Audient's ASP510 gets into film this year, specifically Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene, as composer/musician Michael Josephs wrote, tracked and mixed the score for the PBS biopic due to air next month with the help of his new Audient surround sound controller.

“I'm loving it!” says Josephs [pictured below] when asked how he's getting on with the ASP510. “It's a really beautiful system. It's laid out perfectly and the remote goes in the studio whilst all of the connections are on the main unit on DB-25s in the machine room. The remote is attached with a regular ethernet cable. I can listen back and forth between stereo and surround, as well as mono and dim instantly. I can also use and alternate set of mains, which is really helpful,” he adds.

Creating the score for the Graham Green biopic was a challenge for Josephs. “Graham Greene was of course a fascinating person. His life moved through being a writer, a spy, an editor and a traveller. He sort of lived his own novel. What really appealed to me is that the film-makers Tom O'Connor and David Taylor really moved fluidly between fact and fiction, eras and locales, not to mention being unconstrained by a temporal sense.

Audient ASP510 at Michael Josephs' studio“I really loved the challlenge of writing with a sense of fluidity that could really go anywhere at any time, yet still the drama of telling a great story,” he explains, and his compact studio set up at home makes this a whole lot easier.

“I put my first studio together quite a while ago, when I started to do a Fox show called 'America's Most Wanted', which I did weekly for a long time,” says Josephs, describing the evolution of his studio space. “Over the years it sort of ballooned to a very cramped space with an enormous board […] and finally I'm where I'm at today with digital recording and digital video and no console. I have always dreamed of being able to write and mix music from behind a piano keyboard, not a mixing console, and this is now my very pleasant reality! I am a composer and musician, not an engineer,” he laughs.

Josephs has composed and conducted original scores and music for over 200 films and network television programmes, with recent music credits including scores for Wild Kingdom, National Geographic, HBO, and NBC to name a few.

These days Josephs does a lot more mixing in surround, which the ASP510 has really facilitated. “I like having the choice between isolation and cut buttons, so you can instantly hear what is going on in individual speakers,” he enthuses. “It even remembers your last setting when you disconnect the power, which is important as I try to power things down every night.

“Also, with DAWs, the all-mute button has really taken on an unfortunately HUGE significance! Seriously, with a main DAW and 4-5 satellite computers, I can hit the all-mute switch every time something crashes or needs to be restarted, thereby saving my ears from horrible screeching when word-clock is lost, and also saving my dog from needing a valium.”

Josephs is particularly happy with the build quality, too. “The ASP510 seems to be bullet proof; I have had zero problems with the thing. It seems to be built like a tank, which I really do appreciate, not having any 'technical staff' other than the dog and cat.