out-of-market talent whose voices were recorded and brought over as AIF files to Crush's FTP site.

Last year Lake wrote the music and created the sound design for a show opener to a fundraising event for The Pendulum Project, which helps AIDS orphans in Africa. This year Crush's McCurley spent two weeks in Malawi shooting a video about the orphans. Lake will edit the program, record the VO and score original music for the piece.