USER STORY
Terry Gao is a Chinese ethnic music producer and one of the earliest Dolby Atmos engineers working in music production in China. With more than one hundred immersive productions completed to date, his work through Future Orient focuses on bringing Chinese traditional and ethnic music into contemporary production contexts.
His primary Atmos reference environment is Ascentone Music Studio in Beijing, a flagship facility designed by WSDG and equipped with a Genelec immersive monitoring system built around The Ones coaxial monitors and a 7380 subwoofer.
For years, Terry had a clear position: serious spatial audio production ultimately had to be completed in a real loudspeaker environment.
That was also exactly why the SR1 caught his attention when he first discovered it.
Limited studio availability made that question particularly relevant to his own workflow. Before entering the studio, Terry would already organise the session and establish the basic panning and spatial ideas using conventional binaural monitoring. The studio was then reserved for refining those ideas, judging low-frequency behaviour and creating what he describes as “Atmos-only sound design.”
The question for Terry was therefore not whether headphones could replace the studio. It was whether they could allow him to arrive there with substantially more of the real creative work already completed.
Rather than evaluating the SR1 only with reference material, Terry used it on two of his most important projects of the year: an album based on Dong ethnic music and another based on Tibetan music.
Several tracks had already received preliminary Atmos work using conventional binaural rendering, while the remaining tracks were produced using the SR1. When the projects later moved into the studio, Terry was able to compare the results of the two workflows directly on the same professional Atmos loudspeaker system.
For Terry, the important point was not whether the SR1 could perfectly recreate a loudspeaker room. It was that decisions made on the SR1 translated more reliably into the environment where he would ultimately judge the production. That reduced the amount of studio time spent rebuilding or correcting spatial decisions.
During the test period, the impact on Terry’s workflow became increasingly clear.
The studio did not become less important. Its role became more focused. Instead of spending valuable studio time establishing or correcting fundamental spatial decisions, Terry could arrive with a project already much closer to its intended final form.
There are also areas where he still prefers a real room, particularly for LFE monitoring. For Terry, that’s not simply a question of frequency response. A large subwoofer interacts physically with both the body and the room, and every real space has its own low-frequency behaviour and room modes. Certain Atmos effects designed specifically for large loudspeaker environments are also decisions he still prefers to verify in the studio. The difference is that the loudspeaker room can now be reserved for the areas where it offers something physically irreplaceable.
Another part of the SR1 experience Terry values is its immediacy. Many advanced binaural and virtual monitoring systems require calibration, additional software and detailed setup before work can begin. For Terry, that complexity can interrupt the creative process.
That experience has changed how he sees the role of headphones in immersive production. He is now comfortable doing serious production work on the SR1, with only a handful of decisions still reserved for verification on a real loudspeaker system. For Terry, this is ultimately the most important change: the SR1 can now carry a substantial part of the production itself.
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